RE: Forty Rooms By: Olga Grushin
A Book that I Really Love
From: Travis
July 10, 2020
This is a book that I love to recommend to people. At the time I originally read it, it was the first book I'd read in a really long time that I immediately wanted to re-read -- a seemingly simple book that kept complicating itself subtly, evolving in the jump cuts, changing when you weren't paying attention.
Grushin employs a lot of subtle touches; unannounced hallucinatory tangents, shifts in narrative perspective, letting some of the story happen in between scenes, that I thought were really effective; adding to the narrative without overloading it.
The story, on surface, is about a girl who wants to become a great poet, inspired by none other than Apollo himself, who reveals himself to her, challenging her to cleave to the true artist's life and lifestyle. The real conceit (the titular 40 rooms) is that 40 is God's number for any kind of trial - 40 days of flooding, for example -- and that in the main character's case, it was represented in the 40 different rooms she lived in, through which we follow her as she progresses between them.
Throughout the narrative, I identified with the main character (also named Olga) on a personal level; always striving to be a great poet; always trying to find the time to sit down and write that poem (no, that cycle of poems!) that is just on the tip of her tongue; always having to make some small compromise to let her life in and not quite getting around to it.
I did occasionally have to double-back on a few sections (see aforementioned subtle touches) to make sure I hadn't missed something -- did I miss when she had that second kid? No, I guess not, but here they are -- but was never truly lost; rather sharing the confusion with which the main character might've been dealing.
And maybe that's all I'll say, except to maybe remind you, dear reader, that as soon as I finished the book, I was ready to start it over and perhaps hint that the way this book ends changed my whole understanding of what had been happening the whole time.