Olga Beshlei

Moi diki ukhazher iz FSB My weird lover from the FSB
Blog posts and book published by AST. Moscow 2017. 220 pages
Foreign rights: Estonia

Incompetent, vulnerable, cheeky, paranoid, yearning, shy, but also brilliant at self-presentation, and then, embarrassingly open; for everything that happens to the heroine Beshlei has also happened to the author Olga Beshlei. Nothing is really thought out. The sheer joy, needs, worries and dreams of a young Russian woman, whose stories follow the fortune and misfortune of life, the ebb and flow of the city of Moscow. They follow love, ambition, politics, belief and superstition, and above all people – friends and strangers and lovers past, present and maybe never to be. With a good eye for the off-key, a healthy sense of humour and her heart in the right place, Beshlei wonders why it is so difficult these days for a likeable and open-minded young woman simply to be happy.

It is not at all difficult for Beshleis's heroine to find emancipated soulmates in any Western city who have suffered similarly. Except perhaps, that in Moscow the probability is higher to discover that your lover is a gangster or a FSB officer. And the panic about trying to hide a huge pink dildo before a house search by the secret service should to be considerably less outside Russia.

The novel takes the form of a colourful collection of stories, but is basically a coming-of-age novel with the heroine courageously testing the breaking point of the rules that determine the life of her generation. And she tests her own limits as well. The author's prose leads the reader to the edge of his or her comfort zone. The education aspects of Beshleis's novel are not concerned with how hard it is to grow up, but on how hard it is to assert one's right to be accepted as a grown-up. Using her journalistic incorruptibility and literary skill, Beshlei proves herself to be a seismograph of a generation between the generations. She allows the younger readers to trip over their own half-baked principles and leads the older ones into situations where authority and experience no longer help.

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