If I may start my analysis of Ludmilla Ulitskaya’s Jacob’s Ladder at the end, there is a moment on the last page when Norah, one of main point-of-view characters of the novel, has begun reading the letters from the hidden chest she found after the passing of her father Genrikh. The letters consist of a decades-long correspondence between Norah’s somewhat eccentric grandmother Marusya and the enigmatic figure of her grandfather, Jacob Ossetsky, who was caught up in a Stalinist persecution and passed away in 1956, when Norah was still a child. As the novel comes to its ending, we see Norah revolving in her mind the idea of writing a novel about her grandparents – a novel we metafictionally understand to be the one we just read.

But Ulitskaya closes by having Norah muse (somewhat uncharacteristically) about who the protagonist of her book would be, and I took the ensuing paragraph as a sort of thesis put forward by the author, a key for the reviewer to interpret the whole book.

But who is he, my protagonist? Jacob? Marusya? Genrikh? Me? Yurik? No. No one, in fact, who is conscious of an individual existence, of birth and an anticipated, and unavoidable, death.

Not a person at all, one might say, but a substance with a certain chemical makeup. And is it possible to call a “substance” something that, being immortal, has the capacity to transform itself, to change all its fine, subtle little planes and angles, its crooks and crevices, its radicals? It is more likely an essence that belongs neither to being nor to nonbeing. It wanders through generations, from person to person, and creates the very illusion of personality. […] Thus, my protagonist is essence itself. The bearer of everything that defines a human being—the high and the low, courage and cowardice, cruelty and gentleness, and the hunger for knowledge.

It is a fine thing for an author to give their reviewers a little help; but I recall upon closing Jacob’s Ladder feeling like this ending – or thesis, if you will – felt limited in its ability to describe what I had just read.

Consider the in-story situation by itself: Norah is by now a middle-age set designer and theater artist (a profession we will learn a fair bit about over the course of the novel) Here she uses the language of chemistry to describe her writing philosophy; though heretofore Norah was no geneticist or a biochemist – outside her fictional world, Ludmilla Ulitskaya had been, before becoming a playwright and novelist, and perhaps Norah’s apparent status as roughly autobiographical causes the author here to slip the bounds between fiction and reality –  but this language becomes somewhat more plausible when we recall how Norah in an earlier chapter takes interest in a lively discussion between her ex-husband Vitya, a brilliant geneticist and hardened materialist, and his old school friend Grisha, who has moved to Israel to explore New Age-y spiritualist theories that connect genetics to divinity, the Divine Text to quantum mechanics, information science, and the idea of the cell as an organic computer. Grisha’s ideas are head-spinning stuff, and while in the moment they all laugh and take Grisha’s woowoo only semiseriously, the book’s ending suggests Nora – and by extension Ulitskaya – at least partly credits Grisha’s ideas about the interconnectedness of life, if not on a material level, then as least as a metaphor.

Like Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy, or (today in the U.S.) Jonathan Franzen, Lyudmilla Ulitskaya’s talent for writing large, panoramic family novels like The Big Green Tent and Medea and Her Children has made her one of the most famous authors in her home country, with millions of copies sold of her books. It goes without saying that authors of such novels would want us to see their characters as “interconnected”; it legitimates the author’s choice of genre for readers to see it that way, and it legitimates the length of these “loose, baggy” family novels with their proliferation of storylines – but if we are to treat these family novels not just as agglomerations of indifferent parts, but rather each as (potentially) a coherent artistic whole, it feels appropriate to ask, “interconnected how?” For part of the draw of family novels, traditionally, been not only the diversity of their characters but what unites them, and the grand statement that makes about How We Live Now. The subtitle of Thomas Mann’s beloved Buddenbrooks, for example, is The Decline of a Family; the theme here is decline – of this family, and of many upper-class German families like it. The theme of Anna Karenina is given in its first line: the causes of the unhappiness in families, whose unhappiness makes them interconnected. But is interconnectedness itself a sufficient theme to tie together Jacob’s Ladder? And if not, are there other themes that better describe what this book is about?

Jacob’s Ladder follows two groups of characters across two main time-spans. After the death of her grandmother Marusya in 1989, Norah discovers a chest containing a cache of letters between Marusya and her enigmatic first husband (Norah’s grandfather) Jacob Ossetsky. The first main arc of the plot tells the story of Marusya and Jacob’s tragic romance from 1901 until Jacob’s death in 1956, and consists of chapters of third person narration intermixed with epistolary chapters of Marusya and Jacob’s letters to each other, titled “Letters From the Willow Chest.” The second arc stretches from the 1960s to the present day, and tells the story of Norah, her off-and-on love affair with her frequent theatre collaborator Tengiz, her awkward marriage of convenience with her socially awkward math prodigy classmate Vitya, and of the childhood and coming of age of their wayward son Yurik.

When Ulitskaya opens the novel in 1975, Norah has gone to clean out her dead grandmother Marusya’s apartment and attend to the body, now lying in the bathtub. Ulitskaya uses this opening scene to sketch out details suggestive of Marusya’s character and the past affinities Norah had with her. Marusya had a somewhat bohemian existence in her latter days, her apartment bare, dusty, and flocked with bedbugs; but Norah looks through Marusya’s wardrobe and says, “You could study the history of costume from these relics of the past.” There is the piano where grandmother and granddaughter sang and danced – classical music and ballet are much spoken of in this novel, and we are informed:

Grandmother had practiced some form of esoteric dancing, then the forgotten and maligned science of pedology, and in her later years referred to herself as an “essayist.”

The apartment also contains a bookcase which Norah remembers reading through several times over as a child – an essential facet of her intellectual tutelage, we might say – with names suggestive of Marusya’s intellectual milieu:

A bare incandescent lightbulb—“Lenin’s Lamp, » as it was called back in the day—dangled from the ceiling. And Grandmother had read him—earnestly and fearfully. Indeed, she was personally acquainted with Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, and People’s Commissar of Education Lunacharsky. She had engaged in cultural work—she had once mentioned something about founding a drama studio for homeless children … What a strange, unlikely world, in which Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Stanislavsky and Evreinov, Andrea Bely and Nikolai Ostrovsky, Rachmaninoff and Grieg, Ibsen and Chekhov, went hand in hand. And, of course, her beloved Hamsun.

The novel is rife with these evocative call-outs; they are fun easter-eggs, and provide pointers for readers wanting to further explore Marusya’s world, though I did not find the frequent name-dropping much help as I tried to picture this world visually.

We also get from this chapter some notice of lingering bad blood, and regrets over the quarrels between Norah and her now-deceased grandmothers. From Norah’s perspective we are told that the last time she saw her grandmother, they fought over politics. “[Marusya] detested philistinism in all its forms, and called herself a ‘nonpartisan Bolshevik.’” And she sees how filthy the windows of the dead woman’s apartment are, she reflects, “Why didn’t I do anything for her? How foolish I was to be angry at an old woman. I’m a heartless bitch.”

One theme that emerges over the course of the novel is how various members of the family misunderstand each other; they are such different personalities, and certain traits, like creativity and adventurousness, seem to skip a generation, or manifest in ways that are sufficiently different as to be unsympathetic. Marusya’s son (and Norah’s father) Genrikh, for his part, is a generally non-expressive fellow, who stands in the kitchen while Norah cleans the body, calmly calling relatives to tell them the news and smoking his cigarette. He is not a bohemian like his mother, nor a creative person like his daughter. He and his ex-wife Amalia, Norah’s mother, are notably skipped as point of view characters, until the very end.

In between trips to clean her mother’s apartment, Norah has to rush home to nurse her infant son Yurik. Tired and exhausted, she initially doesn’t think much of a chest she finds, made of willow branches, which seems to contain “old notebooks, writing pads, piles of paper scrawled all over.” She sleeps, draws a picture of the baby in the apartment – drawing, as we will learn, is a big part of Norah’s creative work. Finally, at the beginning of chapter one, Norahs opens the chest; and as with Proust’s madeleine cookie, a broad expanse of past life now unfolds from one narrative MacGuffin.

In any novel with an ensemble of point of view characters, the author runs the risk that some point of view characters will be more interesting for a given reader, others less so, making the chapters featuring the less interesting characters feel like a chore, the chapters with the more interesting characters more of a pleasure.

The story of Marusya and Jacob Ossetsky is told in short third-person interludes and some quite lengthy chapters of letters between them and other minor characters, each of which are titled, “From the Willow Chest.” Marusya, the first of the interludes tells us, was born in Kiev, the daughter of a Jewish watchmaker, Pinchas Kerns, and the Kerns family had been very intellectual – although the father had never read Karl Marx, he was of French stock and “his children, however, assimilated from an early age the progressive ideas of humanity.” Despite being very well-educated, the family were persecuted for their Judaism, first in being denied access to education, then as a result of having their father’s watchmaker’s shop destroyed in a 1905 pogrom in Kiev. This had a radicalizing effect on the family, with Marusya and her brothers becoming severely opposed to the Tsar and monarchism. She began to see the world in black-and-white:

[Marusya’s] character had matured completely during those dark, shameful days of Kiev’s history. The formerly hospitable, affable world now divided itself into two halves, without shades or nuances. on the one side were the fighters for human dignity and freedom; on the other, their enemies, exploiters and the Black Hundreds.

(The latter, a footnote helpfully explains, were a far right group of monarchists who supported the emperor’s autocratic rule.) But then Marusya is sheltered during the pogrom by the Yakovenkos, whose protection throws all of her prior assumptions into turmoil.

Pelageya Onisimovna and Uncle Taras were monarchists. They owned two apartment buildings and a tavern, and so they were exploiters. But they were good people, even heroic. Rumors were making the rounds that, during those awful days, a Russian family that had sheltered an elderly Jewish woman had been killed. The Yakovenkos had certainly risked a great deal by taking Marusya into their home.

At the same time, Marusya’s elder brother Mark ends up being allowed into prep school, but in exchange has to convert to Lutheranism. The family received aid from the Jewish Relief Committee and had to struggle with poverty and hand-me-down clothes. With her piano smashed and no person visiting, Marusya decided to start reading – in one of many nice historical touches, the family receives a library from the writer Vladimir Korolenko, a Ukrainian writer from the turn of the century who (a little Googling shows) wrote and spoke in opposition to antisemitism – and that is how Marusya finds herself reading “the recently published book by the fashionable author Romain Rolland, La Vie de Beethoven.” (There are numerous historical call-outs in the novel; after reading it, I just wanted to go back and mine the book for all the numerous cultural reference points Ulitskaya puts out there.) A woman named Madame Leroux, secretary for the local Froebel Society in Kiev, enters the watchmaker’s shop to get a stone fixed on her watch, randomly sees the copy of Romain Rolland’s Beethoven biography lying open, and inquires of the reader. She asks Marusya if she loves Beethoven, and this launches Marusya on a career as a Froebel Miss, a teacher in the nascent kindergarden education movement begun a half century earlier by Friedrich Froebel.

In the next chapter – the first of the Willow Chest chapters – we meet with young Jacob Ossetsky for the first time through his diary. The diary shows us a precocious and passionate young man, who mixes learned speculations on Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and parthenogenesis, but says, “If I didn’t want to study music, I would study biology. It’s the most fascinating branch of science I’ve read for a long time. But music is more important to me!” We see the youthful hormones at play: “How weak man is! […] it only takes a single glance at the décolleté of a washerwoman” for the boy’s blood to rush, “and I’d run after her like a puppy; I’d forget Ellen Key, and Tolstoy, and Jules Payot.” There is some beauty in these letters, some precociousness, some nostalgia to be savored for the passions of the young blood. There is the irony of the young boy namechecking The Chronicle of My Musical Life by Rimsky-Korsakov right after a conversation where his father reproves him that he must go to the Commercial School instead of studying music because the family needs money. There’s a note that is just a reference to a contemporary printed illustration of Chopin’s Ballade (op. 47) by Aubrey Beardsley. He asks pregnant questions like, “why don’t they write études, exercises, for the orchestra?” He mourns the November 4, 1910 death of Tolstoy with charming sincerity. He raves over a Rachmaninoff concert and contrasts him with Scriabin. Ulitskaya leaves an awful lot of these breadcrumbs for readers to follow up on, and to some degree how interesting one finds Jacob’s diary is commensurate with how thrilled you are by these random crumbs, whose larger fictional purpose (if any) is to make Jacob seem like the kind of protagonist whose writings we might want to spend a hundred or so pages with; it is the same trick Goethe pulls in the first third of Young Werther. When this grows tired, there are the charming scenes of first love between Jacob and Marusya, losing and then finding her at the opera, enthusing over their mutual interests.

In some strange way, their talk unfolded almost without verbs, a single recitation of names and sighs, inhales and exhales, and occasional interjections: Tolstoy? Yes! The Kreutzer Sonata? No, Anna Karenina! Oh yes! Dostoevsky? Of course! Demons! No, Crime and Punishment! Ibsen! Hamsun! Victoria! Hunger! Nietzsche! Yesterday! Dalcroze? Who? No, never heard of him! Rachmaninoff! Ah, Rachmaninoff! Beethoven! Of course! Debussy? And Glière? Magnificent! Chekhov? Dymov? Korolenko! Who? Me, too! But The Captain’s Daughter! What happiness! Lord! Unbelievable! Never before anything like it! Jewish? Sholom Aleichem? Yes, the house next door! No, Blok, Blok! Nadson? Gippius! Never read her! Oh, but you must, you must! Ancient history! Yes, the Greeks, the Greeks!

And Marusya shares with Jacob her belief in a general rhythm, a “metronome of life,” which was the key to everything, and this seems to be another version of Ulitskaya’s claims about interconnection. When the couple moves to Moscow we get some nice touches of the times, Marusya enrolling in the ballet and giving readers a glimpse into the studio of artes plastiques of Ella Ivanovna Rabenek. There is also the vivid letter from Marusya’s brother Mikhail, which shows him turning into a name-dropping dandy as his move to the city brings him into contact with a host of literati; these carry some entertainment – some – and yet Ulitskaya’s mode of narration in the Jacob-Marusya chapters, heavy on exposition, light on description, a wealth of documentary summary and yet altogether not so much vivid scenic action, was not always very gripping.

As the two are secretly married in 1911, Jacob worries in a diary entry that their relationship cannot last, it is based on puppy love, and what is necessary is “manly behavior,” and this corresponds to his ensuing life course, abandoning his studies in music in order to attend the Commercial School and become an expert (a brilliant one, we are led to believe) in political economy. Marusya develops her own views, informed by the biology lectures she attends at the Froebel Institute.

From them, Marusya had gleaned that women pay a high price for their childbearing capacity, and the inequality of the sexes derives directly from the divergent biological functions of the male and the female. But this view led her in the opposite direction—not toward androgyny, but in the direction of the authentic emancipation of women in the psychological, intellectual, and spiritual realms.

This helps explain Marusya’s independent existence, her career as a teacher of dancers and theater players, and also begins to move Jacob and Marusya psychologically apart, even as historical circumstances and political persecution pull them apart physically. The latter parts of this saga were dismal and tragic, but more than anything tedious, and I found myself wanting these chapters to end quickly so the other half of the novel could resume. I suppose that the Jacob-Marusya letters just seemed too bland, and the author’s play for the reader’s sympathies too obvious and telegraphed for this story arc to really generate much surprise.

It’s a given in a family novel that one of the themes will be compassion; the protagonists are not fully in control of their own destinies, but rather History – Capital H – is a prime mover which forces each member of the family to adapt, and so the family novelist sees his or her characters perhaps less judgmentally, more as the victims of circumstance than as a morality tale in the making – certainly Thomas Mann ribs the foibles of individual Buddenbrooks like Tony and Christian, but after you screw things up in the outer world, there remains an inner world of the family that will always welcome you home; a family always has compassion for its own. But compassion – mere sympathy, if you will – was not enough to make Marusya and Jacob’s story altogether that interesting. Jacob was a political prisoner, he was an economist, he loved music and a bevy of random writers; but the letters do not vie with greatness as letters.

In the West, our taste in Russian literature (prototypically) veers towards the dark and psychologically tortured; you will find me oohing and aahing elsewhere on this site over the bleak cynicism of books by Olga Slavnikova and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, their penchant for devastating one-liners and savage deconstructions of the abuse and dishonesty of their own land; and what struck me while reading Marusya and Jacob’s letters is that their tender sentiments were also largely conventional ones; and this straightforwardness and (perhaps) simplicity in Ulitskaya’s characters is also reflected in her prose style, which in translator Polly Gannon’s rendering is elegant and fluent but never particularly angular. In the full-length English study of the author, Ludmila Ulitskaya and the art of tolerance, Elizabeth A. Skomp and Benjamin M. Sutcliffe positively compare some of Ulitskaya’s qualities as a writer to those of Petrushevskaya:

Petrushevskaia’s prose, in fact, offers a useful comparison to Ulitskaya’s. Whereas Petrushevskaia is an existentialist for whom the world is an inhospitable realm rife with threats, disappointments, and disasters, Ulitskaya casts her eye on life’s bounties. Both acknowledge betrayal as a human weakness and the potentially destructive nature of sexual appetite, but for Ulitskaya those drives tend to occur as exceptions in a world rich in love and human bonds that in Petrushevskaia’s fiction seem utterly impossible. Illumination, promise, and fulfillment dwell in Ulitskaya’s homes, where Petrushevskaia finds vicious conflict, desolation, and the desire to assert psychological power: for Ulitskaya, generations nurture; for Petrushev­ skaia, they vampirize. In short, many find Petrushevskaia’s splendid fiction too lacerating for enjoyment, whereas Ulitskaya’s more measured, warmer prose offers the reassurance purveyed by Woland in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita : “Everything will be as it should; that’s what the world rests on.”

Now personally I like a bit of friction, texture – or, if you prefer, “laceration” – in my prose, but it would be entirely unfair to Russians – a nation of millions of people with work-a-day lives – to demand that all of their contemporary fiction be about vicious, neurotic characters who scream and cheat and throw things in the kitchen. In response to male critics like Mark Lipovetsky and Alexander Etkind who label Ulitskaya as “neo-sentimentalist,” Skomp and Sutcliffe counter by pointing out that this line of criticism overlooks the feminist and humanistic qualities of Ulitskaya’s narrative approach, which they sum up as an emphasis on the body (“corporeality”), an obsession with history (as we see in the frequent call-outs in Jacob and Marusya’s letters), and a positive modeling of tolerance for alterity – alternate ways of living, to reduce that to plain English.

The emphasis on the body can be seen at the beginning of Chapter 12 of Jacob’s Ladder, in these delightful scenes showing Nora with her newborn baby Yurik:

[Norah] discovered that her perception of the world had become doubled, as though it had acquired a stereoscopic property. A pleasant puff of wind blowing through the window become both frightening and alarming, because Yurik turned over in his crib from the stream of air on his cheeks. The tap of a hammer in the apartment above, which she wouldn’t even have noticed before, was painful to her ears, and she responded to these blows from the depths of her body, just like the baby. Moderately hot food now burned her mouth; the tight elastic of her socks irritated her. These and many other things she now seemed to measure with two different thermometers—one for adults and one for children.

[…]

She hopes that when she stopped breastfeeding him her familiar world would re-establish itself. But this never happened. On the contrary, it was as though, together with the baby, she was learning to know what was soft, hard, hot, or sharp; she looked at the branch of a tree, a toy, any object at all, with primordial curiosity. Just like him, she ripped pages of newsprint and listened to the rustling of the paper; she licked his toys, noting that the plastic duck was more pleasing to the tongue than the rubber kitten. Once, after she had fed Yurik, she was wiping the sticky cream of what off the table with her hand and she caught herself thinking that there was indeed something pleasurable about smearing it on the surface. Yurik was thrilled when he saw his mother doing what he liked to do, and started slapping his little palm in the mess of porridge. Both of them were rubbing their hands around on the tabletop. Both of them were happy.

The sensuality here does not make itself felt in the Jacob and Marusya chapters; but what I also like about this passage is its transgressiveness, the willingness to see the world like a toddler; and it’s this embrace of strangeness – alterity, to borrow Skomp and Sutliffe’s word – that I think unifies the disparate parts of this story, if anything does.

Each of the story arcs of Jacob’s Ladder concerns a member of the family who is in some way different and/or non-conformist; this alterity is the source of their happiness, it is just as good, but it brings the characters into conflict with institutional prejudice and social stigma, which the characters each have to overcome to achieve their own idiosyncratic version of happiness. In the Jacob and Marusya chapters, this ends rather sadly, with the two lovers ultimately finding love in unusual places, in the only ways their harsh circumstances allow. But let us move on to the more modern story arc of Norah, Vitya, and Yurik to reckon up even more of these examples.

In two early chapters, “Classmates (1955-1963)” and “The Garden of Magnitudes (1958-1974),” Ulitskaya shows how two very different people, Norah and Vitya, develop an early alliance in school that results in an awkward marriage of convenience.

Vitya is a tall, thin, awkward boy who gets beaten up at school. “The boy was in no sense a moron, more likely even a genius, but one with peculiarities.” a professor tells his concerned mother Varvara Vasilievna, an official in the HMC – I am not sure what this is – and a fierce advocate for her son with, in any case, some pull in the Russia intelligentsia. Vitya “blossomed” when it came to studying math, but he had significant handicaps outside his narrow area of interest, showing traits readers will recognize as exemplifying what in DSM-IV was formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome.

Vitya was inattentive to what didn’t interest him, but when something engaged his mental capacities, he was quick, sharp, and hungry for knowledge. Despite his unsual memory and his innate abilities in logical thought, he was emotionally rather backward, and had not an iota of a sense of humor. There seemed to be some sort of short circuit in his head that allowed him to exist happily in the most abtract realms of mathematics, whereas any literary text, from “Little Red Riding Hood” to King Lear, which he read as an adolescent, filled him with indignation as the lack of logic, the contrivances, and the flouting of causal connections and motives in the behavior of both characters and authors.

His only friend is Grisha Lieber, “a half-pint Jewish kid, chubby and pink” who is mocked as Vitya’s Sancho Panza. The two are described as an odd couple, “a garrulous little ball and a taciturn beanpole.” Neither is particularly interesting to girls.

Norah meets Vitya when she is assigned by an advisor to tutor him in literature, a subject he is failing though Norah is struck by “his critical reading of any work put in front of him, which he analyzed with unwavering precision, pointing out the glaring inadequacy of any metaphor taken on its own merits, and the fundamental logical inconsistency and lack of rigor of the humanities as a whole.” Young Norah is “idiosyncratic,” bookish, and an awkward “child of the sexual revolution.” She has an affair in the eighth grade with a boy she has a crush on, Nikita Tregubski, but when the boy brags about his “conquest” to his friends, Nikita’s father and the other parents blame Norah and her mother, Amalia Alexandrovna, who was herself then involved in an affair with a married man, Andrei Ivanovich. The PTA meeting expels Norah from the school after a contentious hearing where she talks back to them using words which “could not be found in a standard dictionary.” After some period of moping, she decides to enroll at the Theater Arts Institute, where she meets Tusya, “a theater artist and set designer, teacher, and the embodiment, according to Nora’s notions, of the ideal modern woman”; she will become Nora’s mentor throughout life.

After Norah is kicked out of school, almost none of her former classmates come to visit her, but Vitya continues, and the two develop a romantic relationship. He is part of a series of romantic triumphs for her, and “with each new victory, [Norah’s] womanly self-respect increased.” Vitya took pressure off of Norah, because “he simply didn’t notice any of her experiments in search of beauty, style, and success. He noticed only that the way she cut her hair was different from the way other women did.” The two have a final triumph over their persecutors, the teachers, the other girls, and Nikita Trugubsky, when they abruptly decide to get married and Vitya and Norah ostentatiously appeared in front of the whole school at graduation.

But the more lingering significance of this marriage of convenience is that it allows Vitya and Norah to each begin following their own separate paths; Norah meets Tengiz, an older man and stage director from Altai, a province in the Caucasian Mountains, with whom she fosters an on-again, off-again relationship spanning decades. Each time Norah and Tengiz rejoin each other, each one spurs the creative energies of the other, and their fascinating back-and-forths over works they plan to adapt together for the stage provide literary commentary on the likes if King Lear, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Gulliver’s Travels, Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, and other works, which then flow into these elaborate, evocative descriptions of the abstract, visionary stage designs Norah draws in her notebook (which furnish ample matter for literary analysis in themselves):

[Lear’s] gnarled, emaciated hands, with their enormous swollen joints, are, possibly, trembling. His face is covered with deep wrinkles, folds of sagging skin, with hanging lips and jowls, and two tendons in his neck, between which a flaccid sack of skin hangs down under his chin.

[…]

The set will be spare in the extreme. Only the cliffs. But in the first act, the cliffs are covered with rugs, priceless tapestries, and fabrics; then, with the first banishment, and the second, the rugs and tapestries disappear. During the storm, only rags blow across the stage.

These elaborate workings-out of the stagings of various literary works were not necessarily the most interesting parts of the book for me, but they certainly add to the complexity, and a sense that there are substrata of meaning that cannot quite be sussed out in the space of this (already long) review. But the diversity of Ulitskaya’s modes of storytelling – letters, interludes, these chapters showing Tengiz and Norah working out a stage production – are in themselves a form of alterity; it is as though Ulitskaya is implicitly saying that every story deserves its own form of telling.

There were other parts of this book that I enjoyed quite a bit, and I could see some interconnections, some parallels, between various characters. Both Norah’s mother Amalia and her grandmother Marusya find happiness in a second relationship rather than their first marriage. Baby Yurik, like his father Vitya, grows up to be brilliant in his own narrow sphere; Vitya becomes a master of mathematical theory and potential Field medalist, but his clashes with his Soviet superiors and their rigid hierarchy forces him to takes his talents to a new land, where he finds the odd woman who is uniquely suited to him; Yurik falls in love with music just like his grandfather Jacob, only for him the love is for his guitar and the songs of the Beatles and the authentic root music of the American blues (and there is a delightful sequence that takes Norah to visit her son in New York City to deal with both his drug addiction and his bohemian lifestyle). Skomp and Sutliffe note that Ulitskaya’s treatment of homosexuality in her work isn’t without its problems, and I will say the same here for her treatment of neurodivergence, but I was moved by the evolution of the relationship between the apparently autistic father and son into ultimately a relationship of mutual understanding. Perhaps most moving of all was the revelation of Norah’s father Genrikh, her realization of the reasons for his stoniness and emotional distance.

What I felt about this latter section – powerful, poignant – somewhat mirrors my feelings about Jacob’s Ladder as a whole. There was much of beauty, and much of interest, and a handful of notable connections between the characters which immediately spring to mind, and perhaps more that would come back on further re-reading; overall, though, it felt like a book whose complexity and diversity made it too unwieldy to hold together and stick out as a singular aesthetic experience (as the truly great books do.) Was the story – were the characters – interconnected, in some degree more significant than other books of this kind? Maybe. Did these interconnections add up to a whole greater than the sum of its sometimes good, sometimes wearying parts? I’m still not quite convinced.