Personal parallels
Novel’s plot based on New York author’s real-life experience
Keith Gessen has never been to Albuquerque.
His coming trip to the Duke City is going to be for work, but he’s also going to have time to look around. “I’m excited for this opportunity,” he says. “It’s always great getting to a new area and sharing your work.”
Gessen teaches journalism by day in New York. During his downtime, he is a novelist.
His most recent is “A Terrible Country,” and he will be hosting a Q&A session and signing the book at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 28, at the Jewish Community Center.
The stop is part of the JCC Book Fest.
It took Gessen more than 10 years to write the novel.
The book follows Andrei Kaplan and his return to Moscow to care for his ailing grandmother.
Kaplan must take stock of his life in New York — as his girlfriend has stopped returning his text messages, and his dissertation adviser is dubious about his job prospects.
It’s the summer of 2008, and he thinks a few months in Moscow is just what he needs.
So he sublets his room in Brooklyn, packs his hockey stuff and moves into the apartment that Stalin gave his grandmother, a woman who has outlived her husband and most of her friends. She survived the dark days of communism and witnessed Russia’s violent capitalist transformation, during which she lost her beloved dacha. She welcomes Kaplan into her home, even if she can’t always remember who he is.
When he becomes entangled with a group of leftists, Kaplan’s politics and his allegiances are tested, and he is forced to come to terms with the Russian society he was born into and the American one he has enjoyed since he was a kid.
“(The book) mostly came out of this personal experience where I went to Moscow to take care of my grandmother in 2008-09,” he says. “I didn’t think of it as a novel. It was pretty difficult to write, and I was pretty wrapped up in it. When I came home, I started looking back on it. It had been a profound experience that I wanted to describe. I had also been going to Russia for many years as a journalist. I had always felt like I never had a journalist captured what was so compelling, strange and interesting to me about Russia. I thought that this story of this guy taking care of his grandmother would be a great way to tell the story.”