Helena Pobjarzhina "Other Notes" Moscow: Alpina non-fiction, 2024

A novel that opens with a quote from Cortázar has the reader right to expect an intellectual challenge, and the challenge becomes apparent fairly quickly: Other Notes can be read either in the order the author suggests or as dictated by the logic and numbering of the chapters. There are 104 of them, and they form a story, but to hear a coherent narrative, one must solve the author's puzzle, the main question of which is how many narrators there are in the novel. Depending on how the reader constructs the chapters, both the voices and the plots change. However, the mental gymnastics in the book are not the main focus, and the action itself gradually fades into the background, leaving the rich emotions to take center stage. Helena Pobyarzhina's heroines (or is it one heroine?) experience feelings of love, dislike, and fear that are understandable to modern people; they go through loss, betrayal, trauma, acceptance, silence, and hysteria, and the sum of the chapters/notes creates not so much a narrative as a harmony.
"You're always getting lost. When you live such a long, monotonous life, you're bound to get lost. You're bound to trip over something trivial."

