Traces of Habitation
Debut novel by Denis Besnosov
Debut novel by Denis Besnosov
ORIGINAL TITLE: Свидетельства обитания
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Ivan Limbakh, 2023
352 PAGES
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Ivan Limbakh, 2023
352 PAGES
ENGLISH SAMPLE AVAILABLE
“Most of all, I was afraid of something like this. When you wake up and there’s nothing around. It’s such a constant fear. And things will never be the same again. I had read and heard about something like this, seen things like this in movies. And feared it could happen. But I don’t even know anymore. Back then, everyone started calling each other. Asking where you were, how you were doing, if everything was all right. My mom called me in the morning, crying into the receiver. Me, I didn’t start crying right away. At first, I was sure this couldn’t be happening. You can’t wake up in the morning and have nothing left around you. There should have been some kind of warning.“
Polyphonic reflection on catastrophe and totalitarianism and a meditation on the insufficiency of language to address trauma, by the poet and literary translator Denis Besnosov.
The world is in a state of catastrophe, and four nameless characters find themselves trapped in a shelter. They receive updates from the outside world over the radio and through a window overlooking the street. The post-catastrophe world appears fragmented, requiring both the protagonists and the reader to piece together the entire picture.
Devoid of any possibility of leaving their refuge, they recall, dream, and quarrel. A choir of voices, woven from quasi-monologues, film chronicles, and propaganda clips, records the history of destruction.
The world is in a state of catastrophe, and four nameless characters find themselves trapped in a shelter. They receive updates from the outside world over the radio and through a window overlooking the street. The post-catastrophe world appears fragmented, requiring both the protagonists and the reader to piece together the entire picture.
Devoid of any possibility of leaving their refuge, they recall, dream, and quarrel. A choir of voices, woven from quasi-monologues, film chronicles, and propaganda clips, records the history of destruction.
One of the first major prose works, the action of which takes place within the timeframe of today's catastrophe.
— Denis Larionov, The Andrei Bely Prize jury
Traces of Habitation is a collage of voices, a chorus of the everyday, as it proceeds against a backdrop of social change and fear. Threads of real horror are bound into this tapestry, it is the claustrophobic fictional equivalent of a work like The Third Reich of Dreams, although it hardly feels fictional. The catastrophe that engulfs the protagonists of Beznosov’s voiced novel is already upon them, and us, and in their powerlessness and their stasis we recognise our own inability to act in the face of evil.
— Sasha Dugdale, author of Joy and Deformations (Carcanet Press)