3.5
Forty Rooms
ByPublisher Description
The internationally acclaimed author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov now returns to gift us with Forty Rooms, which outshines even that prizewinning novel.
Totally original in conception and magnificently executed, Forty Rooms is mysterious, withholding, and ultimately emotionally devastating. Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women’s identity, of women’s choices, that no modern novel has explored so deeply.
“Forty rooms” is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family’s Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life, and he is protective of her. (He is also a great cook.) They drift into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts—until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her.
Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocative novel.
Totally original in conception and magnificently executed, Forty Rooms is mysterious, withholding, and ultimately emotionally devastating. Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women’s identity, of women’s choices, that no modern novel has explored so deeply.
“Forty rooms” is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family’s Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life, and he is protective of her. (He is also a great cook.) They drift into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts—until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her.
Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocative novel.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities62 Reviews
3.5
avery ☆
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Kate Onsgard
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Mitali Daryani
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edxrare
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“Setting aside the very common trope of “housewife had other dreams besides being a housewife” this book has so much to discuss and analyze.
I’ll begin with what I loved, to leave a positive impression on an impressionable review reader.
“Forty Rooms” is a fiction story of a creative mind struggling with her own normalcy and the abandonment of her childhood dreams. The narrator is haunting and beautiful when evoking feelings of complacency, longing and dissatisfaction with her life. She also at times feels very joyous, rebellious and confident in her choices. Throughout the novel, we also get snippets of the perspectives belonging to people around the narrator’s life which are also very very articulate and human. This novel is very much about youth, identity and coming to terms with the choices you’ve made.
On the other side of the coin, there are a lot of things that frustrated me about “Forty Rooms”. Taking apart the pros and cons of her eventual adult life, on a surface level she becomes incredibly spoiled and wealthy, living a lifestyle only some can dream of. The narrator’s never ending prattling about how none of her life is good enough and she wishes she did this, that, wrote that poem, wrote that book, abandoned her marriage, ran away with the handsome stranger, etc, eventually becomes incredibly tiresome. I suppose it is meant to be the perspective of how a house wife always feels just like a house wife but it felt cliche and lazy to the caliber of writing the author proves to possess in other passages not relating to complacency. Aside from the narrator, I do feel like every other character is lacking in a lot of depth besides her father and it does a disservice to the emotional depth she feels but perhaps it is purposeful to show how involved sometimes we are in our own delusions of grandeur.
My favorite part of the novel is when she starts to address feelings of homesickness as well as loss of her identity in relation to her childhood my home from her mother’s perspective.
I enjoyed this book, I felt like it read very easily and had a good flow. It is a solid 3.5 for me.”
Winnie Hung
Created over 1 year agoShare
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About Olga Grushin
Olga Grushin is a Russian-born award-winning writer whose work has been translated into fifteen languages. Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and for England’s Orange Award for New Writers. The New York Times chose it as a Notable Book of the Year, and both it and her second novel, The Line, were among The Washington Post’s Ten Best Books of the Year (2007, 2010). In 2007, Granta named Grushin one of the Best Young American Novelists. Forty Rooms is her third novel. Grushin was born in Moscow, moved to the United States as a teenager, and now lives outside Washington, D.C., with her two children.
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