A book which came to mind while reading Maidenhair was Cloud Atlas, another ambitious novel which plays with genres, meta-fiction and text types.

It is an overwhelming confusion of genres, styles and stories, the parts coming together to create a whole which is extremely difficult to understand fully, but wonderful to read. As well as following the unnamed interpreter in his work (and on his travels), the reader must navigate the books the interpreter is reading, the postcards he writes (but never sends) to his son, and the diary entries of a famous singer and actress whose biography he was once commissioned to write. Shishkin creates a tangle of intermingled strands, zipping backwards and forwards in time and space, alternating between fiction and reality (whatever that is). Very soon though any idea of a straight narrative is abandoned. The five-hundred page novel starts off in Switzerland as a story about an interpreter for Russian refugees, a man who must listen to the stories of atrocities they spin in an attempt to prolong their stay in the country. Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair (translated by Marian Schwartz, review copy courtesy of Open Letter Books) has been touted as an instant classic. However, there is good new stuff out there too: I enjoyed Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Happiness is Possible when I read it last year, and today’s offering is another contemporary book which came with a lot of hype. For every new translation, there are a couple of dozen updated versions of novels from the Golden and Silver ages of the country’s literary past.

Anyone who reads Russian literature in English will have noticed that there is, shall we say, a slight obsession with the classics.

Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin