Andrey Kurkov at Partners & Crime
Last night, we had dinner at one of our favorite everyday restaurants, then went to a reading at one of our favorite bookstores for a book published by one of our favorite publishing houses, and the reading proved to be one of our all-time favorites. In short, it was a pretty great night.
Andrey Kurkov began his reading by telling a long story with several substories about how he became a writer. It all started with a hamster --- three actually --- and when one died, he wrote a poem that his mother really liked and made him perform, and when the second died, he wrote another poem, this time about Lenin and animals and children. In the fifty or so intervening years, he has written many novels, short stories, essays, screenplays, and children's books in Russian, including the beloved Death and the Penguin. His latest novel, below, features a turtle. "No pet was happy in my flat as a child, so maybe it's internal guilt," Kurkov explained, when asked about his fondness for animal characters, "I let the animals in my books live more or less happily."
He talked too about the 600 written rejections he received, including some from publishers who now distribute his books aruond the world; about winning a joke telling competition in Ukraine, where he lives and about which he says, "it's very wild, but very nice. I like it"; about a friend who would smuggle out his novels into Poland, then smuggle the rejections back in; about being taken out for drinks with two military generals quite curious about why elements of a novel he wrote about a Ukranian politics were starting to come true ("people who poison others professionally don't read novels," he told them); about raising, and naming, approximately 1500 cacti as a child; about his "tough Stalinist grandmother" who worked as a surgeon; and so on and so on. Occasionally he would pause and say about an event or person, "that's another sad story that can become a funny novel." In other words, Kurkov veritably burst with tales, and we're really glad to have been in his company.
He talked too about the 600 written rejections he received, including some from publishers who now distribute his books aruond the world; about winning a joke telling competition in Ukraine, where he lives and about which he says, "it's very wild, but very nice. I like it"; about a friend who would smuggle out his novels into Poland, then smuggle the rejections back in; about being taken out for drinks with two military generals quite curious about why elements of a novel he wrote about a Ukranian politics were starting to come true ("people who poison others professionally don't read novels," he told them); about raising, and naming, approximately 1500 cacti as a child; about his "tough Stalinist grandmother" who worked as a surgeon; and so on and so on. Occasionally he would pause and say about an event or person, "that's another sad story that can become a funny novel." In other words, Kurkov veritably burst with tales, and we're really glad to have been in his company.
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