In Forty Rooms, Olga Grushin (The Dream Life of Sukhanov) tells the story of a woman's life, from her childhood dreams of becoming a poet to her closing fugue-like days, when those dreams entwine with her experiences and her regrets. Grushin emphasizes the choices that people make between following one's creative vision or a life of material comfort.
Her protagonist, the daughter of Russian intellectuals, grows up in Moscow and stays up late reading forbidden poetry. A romantic, she imagines the characters in her mind as mythical creatures. They enter her world in hallucinatory dream sequences, and they beckon her to a place where she, too, can be a poet, immortal and capable of seeing past the mundane surfaces of life. Her dreams propel her to apply to college in the American South, and then to the urban Northeast to make her way as a writer. There she connects with Paul Caldwell, a college friend from a wealthy family, and settles into a comfortable, upper-middle-class suburban life of motherhood, shopping and competitive decorating, interrupted only occasionally by the taunting memories of her youthful dreams. She turns a blind eye to the fissures in her life, filling the emptiness with yet another pregnancy, eventually finding deep pleasure in her children.
The genius of Forty Rooms is its suggestion that a betrayal of childhood dreams can still allow for a life filled with meaning, one that is contradictory, replete with loss, contentment, regret and its own definition of purpose. Forty Rooms is a beautiful, moving novel of dreams that reflects life as it is lived. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer