No worse than "The Catcher in the Rye": 8 modern books about growing up
Miscellaneous / / July 04, 2023
A family saga with cyberpunk touches, stories about teenage rebellions against the system, a novel about boarding school students and more.
The canon of the coming of age novel is slowly changing. For many years, the typical tale of the agonizingly rebellious teenager was The Catcher in the Rye, a multi-generational handbook. But this does not mean that the authors have stopped writing about young people experiencing personality crises, while at the same time trying to fit in or, on the contrary, rebuild themselves from the reality around them.
We have collected eight stories in which young men and women grow up in their own way, but ask the same questions as Holden Caulfield.
1. "Don't talk about him", Igor Beloded
Igor Beloded is a multiple finalist for the Lyceum Literary Prize. He wrote three stories about lost teenagerswho learn to push boundaries and moderately rebel against the system. But every time it turns out that the boundaries are imaginary, and they rebel against themselves.
The heroes of Beloded participate in dangerous Internet games, enter into forbidden relationships, try to spite parents to freeze their ears, constantly raising their own pain threshold, and these tests are not for everyone under power.
Buy a book2. Iceland, Alexander Ilichevsky
Alexander Ilichevsky is a laureate of the Russian Booker and Big Book awards. This is an author who writes stories in different spatial and temporal sections, but almost always about the same hero, whose worldview is formed under the influence of the location.
In the proposed Ilichevsk chain of organic codes Iceland - this is not an island European state, but a street in Jerusalem and, perhaps, the hero himself. He agreed to the implantation of a silicon chip, with which he collects and analyzes geodetic information. All this is bizarrely mixed with memories and stories that made the traveling young man what he becomes by the end. The Big Data we deserve.
Buy a book3. "Center of Gravity", Alexey Polyarinov
Aleksey Polyarinov is a translator, essayist, critic and prose writer. His debut novel "Center of Gravity" in 2018 entered the long list of "National Best" and received the Audience Award of the "NOS" award.
Polarinov set himself the task of writing the so-called "great American novel" on Russian material, and brilliantly coped with it. The story of growing up in the 1990s with detailed descriptions of childhood, adolescence and adolescence, gradually deepening the colors, immerses the reader in dystopia. The harmless family saga takes on cyberpunk flair, but the characters remain true to their values and ask the same questions they did as children.
Buy a book4. Fireworks on the other side, Alexandra Shalashova
Twice winner of the "Lyceum" award in the "Poetry" nomination, Alexandra Shalashova also writes polyphonic prose of unusual structure and poetics.
The heroes of the novel-parabola "Salutes on the Other Side" are pupils of a boarding school for visually impaired and blind children - tell the same story in nine voices. They are joined by an adult and another person, standing on the shaky border between childhood and non-childhood.
They all live in a city divided by a river. On one side is an institution isolated from outside life, on the other, fireworks are thundering. Or maybe explosions. Left alone with themselves, teenagers build their own hierarchy and take on non-childish responsibility for the world around them.
Buy a book5. "Magic Choir", Evgeny Kremchukov
Prose writer, poet and critic Yevgeny Kremchukov wrote his debut novel, which immediately attracted the attention of observers and was included in the long list of the Yasnaya Polyana Prize and the short list of the Big Book Prize.
This is a novel about a good man Mitya Bavrin. As an adult, he learns that his old close friend was in prison an equally ridiculous and terrible accusation. Mitya plunges into a retrospective of memories, trying to figure out what really happened and how well he knows the person next to whom he spent the best childhood and youth. And does Bavrin know himself?
Buy a book6. "Mark and Ezra 2.0", Rahim Jafarov
Laureate of "New Horizons" and "New Literature", finalist of the "Lyceum" Rahim Jafarov writes prose in at the intersection of fantasy, science fiction and psychology, at every step deceiving the gullible reader, enthusiastic twists.
"Mark and Ezra 2.0" is essentially a novel in parables, connected by cross-cutting characters who look into an antique shop misanthrope Mark is a merchant of magical artifacts. His assistant Ezra, an orphanage stray, caustic and detail-oriented teenager, grows up by observing visitors and making conclusions about the world. And, of course, he is deceived in expectations, being outside the place in which he grew up.
Buy a book7. "Fear", Oleg Postnov
Oleg Postnov is a Novosibirsk linguist who is often referred to as the "Russian Borges". “Fear” is the story of a Moscow teenager who visited relatives near Kiev every summer. In these mystical places, he met first love, experienced the first disappointments and lived an irrational fear of the boundless unknown.
The novel, a memory of love and obsession, is filled with allusions to the works of Gogol and Bulgakov and is designed in the spirit of a gloomy hoax.
Buy a book8. "Queen Lear. Wonderful stories, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya
Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya, the famous playwright, musician and writer, told these wonderful stories in every sense to her growing granddaughter.
The heroines and heroes of Petrushevskaya's fairy tales behave like ordinary, and not at all fabulous teenagers. They learn to obey fate and manipulate others, manage anger and look for the good in bad, see beauty in ugliness, not follow the impulses of the soul, but listen to the voice of the heart. These are stories of growing up in which everyone will see themselves as in a mirror.
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