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Summer, 1978. Brezhnev sits like a stone in the Kremlin, Israel and Egypt are inching towards peace, and in the bustling, polyglot streets of Rome, strange new creatures have appeared: Soviet Jews who have escaped to freedom through a crack in the Iron Curtain. Among the thousands who have landed in Italy to secure visas for new lives in the West are the members of the Krasnansky family - three generations of Russian Jews.
There is Samuil, an old Communist and Red Army veteran, who reluctantly leaves the country to which he has dedicated himself body and soul; Karl, his elder son, a man eager to embrace the opportunities emigration affords; Alec, his younger son, a carefree playboy for whom life has always been a game; and Polina, Alec's new wife, who has risked the most by breaking with her old family to join this new one. Together, they will spend six months in Rome - their way station and purgatory. They will immerse themselves in the carnival of emigration, in an Italy rife with love affairs and ruthless hustles, with dislocation and nostalgia, with the promise and peril of a better life. Through the unforgettable Krasnansky family, David Bezmozgis has created an intimate portrait of a tumultuous era.
Written in precise, musical prose, The Free World is a stunning debut novel, a heartfelt multigenerational saga of great historical scope and even greater human debth. Enlarging on the themes of aspiration and exile that infused his critically acclaimed first collection, Natasha and Other Stories, The Free World establishes Bezmozgis as one of our most mature and accomplished storytellers.
BookBrowse Says
"Bezmozgis is a gifted short story writer, but the necessary components of a novel - character development, conflict, plot arc, resolution (to name a few) - are nonpresent, leaving The Free World with a strong sense of aimlessness. Some critics have argued that this aimlessness represents the limbo-state of the immigrant experience, the horrible sense that one has arrived at the door of dreams, only to languish on the stoop. Although this argument is somewhat compelling, I think it gives Bezmozgis a free pass. With as much time as he spends on his characters' backstories, there seems to be an implicit promise that these characters are being set up to do something - to change, to grow - anything that would indicate that the process of immigration has made an impact. Nothing like this happens for any of them, and the novel suffers for it. Ultimately, it is a well-manicured path that leads nowhere." - Sarah Dollacker
Others Say
"Starred Review. This is mellifluous, utterly captivating writing, and you'll live with the Krasnansky family as if it were your own. Highly recommended." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. Sharply funny and fast-paced, yet splendidly saturated with intriguing psychological nuance and caustic social commentary." - Booklist
"[T]hough...his tone makes for some slow patches, the book remains an assured, complex social novel..." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The Free World 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.
Photo: David Bezmozgis
David Bezmozgis is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. David's stories have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, Zoetrope All-Story, and The Walrus.
His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, was published in 2004 in the US and Canada and was subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages. Natasha was a New York Times Notable Book, one of the New York Public Library's 25 Books to Remember for 2004, and an Amazon.com Top 10 Book for 2004. Natasha was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award (UK), the LA Times First Book Award (US), and the Governor General's Award (Canada). It won the Toronto Book Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for First Book.
In 2006, David was a screenwriting fellow at the Sundance Labs where he developed his ...
... Full Biography
Link to David Bezmozgis's Website
Name Pronunciation
David Bezmozgis: Bez-MOZE-ghis
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