The Aviator

April 1, 2018

Vodolazkin's second novel to be translated into English is stylistically different from its brightly filigreed, 15th century-set predecessor, Laurus, but preserves that novel's sweep and passion for history. Awakening in a Russian hospital, Innokenty Petrovich Platonov initially remembers nothing, then begins recalling events surrounding the Russian Revolution, a girl he loved named Anastasia, and his eventual internment at the infamous labor camp on the Solovetsky Islands. But he's puzzled: his doctor wears a three-piece suit--so un-Soviet--and his pill bottles are dated 1999. It turns out that Platonov was cryogenically frozen and has just been thawed, and as he and his medical team work to introduce him into the modern world, the novel offers the pleasures of a time travel narrative without the usual hokeyness. Points of contrast are as large as politics and as small as talking ("people did not economize on speech before"), and as the writing, never portentous, blows like fine, dry snow across the pages we urgently ask, why was Platonov frozen, and will he adapt? VERDICT Great reading for all audiences.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2018
A prisoner of the Soviet Gulag emerges from cryogenic slumber to find himself stuck between two worlds in this evocative and enigmatic second novel by the author of Laurus (2015). Upon waking, our protagonist is told that his name is Innokenty Petrovich Platonov and that the year is 1999. The details of his predicament and the events of his lost decades are left for him to puzzle through on his own. Seeking out the people and places that bear traces of his former life, Innokenty recovers his memories and finds the love that eluded him 80 years ago. He becomes a celebrity and a public symbol of a new, post-Soviet Russia, even though his political sensibilities are murky and not entirely emancipated from the past. But Innokenty also discovers that his wide-angle view of the twentieth century only magnifies essential questions about identity, intimacy, and death, and both past and present remain for the most part tragically inscrutable. Vodolazkin's emphasis on these big questions and his insistence on the transcendence and the mystery of Innokenty's human soul remind us that despite this book's gentle love story or its murder mystery or its sf flourishes, it is, in many ways, a quintessentially Russian novel, as vivid and probing as they come.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)