The final book in Oksana Vasyakina’s acclaimed autofiction trilogy that began with Wound and Steppe, Rose tells the story of her family’s lineage, and the specific intimacy, pain, and resilience that define womanhood in a patriarchal world
As a young writer living in Moscow, Oksana Vasyakina attempts to solve the riddle of her aunt’s brief and apparently tragic life. Svetlana was the black sheep of a family of hard-working, hard-drinking women in Siberia. Flighty but kind, indolent but exact, she spent her teenage years minding Oksana when she’d much rather have been out partying. Her painful early death from tuberculosis seems entirely preventable—so why did it happen?
In lapidary fragments, Oksana pieces together memories of family dinners and forbidden forest excursions, Siberian funeral customs and depictions of tuberculosis from Edvard Munch to Thomas Mann. The result is a portrait of her aunt as a woman whose difficult relationship with her mother, domestic instability, and indifference to her own fate coexist with an almost childlike purity. And the further Vasyakina delves into Svetlana’s story, the more aware she becomes of her own inextricable connection to her aunt and the rest of her family, crucial for her understanding of herself and her writing.
The powerful conclusion of Oksana Vasyakina’s acclaimed trilogy (after Wound and Steppe), Rose returns to the definitive relationships of our lives, echoing down the days as grief, lust, and melancholy. Heralded as a visionary among her generation of Russophone writers, Vasyakina offers an earnest and lyrical account of what happens when one loses everything—a family, a country—and what it takes to survive in darkness.
