Maria Galina
| Avtokhtones | Autochthones Novel. Eksmo. Moscow 2015. 272 pages |
| Foreign rights: | France/ Agullo |
Galina set a triptych of novels in Ukraine: Little Boondock takes place in Odessa; Mole Cricets is set in the Odessa region, near Snake Island, where legend says Achilles was buried; and Lviv is the stage for Autochthons, an unusual detective novel. The three books play on fantasy, myth, geography, and history, creating characters and situations that nimbly combine coziness with unease.
In the 2010s a mysterious art critic comes from St. Petersburg to a certain European city with a complex history (Lvov is implied). He is interested in the one and only performance of the opera “Death of Petronius” by an avangarde theatre group. The premiere took place in the city in the 1920ies and became the fate of directors and performers. A single performance, as it turned out, launched a chain of strange events that the protagonist has to unravel. The protagonist is especially interested in the mysterious figure of the director - a certain Vertigo and the person hiding under this pseudonym (the prototype of Vertigo is the famous Ukrainian writer and literary critic Domontovich). Gradually, under the tourist gloss, the true face of the city is revealed to the protagonist, and completely different features appear under the mask of the art critic himself. The art critic, whose aims are anything but scientific, as it turns out in the end, finds himself at odds with the interests of the local tourism industry, who have not selflessly invented the city‘s fake simulacra. But these simulacra suddenly begin to take on a life of their own.
A novel about the search for one‘s own identity and „historical truth“, and whether both exist. A novel not only in the style of magic realism but twisting and blending detective and fantasy genres with local myth. Werewolves and ghoul bikers are taken here as if from Gothic prose, and the “eternal Jews”, undines and languid opera primas with a fatal secret in their chests are borrowed from the romantics.
