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Mission: Impossible
By Saul Austerlitz
Two young men set off on a race against time in David Benioff's novel about wartime Leningrad.
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Sex in the '90s City
By Marina Kamenev
Yevgeny Kondakov has compiled his photographs into a book, "Russian Sexual Revolution," to document the attitude toward sex in the '90s.
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Back to The Future
By Marina Kamenev
Futurist art from Italy and Russia is brought together for the first time.
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Uncensored Art
By Jeremy Ventuso
A retrospective on glasnost and perestroika opens.
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Out of Context
By John Freedman
Mossoviet Theater's production of Michael Frayn's farce "Noises Off" loses something in translation, but still evokes a good few laughs.
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Angels and Demons
By Raymond Stults
A staging of "The Demon" is a mix of lots of good and some bad.
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Salon
By Victor Sonkin
Dina Rubina's new novel, "Leonardo's Handwriting," looks at the special powers of mirrors.
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In the spotlight
By Anna Malpas
An expert at an 'esoteric school of magic' reassured us that it's not possible to put a curse on footballers.
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Salon
Linor Goralik has published a collection of jottings on everything from cat food to the future of Russian literature.
By Victor Sonkin
Published: September 10, 2004
Linor Goralik, a firmly established figure on Moscow's literary scene, has written a new book entitled "Not Baby Food" (Nedetskaya Yeda). Actually it's not an entirely new publication, since she wrote the book over a period of more than five years and published it on the Internet in small installments, each of them called "Something Added."
A writer's diary or notebook is nothing new, one of the best recent examples being "Notes and Fragments" by the renowned scholar Mikhail Gasparov. Goralik's book is a lighter version of the genre. It is a short read, numbering fewer than 100 pages, and doesn't require a long attention span, since most entries are just a couple of lines long. And it is light in style, too. A few stories are tragic, but most are funny, including some that make the reader double up with laughter.
On the other hand, the scope of this little book is surprisingly wide. It covers many locations, reflecting Goralik's nomadic life -- an Israeli citizen, she moved to Moscow several years ago, but still travels extensively in Israel and other countries. It covers many professional areas, reflecting Goralik's versatility. Apart from being a poet and prose writer, she has worked as an IT manager, investigative journalist, academic researcher, copywriter, radio show host, translator and interior designer (and I have probably forgotten something).
Her writing also moves freely from the sublime -- God and the Destiny of Russian Literature -- to the ridiculous -- cat food and the superfluity of advertising vodka in Russia. So many people are mentioned in "Not Baby Food" that Goralik's friend and colleague Stanislav Lvovsky fitted the book with a short who's who. As one of the people listed, I should warn potential readers not to believe either the list itself or the stories. Some of the events described by Goralik probably never happened; others were quite different from what she said. It's a work of art, after all.
For a non-Russian reader, this slender volume may have a special appeal. The best language teachers avoid simplified texts, instead plunging the student into the real environment of the spoken and written language. Goralik's stories are short, written in excellent idiomatic Russian, and understanding their point usually results in a happy guffaw. No doubt, some entries will leave unprepared readers perplexed, but these are the kind of culturally specific references that no serious language learner can avoid.
In the meantime, Goralik is busy as ever. This fall will see the publication of her first major academic treatise -- a comprehensive history of the Barbie doll.
Copyright © 2004 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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June 27 - July 3, 2008 
