Deathless by Catherynne M. ValenteMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
It seems a fashionable trend to re-tell Slavic fairy tales. Deathless is not a first book I read exploting them, though judging by the publication date, it was written sometime in the beginning of this literary fashion. And I must admit it's not the worst version.
From the first page I had a feeling that the author really did her homework, having a Russian husband probably helped a lot. The number of transliterated Russian words is rather questionable. I myself had a good laugh at them, but I'm not sure a person unfamiliar with the language can appreciate them much; they certainly add something to the tale, but only if you can trace the meaning behind them. The meaning is more or less explained along the way, but then the reader is left with the necessity to remember which word is which, so that level of the story is the first in line to be skipped.
The translations of Russian poetry are rather liberal, changing words for the story's sake, and at the same time still ugly. I don't know if there are better translations out there, but the author could at least try to keep the rhyme. Or, if nothing else, the rhythm.
As I said, I had thought that the author did a very good job in studying the culture. Right up to the page 63. On which Pushkin is called Aleksey. It somehow broke the spell. After that the transliterated Russian words became annoying; tradional elements of fairy tales, like three-fold repetitions, looked foreign; stereotypes seemed to pile up out of control (of course Russian fairies, and all Russians for that matter, drink vodka as water and nothing else, right?)
The poet's name is not the only overlooked mistake in the text. There were some gender-changing kings of water and strange-looking birds, but most of them were easy to forgive.
And then comes the Siege of Leningrad... There is probably a way to turn that pain and that fear into a story, a fairy tale to pass on. But that book is not that way.
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