This year’s literary talent in the Netherlands is called Lisa Weeda, and it’s easy to understand. This ambitious debut novel is set in Ukraine and, in particular, in Luhansk, where the author has roots. Ukrainian novels that have appeared in Norwegian language form this year have been marked by absurdities, comedy and great seriousness. Weeda joins this highly readable tradition. Queue of Soviet dimensions “Aleksandra” starts with a queue. Anyone who has read novels from the Soviet era will know that the queue has a special place: People stand there for a long time, it is uncertain what will be waiting when you arrive, and queue-standers have developed their own, rambling art of repartee, at least in the fiction. The main character Lisa is waiting in line to come from Ukraine and into the so-called People’s Republic of Luhansk. Literarily speaking, this is a very successful queue, but Lisa is rejected when she arrives. She tries to explain that she has to go in, she has a cloth with her to lay on the grave of a dead relative. He cannot find peace on the other side, and Grandma Aleksandra has sent Lisa off guard with the cloth. Searched? Yes, the border guards think so too. But the cloth takes us to the very edge of the dramatic story of the Don Cossack family Krasnov. BREAKING DEBUT: Dutch Lisa Weeda takes us on a journey to Luhansk and to a hundred years of Ukrainian history with a dead great-grandfather as guide. Photo: Eva Roefs Time travel with dead great-grandfather After fighting on the side of the Whites during the revolution, many Donkosakkas were deported to Siberia, later they experienced the great famine together with other Ukrainians in the 1930s. During the war, they were deported to Germany to work in the war industry. Recently, people have sought to get out of the Donbass region after Russian-friendly separatists started forming people’s republics in 2014. In short: The family has been scattered to all winds for hundreds of years. But in Germany, grandmother Aleksandra sits and embroiders births and deaths and important events on a cloth. This cloth holds the family together, and gradually it has acquired magical power: Kolja, who got into an argument with the separatists in Luhansk in 2015, will be helped to eternal rest when only Lisa can place the cloth on his grave. Long story short: She makes it to the churchyard, but before she reaches the grave she is dragged into the “Palace of the Lost Don Cossacks” by… her great-grandfather. And from here the story goes into a new dimension, literally. Drastic and original history lesson Together with great-grandfather Nikolaj, Lisa travels backwards in time. She gets to see how the great history has thinned family, friends and neighbors from the Russian revolution until 2018, where this novel ends. The time journeys alternate with chapters from Luhansk from 2014 onwards. Poor Kolja is central here. The trick of transcending time and death together with the great-grandfather works well, but the novel sparkles most when the dead family members get to speak. Their stories are full of great tragedies, insoluble dilemmas and small details that make them come alive. The same applies to mater familias Aleksandra, who collects bits and pieces of family history in the bread box where she sits far away from her birthplace. “Aleksandra” is a drastic and original history lesson that I will soon forget. Hear the discussion about the book from “Open book: Kritikarane”: news reports Photo: Cappelen Damm Title: “Aleksandra” Author: Lisa Weeda Translated by: Hedda Vormeland Publisher: Cappelen Damm Pages: 272 Hi! I am chief critic of fiction at news. Feel free to read my book reviews of “The Surgeon” by Ida Hegazi Høyer, “Løpe ulv” by Kerstin Ekman or “Matrix” by Lauren Groff.
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“Aleksandra” by Lisa Weeda – Reviews and recommendations
