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Forty Rooms

February 15, 2016

Forty Rooms by Olga Grushin
Published by Marian Wood Books/Putnam
Publication date: February 16th 2016
Genres: Contemporary, Fiction, Literary
five-stars

forty rooms

 

It is no small feat to write a novel about one woman’s life that taps into the universality of all women’s lives but Olga Grushin accomplishes just that in her new novel, Forty Rooms. With a construct based on the belief that—

Forty is God’s way of testing the human spirit. It’s the limits of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true

each chapter is a room at a point in the narrator’s life. The earliest rooms are from her perspective as a little girl and so are filled with the charm of a child’s mind—not knowing who exactly is bathing her only that the hands and tones of voice are different, later believing her mother is a mermaid as she watches her dress…so much mystery in what we, as adults, see as mundane. Later she leaves Russia to attend college in the United States and her early dreams of being a poet crystallize into a fervent belief that this is what she is meant to do.

Anything. Everything. I’ve never even been anywhere. I want to throw myself into adventures. Plunge into the twentieth century before it runs out, so I can write about it in the fullness of experience. Because no one can discover anything new while staying within the four walls of a bookworm’s cell, never venturing out to taste joy or pain.

She leaves her library cubicle but not to be a poet. Instead, the rooms lead to a large home, four children, and two dogs by the time she is thirty-three. Along the way Forty Rooms shifts from being told by the narrator herself as ‘I’ to the story of ‘she’. It’s only in marriage that she gains a name for the first time and is Mrs. Caldwell for the rest of the novel. She’s defined by everything around her, but no longer by anything within her.

On the surface, Forty Rooms is the chronology of a life but beneath that is a contemplative study, much like Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. In the many conversations in the novel Grushin puts the spoken on the page, but what draws the reader in is the unspoken and the uncertainty as to what was said and what was only thought. In this way, the novel steals in quietly and without manipulation. There is no great drama or tragedy, only the motion of days lived and the dreams that are traded in ways, large and small, willingly and unwillingly, for the realities of life. Whether these compromises were necessary comes to light later when her husband says about their marriage

…I keep having this feeling that it could have been more if only you’d trusted your dumb prince with your frog skin or your swan wings or—whatever it was you turned into when you were alone. Because our life often felt—I don’t know—less than real somehow. Like you weren’t all here. 

The novel encapsulates the fallibility of memory and of how we try and reconcile it to reality. There are people who float through the narrator’s life but it is difficult to know if they are real or simply her own conversations with herself. A mystery man visits her as a child and seems to encourage her poetry, but returns later to mock her feelings about her life

“Oh, and finding happiness in the small things, my dear, that’s really nothing to brag about—it’s the last consolation of those whose imagination has failed them” 

Even this harshness, whether real or self-induced, is just one of many phases and while it may be a sentence, a complete room or many rooms, there is something for every woman in Forty Rooms; something she can see of her own life in the telling—a scene, an hour, years. This is a book of woman and is one of those rare instances where what an author has written says more about the reader than it does the writer. In Grushin’s words there is recognition and each one, perfectly placed to the next, twines into the heart. Forty Rooms is a deep breath of sadness exhaled as a sigh of acceptance.

 

In her first decade of life, she had understood, albeit dimly and without reasoning, that certain kind of inner fire was required if you were ever to see the things no one else saw. In her second decade, she had learned that work and daring were necessary also, and in her third, she had added experience—of pain and joy both—to the list. But was she discovering, on the cusp of her fourth decade, that selfishness too was an essential part of this celestial equation? In the end, when all accounts were totaled, did you become great only by disregarding the happiness of those around you—was the mark of a true genius his perfect solitude, his absolute inability to consider anything beyond his art?

 

five-stars

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11 Comments
Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fiction Tagged: book clubs, contemporary life, literary, Putnam

Comments

  1. Shannon @ River City Reading says

    February 15, 2016 at 5:14 am

    This sounds SO, SO beautiful. Love your review and can’t wait to pick up my library copy.

    Reply
  2. Sarah's Book Shelves says

    February 15, 2016 at 5:35 am

    The mystery man…he’s one of the things that’s really irking me about this one! But, reading about where the novel goes later does make me want to pick it up again. We shall see…

    Reply
    • Catherine says

      February 15, 2016 at 3:29 pm

      And to me, he was familiar. Her inner editor, maybe? So encouraging as a child but tough as you get older.

      Reply
  3. KatieMcD @ Bookish Tendencies says

    February 15, 2016 at 6:55 am

    I will keep trying! To be fair, I haven’t really given it a chance. Hopefully this week I can carve out some time to dig into this one a bit. So glad it worked for you so well 🙂

    Reply
    • Catherine says

      February 15, 2016 at 10:06 am

      I think it may be a highly personal book- every reader will see it differently. A great one for book clubs because some will love and some will not.

      Reply
  4. Amanda says

    February 15, 2016 at 1:30 pm

    This is a great review! I will definitely be adding Forty Rooms to my library list. “For me, Forty Rooms was a deep breath of sadness exhaled as a sigh of acceptance.” – I love it.

    Reply
    • Catherine says

      February 15, 2016 at 3:28 pm

      Thank you- I hope you enjoy it even half as much as I did. It’s in my all-time Top 10.

      Reply
  5. Marisa @ The Daily Dosage says

    February 16, 2016 at 7:20 pm

    This review! I can’t wait for my library copy to come in. Is this your first 5 star this year?

    Reply
    • Catherine says

      February 17, 2016 at 9:59 am

      Crazy, but no! In a completely different vein I gave The Swans of Fifth Avenue because it was perfect for what it was- if that makes sense.

      Reply

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