Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Intelligence

There are many books one admires, Jon Fosse’s Septology or perhaps Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch for instance. While reading them, I am excited by their distinctive nature and the formal achievement, but cannot imagine returning to either. Eighty pages into Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, I am already anticipating rereading and tracking down its sequel. I am thinking through an intelligence so fiercely alive that I am exhilarated even as I am chilled by the world she describes. It brings to mind the fictional world conjured up in Antoine Volodine’s Radiant Terminus. Both books represent peaks of this year’s reading. What connects them is less the worlds they describe than the extraordinary intelligence through which those worlds become perceptible. “The voices,” M. said to me once, “are like a composite quotation of everything I heard.” (“Composite quotation” is an expression coined by Andrei Bely, who said that for him every writer was represented not by a series of…