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Books: Olga Grushin’s “The Line”

A line stretches from a closed kiosk day after day for a year. Place numbers are assigned. Family members take turns waiting, sometimes paying each other for their time. What’s for sale? What could be worth losing your job, your savings, your marriage, your family?

Concert tickets.

Once issued, what will you do with the ticket? Keep it? Give it to someone you love? Sell it?

Based on a line that formed for a 1962 Stravinksy concert in Leningrad, this story focuses on Anna and Sergei, an unhappy middle-age couple; their teenage son, Alex, and Anna’s mother, a one-time ballet star. It’s set in the recent past, when people lived under State rule, unable to leave, with State controls on reading, listening, conversing.

After Sergei talks to a foreigner in a men’s room, he is reported and demoted.

Anna works as a physics teacher and pines for a relationship with Sergei, who ignores her. Initially mocked by colleagues and family for joining the line, Anna’s place in it gives her a new life. Not a happier life, just a different one. Calling in sick too often — to stand in line — she loses her job. Helping out a friend she’s made on line, Anna agrees to man another kiosk, filled sometimes with intoxicating pleasures: chocolates or nylons, perfumes or scarves. The same friend advises Anna on wooing Sergei, with disastrous results.

Meanwhile, Sergei falls in love with Sofia, the young State “widow” who stands beside him in line. His yearning for her is aching, believable and fully realized.

“Sergei saw the hollow palpitating like a pale bruise at the base of her neck, just where a delicate, pearly button of her blouse had come undone, and looked away quickly….(as he) stepped back into the night’s expanding darkness, he witnessed a different, unrecognizable city come into being before him, one that was foreign, perhaps even vaguely dangerous, yet somehow larger than the earlier city, its great obscure stretches sheltering unpredictable, mysterious happenings and emotions. He felt unmoored.”

Less convincing is teen Alex’s downward spiral. His parents are too invested in his education and future to be unaware of his truancy and life of crime.

“The Line” is a slow tale told with skill and grace. The story unspools in quiet but surprising ways. It’s a lovely read. Thanks, Jacquie.

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