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by Gina Ochsner
In a crumbling apartment building in post-Soviet Russia, there's a ghost who won't keep quiet. Mircha fell from the roof and was never properly buried, so he sticks around to heckle the living: his wife, Azade; Olga, a disillusioned translator/censor for a military newspaper; Yuri, an army veteran who always wears an aviator's helmet; and Tanya. Tanya carries a notebook wherever she goes, recording her observations and her dreams of finding love and escaping her job at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, a place which holds a fantastic and terrible collection of art knockoffs created using the tools at hand, from foam to chewing gum, Popsicle sticks to tomato juice. When the museum's director hears of a mysterious American group seeking to fund art in Russia, it looks like she might get her chance at a better life, if she can only convince them of the collection’s worth. Enlisting the help of Azade, Olga and even Mircha, Tanya scrambles to save her dreams and her neighbors, and along the way discovers that love may have been waiting in her own courtyard all along.
And so in Ochsner's fable-like, magical debut novel, we see the transcendence of imagination. As Colum McCann has said: "[Ochsner] manages... to capture our sundry human moments and make raw and unforgettable music of them."
Published in the UK in 2009 The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight was longlisted for the British Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Ken Kesey fiction award.
"Though Ochsner struggles in places to expand and sustain the energy of her short stories, the novel benefits from its relative plotlessness by granting a rare glimpse of buoyant inner worlds that flourish through the frost." - Publishers Weekly
" She paints an impressionistic picture of the complex machine of life. For all fiction readers, especially those who enjoy magical realism." - Library Journal
"Gina Oschner's novel is enchanting, at once playful and poignant. With her marvelously light touch, she takes the rubble of post-Soviet Russia and turns it into gold." - Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles and Madeleine Is Sleeping
"The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight is a hilariously absurdist and deeply resonant debut novel by a short story master. Gina Ochsner transforms the lives of ordinary post-Soviet Russians into something magical and wise and glintingly beautiful." - Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K.
“Heartbreaking and funny and deeply moving, this beautifully wrought novel matters from first word to last. This is an absolutely original book, and Gina Ochsner is like no other writer I know at work today. She is at once a fabulist and a realist, a romantic and a cold-eyed recorder of the ways we rationalize our most intimate mistakes. Her love of both the written word and of humanity at large shine through on every page, and I couldn't stop reading this tale of the living and the dead, the loved and the unloved, the powerful and the oppressed. This is magical stuff - The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight is whimsical, ghost-riven, satirical and darkly, richly, wonderfully redeeming." – Bret Lott, author of Jewel and A Song I Knew by Heart
This information about The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gina Ochsner's first collection, The Necessary Grace to Fall, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press. It also won the Oregon Book Award for Short Fiction and the PNBA award for short stories and was an Austin Chronicle Top Ten Pick. Her second collection, People I Want to Be, was published in 2005. This is her first novel. She lives in western Oregon with her husband and four children.
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