Roman Senchin

Dozhd v Parizhe

Rain in Paris Novel. AST. Moscow 2018. 411 pages

Foreign rights:

France/ Noir sur Blanc, Macedonia/ Makedonika Litera

Despite national upheavals, economic turmoil and the departure of his own family, Andrei Topkin still does not want to leave his Siberian hometown of Kyzyl. In this hopelessness, he finally books the journey he has dreamed of for a lifetime: Paris. There he thinks he can avoid his misfortune and the impending changes in his life. But it is raining in Paris. And so Andrei hardly comes out of the hotel room, but travels - against his will, but with a lot of alcohol - deep into his own past, to his youth in the nineties, to his first love, yes, at all first times. So far suppressed by the events of everyday life, they rise from the depths to the surface, behind the rainy window of a lonely Parisian hotel room. Internally, however, the sun comes out more often and illuminates the dark spots of that time.

The sincerity and accuracy of the author, the attention to detail create the vivid and truthful image of a forty-year-old man and his life in the Russian province. The hero and the reader with him become gradually clear: Without understanding the past, people have no future.