In Forty Rooms, Olga Grushin, Orange Prize finalist, a Granta Best Young American Novelist and author of 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, where dinner parties last late into the night with half-secret arguments about politics and literature, while she 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 world 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.
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. As her choices accumulate, the first-person narrative of the earlier chapters shifts to the third person; she becomes "Mrs. Caldwell," her literary ambitions a forgotten dream. The ghosts and mythical oracles of her past visit, uninvited, reminding her of who she could have been, mingling with her present. She sometimes cannot be sure which memory of events is the real one.
Mrs. Caldwell's life is predictable and often stereotypical, though her choices are understandable even when they close the door to the possibility of the creative life she once felt destined to live. Yet, Grushin is after something beyond the conflict between artistic expression and the aspirations of well-to-do suburbanites, or even the question of whether Mrs. Caldwell has sold out. The genius of Forty Rooms is instead 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
Shelf Talker: This sweeping and emotionally complex novel spans a woman's life as she navigates the conflict between her artistic and domestic needs.