Winterland

I’ve come to believe that all stories are about time. Time passing. How life changes. What something once was. Even our own stories.

Based on the page count and how the first couple of chapters just flew by, I expected this to be a quick read. I didn't account for how heavy it would be, though. 

Just as the blurb says, this is a story of a young girl becoming a gymnast under the Soviet Union which follows her from the frozen city of Norilsk to the training camp on Ozero Krugloye to Olympics and beyond. We also get chapters from her father, a longtime believer in the Soviet way of life who's growing slowly, reluctantly disillusioned; her elderly next-door neighbor and childhood babysitter, a gulag survivor who's still grappling with everything she'd had to go through; and, sometimes, flashbacks from her mother, a former ballerina and a passionate free thinker who, one day, had walked out of everyone's life and disappeared. That last mystery is in big part what holds the book together and what kept me turning pages even when the story grew too hard to bear. The way it plays out is something I'd love to talk about, but it's also a huge spoiler, so I'll just say I was both disappointed and satisfied in absolutely equal measure.

All the POV characters and then some have that MC energy—the book could easily be about anyone in the main cast, twisted just a bit differently. While I read about their tribulations, each of those characters felt so alive on the page. And yet, curiously, as I look back at the book, I don't recall the characters as fully realized fictional people. Each of them spends the story super stuck in a particular conflict, in the consequences of a specific choice. Everything they are revolves around it, and it's honestly super fitting for this book, because much as it is about gymnastics, it is even more so about the dystopian life in USSR, and it's portraying the experience with grueling honesty. I was born mere years before the collapse of the Soviets and raised by people who spent their entire life there, and the shadow of that miserable great country that everybody missed and no one had anything truly good to say about has hung above me my whole life. A bone-chillingly sad history, and the saddest part of it is that the world never truly learned from it. 

As a whole, this is a story about surviving in a system that decides everything for you and constantly gaslights you. Does it still matter you love something if you're told to love it? If what you believe in turns out to be a lie, at what point do you realize you've been lying to yourself and how do you live with it? What choices can you make when everything's been decided for you? Can you say no while you still care, and what happens when you stop? There are definitely right and wrong answers here, I feel, but there are no easy ones, and it's especially not easy to tell ones from others. 

The vibes here are scary thick and the writing is engrossing. I did sometimes feel taken out of the story by stuff like, when it's assumed that all the characters are speaking Russian anyway, random insertions of Russian words that have full equivalents in English. Like, why use "dochka" when it's literally just "daughter?" Also, I feel I've given up on authors who don't come from Post-Soviet countries ever figuring out how patronimics work. Clearly, this is arcane knowledge that you either grow up with or never grasp by the will of divine powers.