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    Vita Nostra: A Novel
    Vita Nostra: A Novel
    Vita Nostra: A Novel
    Audiobook18 hours

    Vita Nostra: A Novel

    Written by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko

    Narrated by Jessica Ball

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The definitive English language translation of the internationally bestselling Russian novel—a brilliant dark fantasy with ""the potential to be a modern classic"" (Lev Grossman), combining psychological suspense, enchantment, and terror that makes us consider human existence in a fresh and provocative way.

    Our life is brief . . .

    While vacationing at the beach with her mother, Sasha Samokhina meets the mysterious Farit Kozhennikov under the most peculiar circumstances. The teenage girl is powerless to refuse when this strange and unusual man with an air of the sinister directs her to perform a task with potentially scandalous consequences. He rewards her effort with a strange golden coin.

    As the days progress, Sasha carries out other acts for which she receives more coins from Kozhennikov. As summer ends, her domineering mentor directs her to move to a remote village and use her gold to enter the Institute of Special Technologies. Though she does not want to go to this unknown town or school, she also feels it’s the only place she should be. Against her mother’s wishes, Sasha leaves behind all that is familiar and begins her education.

    As she quickly discovers, the institute’s ""special technologies"" are unlike anything she has ever encountered. The books are impossible to read, the lessons obscure to the point of maddening, and the work refuses memorization. Using terror and coercion to keep the students in line, the school does not punish them for their transgressions and failures; instead, their families pay a terrible price. Yet despite her fear, Sasha undergoes changes that defy the dictates of matter and time; experiences which are nothing she has ever dreamed of . . . and suddenly all she could ever want.

    A complex blend of adventure, magic, science, and philosophy that probes the mysteries of existence, filtered through a distinct Russian sensibility, this astonishing work of speculative fiction—brilliantly translated by Julia Meitov Hersey—is reminiscent of modern classics such as Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Max Barry’s Lexicon, and Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, but will transport them to a place far beyond those fantastical worlds.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateNov 13, 2018
    ISBN9780062876348
    Author

    Marina & Sergey Dyachenko

    Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, a former actress and a former psychiatrist, are co-authors of over thirty novels and numerous short stories and screenplays. They were born in Ukraine, lived in Russia, and eventually settled in California. Their books have been translated into several foreign languages and awarded multiple literary and film prizes. Marina and Sergey are recipients of the Award for Best Authors (Eurocon 2005) and of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Rosetta Awards (2021). Julia Meitov Hersey originally began her translation of Vita Nostra because she wanted her family to share her love for this striking example of urban psychological science fiction and fantasy genre with its literary allusions and ominous atmosphere. Born in Moscow, Julia moved to the U.S. at the age of nineteen and has been straddling the two cultures ever since. Julia is the winner of the 2021 Science Fiction and Fantasy Rosetta Awards for best translated work (long form). Currently, she is working on translating other Dyachenko novels into English.

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    Reviews for Vita Nostra

    4/5

    265 ratings21 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I don’t know what that was. I didn’t hate it but what was the point of it?

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Absolutely scrambled my brains in the best way. I find all the comparisons to Harry Potter weird imho, but I vibed with this extremely.
    • 1/5
      The end is a complete let down. All the build up for that!
    • 2/5
      You should take a shot every time you hear Sasha
    • 5/5
      Hands down the best book I’ve ever read. Read this one.
    • 5/5
      Immediate thoughts after reading. Enjoyed this incredible story of magical self discovery.
    • 5/5
      Delightful but dark. Hope they translate the rest of the series! Narrator was superb!
    • 2/5
      I struggled to finish this book. It was like grasping sand, the content shifting and falling and defying definition or shape. The sensation of trying anyway was fun, and I love when books treat the reader as smart enough to deal with complexities. Unfortunately, the plot itself was awful. The book was filled with abusive behavior, stilted relationships, and circular events. I didn't care at all about any of the characters, and paper-thin personalities couldn't support a suspension of disbelief. (I also hated a lot about The Magicians and the fact that Lev Grossman endorsed it should have warned me this would be full of terribleness.)
    • 5/5
      Interesting and compelling. Many times I wondered at the genius of the authors.
    • 2/5
      Sasha is a 16-year-old who’s approached by a strange man while she’s on vacation with her mom. The man stalks her around until she relents and starts performing strange, pointless tasks he gives her. Once he deems the tasks finished, he tells her that she has been accepted into a special school, and she doesn’t really get a say in whether she goes or not. This is the carrying theme throughout the book. Strange men tell her what to do, she does it against her will because they know better, fearing constantly for the safety of her family, and getting more and more sucked into the weirdness that is being taught at the school.

      I think the premise here is interesting, and the concepts the book introduces by the end are very original and inventive. I also think this book is the best representation of “dark academia” I’ve actually read. This is not a murder mystery of entitled assholes attending university. This is, in fact, dark academia.

      I find it a little difficult to rate this book. I didn’t really enjoy the reading experience, nor the writing style, but I did appreciate what the book was trying to do. In the end my biggest issue was that this felt a lot like listening to someone tell you a very intricate and convoluted dream they had. You can marvel at the creativity of their subconscious, but in the end nothing about it is really all that relevant to you, specifically.
    • 4/5
      Sixteen-year-old Sasha is enjoying a pleasant beach holiday with her mother, when she becomes aware that a strange, unsettling man is watching her. The man coerces her in an impossible-seeming fashion into performing certain odd, seemingly meaningless, mildly transgressive actions, with bizarre results. Then he tells her she's been accepted to a college she's never heard of, much less applied to. And she will be attending. Or else. Even once she gets there, though, it's not at all clear exactly what she's studying. But it seems to be doing something worrying to the students...It's tempting to think of this as a sort of weird, dark mirror of the Harry Potter books. The obvious comparison here is with that other dark school-for-magic story, Lev Grossman's The Magicians, and, indeed, there's a blurb from Grossman on the cover. But I have to say, I liked this a lot more than The Magicians. (Or at least the first book. The rest of the trilogy did grow on me.) And the general vibe of the two is very, very different. Whereas The Magicians feels as if it sort of sucks everything magical out of magic, this one feels positively permeated with a deep, profound feeling of something mystical and extraordinary -- despite the fact that the students mostly aren't doing things that we might conventionally think of as magic, and words like "magic" are never used.Exactly what the students are doing is hard to say. I do think that, if I'd read this in a worse, less patient mood, I might have found myself annoyed and frustrated by how opaque so much of this is, how little is explained, and how much of what we are told or shown is expressed in ways that are abstract or oblique or perhaps even flat-out nonsensical. But I'm very, very glad I did read it in the right mood, one that allowed me to fully appreciate the way in which the authors are approaching something that is literally impossible: giving us a glimpse into the process of learning something so deeply alien that it simply cannot be understood by human beings... and a viewpoint character who must herself become something non-human and incomprehensible if she is going to master it. It's audacious and fascinating and more than a little disturbing, and it worked for me much, much better than I might have expected it could.I should note that this was translated from Russian, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of some of the translation choices. There were definitely a lot of moments where I felt like the translator must have been struggling to find an English word to express whatever was in the original, and ended up landing on one that felt a little off, or inappropriately obscure or something. In another novel, maybe that would have bothered me more, but in this one perceiving it all through an obvious extra layer of translation maybe just enhances the overall feel of strangeness and provokes some actually appropriate thoughts about the ways in which the words available to us do or don't fully capture meaning. Anyway, despite all that, I found the novel very readable and fully capable of evoking the intended emotional reactions, so I think we can say the translator was doing the really important stuff right.
    • 4/5
      Great writing. Very bizzare fantasy. Moving ending.
    • 5/5
      Where to begin? I have not read anything like Vita Nostra, ever. The story is like an aged oak tree, branching in so many surprising directions, and yet observed as one forms the sensible whole.
    • 4/5
      “To live is to be vulnerable”

      I'm so incredibly mind fucked right now I don’t even know where to start…. This review is probably going to be a bit messy. Like my mind.

      This was probably the weirdest book I’ve ever read. Let’s start there. The way “magic” works here is so unique, it’s not even magic, it’s kind of a science of life? I still haven’t quite figured it out, I’m confused but in a very good way. Our protagonist, Sasha, had to work hard for her powers and I loved watching her do it. It did not come easy to her, she cried and she went through all sorts of emotions to become what she needed to be. The Sasha at the beginning of the book is a completely different person compared to the Sasha at the end of it. Obviously, I mean three years pass throughout this. You get to watch this confused girl grow into a flawed but bright young woman.

      This freaking school was brutal. They forced these kids to come and study a bunch of weird crap and if they didn’t then bad stuff happened. My first impression, naturally, was that this was a cult of sorts. That these kids were getting brainwashed. I was creeped but fascinated.

      It was quite refreshing to not have romance be the focus of the book. Vita Nostra wasn’t really character driven but it also wasn’t plot driven, it was somewhere in between… Concept driven? Is that a thing?

      The writing built these fascinating images in my head and it slightly reminded me of the way Laini Taylor’s works made me feel. I’m not saying you’ll like this if you like her stuff but try it out if you do.

      As for the audiobook, which I listened to as I read, it was quite lovely. I would definitely recommend it. Without it, I would probably be a lot more confused. The narrators' voice was relaxing. She did, however, mess up most of the Russian names but it’s fine.,. I’m used to it lol
    • 3/5
      This sinister exercise in magical realism begins well enough, so you want to keep flipping the pages to see what the authors really have in mind. In the end though, the fate of the female protagonist leaves one scratching your head, making you wonder just what the hell is going on. Apparently, if one goes by an explanation offered at "Good Reads, successfully completing one's program of study at the school where most of the events happen means becoming an angel of the lord and the key to unlocking a new world; really!? I need to mull over this some more to decide whether the problem is me, or whether the authors aren't quite as clever as they think they are. Your enthusiasm for the more symbolist flavors of Russian literature will probably condition your reception of this novel. As a light spoiler I might note that the original Russian book cover art can be taken quite literally, besides being a glorious exercise in kitsch.
    • 5/5
      A little odd, but a very engaging story, all in all. It has a thread of, well, supernatural. And I think this was supposed to be thought provoking and have some "meaning" in the nature of the world, or people, or whatever. I don't read "meaning" in stories so probably missed the point. Of course, this did not take away my enjoyment of the story - if you accept it has a supernatural component, you can just go with the flow. You might even care about how the main character's life turns out...The narration is very good. There is no gore or swearing or sex. Over all worth the credit.
    • 3/5
      This review has been so hard to write. I'm not entirely sure if it will make sense to someone who hasn't read the book. I am making an attempt anyway.At it's heart Vita Nostra is a story about that period of time of the early transition to adulthood, that 17-20ish age range, and just how terrifying that time truly is. All while being wrapped in a speculative fiction story about metaphysics. Never before have I felt a book's description has left me unprepared for what I was about to read. Yes, Sasha is chosen to attend a special school after completing some bizarre tasks for a mysterious stranger. And yes, that school could be considered magical if looked at a certain way. A Slavic Harry Potter this is not. I have been told a closer comparison is The Magicians though I have not read those books so couldn't say for sure. Vita Nostra is easily one of the strangest reads I've experienced in a long time. The plot is deceptively simple. It doesn't follow standard story writing at all. There is no antagonist, no conflict as such, characters are semi-cardboard, there is a heavy undercurrent of fear and terror throughout. In any other book this would have seriously bothered me and yet here it is fascinating, engaging and makes for an almost compulsive read. Even with a slow pace I kept finding myself turning pages long after I should've turned out my light each night. It is a deeply philosophical read, heavy on the existentialism, and utterly brilliant.For most of the book we are just as confused and in the dark about what's going on as Sasha is and we discover it right along with her. Once enlightenment is achieved, things get really weird! Metamorphosis is necessary. The ending is deliberately left open to interpretation.I could see this as a love it or hate it book depending on how much you enjoy a Kafkaesque style. It also appears to be the start of a series. Based on Google translate of the summaries of the other books, the rest of the series seems to be completely unrelated and are not yet translated to English. This reads well enough as a stand alone.So why three stars? I rate books on the enjoyment of my reading experience. Given the current state of the world and the underlying terror inherent in Sasha's story the book tended to trigger the generalized anxiety I have at the moment. I think I'd like to reread this again in a couple years and see how I do.
    • 4/5
      I'm not the first person to compare this to Harry Potter in the sense that it follows someone chosen to attend a school for magic over the course of their study. It does however put the "contrast" into "compare and contrast", in the sense that neither the protagonist nor any other student wants to be there; they've in fact been strongly coerced to be there; if they refuse or fail in their studies Bad Things happen to their loved ones; and their studies are not only nonsensical but once they start making sense of them in the desperate course of not failing, bad things happen to their brains and eventually bodies.It's a compulsively horrifying read.[spoiler?] I'm also not the first person to say "WTF" about the ending. I'm not allergic to religious allegory in my fiction by any means - but this was in no way a religious novel until the last five lines. Until those last five lines the ending was actually reasonable, if slightly abrupt and obscure (but you'd expect obscurity at least from where the plot's taken us, and for the same reason we can't really expect much of a post-climactic ease-down) so I'm just going to headcanon that those lines are there purely as literary reference for the sense of what she's doing, rather than a literal explanation that would be a complete and utter curveball. [/spoiler]
    • 5/5
      4.75 - 5.0

      First off, let me start off by saying that If you are reading this because it has been marketed to you as Harry Potter for Adults, and you are hoping to find an adult fantasy world brimming with magic, then you may want to pick up "The Magicians." There is a school, there are professors, there is something beyond the scope of our physical reality going on...and that is about all that this book and HP have in common.

      This book defies genre. It is esoteric in nature, it has philosophical leanings, and it is like nothing I have ever read before. The students in this school aren't getting up to hi-jinx trying to learn magic. They are undergoing a grueling transformation from human form to one more conceptual. That is about as much as I can say without spoiling it. What I can say is I ingested this book in just 3 days and that was because I have a job and responsibilities which made me have to FORCE myself to put it down. This is definitely a new favorite. Now...


      ***Spoiler-y bits***

      I loved the very idea of humans transcending their shell and shaking their humanity to become hypertext as grammatical and graphical concepts. Words in action or explanation, creating and modifying reality in an almost Godlike way. The author did an amazing job building these characters. I felt the pressure and the relief Sasha felt as she tried desperate to unfold the layers of reality and ultimately shake their human form. I felt her struggle of fighting her fear and trying to contain her desire to be. I loved the entire process of the students struggle in becoming nouns, pronouns, verbs and adjectives. Becoming action in being, and literal creation. I don't know how to describe this other than the philosophy behind linguistics being actualized. Still, I don't know if I have used the correct "words" to summarize it. I guess I can use something familiar to most. The Creation Story from the Christian Religion. God speaking things into place. God saying to Moses, "I am the Great I am."
    • 5/5
      An intriguing read.Quite different from run of the mill magic schools.Really scary as well.Sasha is a young girl just about to get out of school who gets approached by a dark and mysterious man threatening her with dire consequences if she doesn't do certain things.She then has to join a school which trains her in a completely different way using fear as a primary motivator. Eventually the incomprehensible becomes comprehensible. The consequences of which are dire.Then a metamorphosis happens.This book is very smart and ideally you would read it slowly to get a grasp on what is happening but the character arc is so interesting that I ended up going really really fast. I will probably have to reread this to grasp it fully.
    • 4/5
      The sleeve says it's this book is like a more sinister, more dark Harry Potter story. Well... it's partly true but the only similarity is the basic plot. A young girl became the student of a mysterious university. The lectures have no sense, the teachers are sometimes rude and harsh, but... there's something magical about it. Interesting book with a little predictable ending.