The Time of Swans
Debut novel by Larissa Muraveva
Debut novel by Larissa Muraveva
ORIGINAL TITLE: Написано в Западном Берлине
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Shell(f), 2025
240 PAGES
RIGHTS SOLD: German (Aufbau)
ENGLISH SAMPLE AVAILABLE
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Shell(f), 2025
240 PAGES
RIGHTS SOLD: German (Aufbau)
ENGLISH SAMPLE AVAILABLE
“Gradually, I realized I was suffering from a kind of Proustian syndrome, and that only writing could cure it. Yet every time I tried to write about my past, it folded in on itself, dissolved like smoke, melted away before my eyes. My thoughts kept running into a dead end: I could no longer remember what exactly I had been doing on Bolshoi Prospekt when I saw that lilac tree, or what year I had stepped into the Church of St. Eustathius, and I could not understand what was worth telling about that trip to Rishon LeZion, one of many, entirely unremarkable.”
A chronicle of dislocation unfolding across geography, language and the self, The Time of Swans traces the slow fracture of a literary scholar’s identity, while questioning the very possibility of capturing the self through writing in a world of perpetual upheaval.
Fleeing Russia after the outbreak of war, a literary scholar studying contemporary autobiography arrives in Israel to join her estranged father. In a cramped room in his Tel-Aviv apartment, she tries to reassemble her identity: a university lecturer unable to teach, a literary scholar deprived of language.
Forced to leave again shortly after arrival, she accepts a visiting professorship at an American college in Berlin. There, she teaches students Holocaust testimonies and autobiographical writing while becoming increasingly unable to make sense of her own experience through narrative.
Moving between Saint Petersburg, Tel Aviv and Berlin, the novel interweaves diary fragments, literary reflection and the relentless flow of news alerts invading the narrator’s daily life into a meditation on displacement, the instability of identity and the writing of the self. Berlin — with its visible scars and layered history — becomes both a refuge and a mirror: a city through which to confront the gap between lived experience and the narratives we construct to make sense of it.
Fleeing Russia after the outbreak of war, a literary scholar studying contemporary autobiography arrives in Israel to join her estranged father. In a cramped room in his Tel-Aviv apartment, she tries to reassemble her identity: a university lecturer unable to teach, a literary scholar deprived of language.
Forced to leave again shortly after arrival, she accepts a visiting professorship at an American college in Berlin. There, she teaches students Holocaust testimonies and autobiographical writing while becoming increasingly unable to make sense of her own experience through narrative.
Moving between Saint Petersburg, Tel Aviv and Berlin, the novel interweaves diary fragments, literary reflection and the relentless flow of news alerts invading the narrator’s daily life into a meditation on displacement, the instability of identity and the writing of the self. Berlin — with its visible scars and layered history — becomes both a refuge and a mirror: a city through which to confront the gap between lived experience and the narratives we construct to make sense of it.
An unusually mature and formally accomplished debut.
— Meduza