Virtuoso
Yelena Moskovich
Reviewed by Kaityln Yates
Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso demands a slow pulling-apart—despite being a novel cut into vignettes with consistently paced sections. It explores the complexity of lesbian love that spans countries, continents, and generations; love that escalates until meeting at the center of an unresolved and tricky past. Moskovich’s novel reconsiders the people of the post-Soviet Western Bloc and gives veracity to its foundling post-regime generations committed to existential freedom.
The story revolves around Jana, a Czech translator living in Paris, and features struggling Mamkas, dying Papkas, and one mighty Zorka: an erratic childhood sidekick of sorts “with eyebrows like her name,” who pushes Jana, and associated parts, out of comfort into an abysmal unknown, leading to an explosive epicenter of past and fate at the Rue de Prague in Paris. Readers have to trust Moskovich, as Virtuoso’s form is as carefully composed as its narrative. Virtuoso is compelling for this clever form as it makes readers question their current lucidity and the possibility of transcendental love. In addition, each character—spotlighted via a wandering third-person singular narrator—struggles internally and externally in aptly written ways. As the wandering narrator notes in the beginning, “Don’t we all ask for death before we know how to ask for what we really want? Usually it’s night-time—out of its stem, a rose blooms open with a fragrant scream.” Moskovich’s novel spills-over with the nuances of existence (and by extension, co-existence), grounding readers in her dizzying and dreamlike story of love, friendship, and reconnection.