Forty Rooms (Grushin)

Forty Rooms 
Olga Grushin, 2016
Penguin Publishing
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101982334


Summary
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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Where—Moscow, Russia
• Raised—Prague, Czechoslovakia
• Education—Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts; Moscow State University; Emory University
• Awards—New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
• Currently—lives outside Washington, DC


Olga Grushin is a Russian-born award-winning writer whose work has been translated into fifteen languages.

Born in Moscow to the family of Boris Grushin, a prominent Soviet sociologist, she spent most of her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She was educated at Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and Moscow State University before receiving a scholarship to Emory University from which she graduated (summa cum laude) in 1993. She became a naturalized US citizen in 2002 and retains her Russian citizenship.

Grushin has worked as an interpreter for Jimmy Carter, as a cocktail waitress in a jazz bar, a translator at the World Bank, a research analyst at a Washington, D.C., law firm, and most recently an editor at Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006), 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. Both it and her second novel, The Line (2010), 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 (2016) is her third novel.

Grushin now lives outside Washington, D.C., with her two children. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/5/2016.)

Book Reviews
The structure of Olga Grushin's Forty Rooms is ingeniously simple...there is enough material to warrant hours of contemplation.... The reader's impulse to grapple with the text, to wrestle it down and to raise objections or to attempt to identify her own place in the context of the story, is a sign not of weakness, but of Grushin's genius. There is no redemption story to relax into here, and no easy answers.... This novel reminds us that to pursue her dreams, a woman is working against the establishment, not with it. To the young women into whose hands I will most certainly be putting Grushin's novel, I will say this: You can do it all, but together we can create a world in which we might be able to do more. Because if we don't keep working for greater gender equality, it's not in the best interests of the current power brokers to stop us from continuing to spend more than a fair share of our lives elbow-deep in soapsuds whether we choose to or not.
Alexandra Fuller - New York Times Book Review


[An] ingenious and original conceit.... Forty Rooms is a deft, engaging novel written with rare eloquence. But a ferociously uncompromising morality play lurks within it.
Wall Street Journal


[A] child of the Moscow intelligentsia rejects a "small life consumed by happiness" in America and a life driven by "the divine standards of art." But her path veers wildly in the New World.... At the end of life, Grushin concludes that the impossible, irresistible path of art is what’s most joyful—and memorable.
Publishers Weekly


Lacking the grandeur of her previous titles despite the masterly writing (and, at times, overwriting), this work might puzzle some of Grushin's fans but will appeal to readers interested in careful portraiture of one woman's struggles. —Edward B. Cone, New York
Library Journal


(Starred review.) The tension between art and domesticity....narrated by an unnamed heroine who can see through mundane reality...into other worlds.... [The novel poses] questions that women, especially, will recognize. Honest, tender, and exquisitely crafted. A novel to savor.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Who is the narrator of this story? Through whose eyes do you see the events unfold? Is it one of the last incarnations of Mrs. Caldwell, if so, which one? Is it her friend, Olga, or the author, Olga Grushin? Who else might be telling this story?
 
2. From the anonymous child who becomes Mrs. Caldwell to the Olgas (both author and character), what importance can be found in the assigning of names? Is a name felt more in its presence or absence?
 
3. What you do you make of the apparitions that visit the protagonist? Are they figments of her imagination or a part of the collective consciousness?  Are they cruel or benevolent?
 
4. Could the protagonist have become a great poet? And is creative success about talent, diligence, or something else?
 
5. Are there any choices the protagonist made that may have acted as a tipping point, or did each lead inevitably to the next?
 
6. If you were to write your own life story in forty rooms, where would you begin? Are there key moments you would pick out for yourself? And where did they unfold?
 
7. In their last conversation Apollo tells Mrs. Caldwell:

You must earn your right to say the things that truly matter—and for that, you pay in years, you pay in sweat, you pay in tears, you pay in blood. Both yours and other people’s.

Did the universe give Mrs. Caldwell opportunities, and did she squander them by seeking not to suffer? Were her prayers, especially for loved ones, selfless? Would it have been selfish to embrace their misfortune for her inspiration? And if so, is art an act of selfish appropriation or selflessness?

8. How is accomplishment defined in Forty Rooms and do you agree with these parameters?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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