Salon

Tatyana Moskvina, journalist, essayist and author of the critically acclaimed novel "Death Is All Men," has written a new novel, "She Knew Something," published last month by St. Petersburg's Amphora publishers. It has grand aspirations, but, unfortunately, doesn't really go anywhere.

The title of the book is reminiscent of a mystery novel by Alexandra Marinina or any one of the countless female writers of crime stories. And at first glance, the story does indeed look like a typical crime novel. Lilia Serebrinskaya, a popular journalist with liberal affiliations (her political colleagues are portrayed as failures and frauds), suddenly commits suicide and leaves an enigmatic note, which propels Anna Karetkina, a young professor of history, onto a quest to unravel the secret of Serebrinskaya's life. In the course of her investigation, Anna discovers a secret commitment binding four women, including the deceased, and has to rethink all she ever knew about life.

The friends of Lilia are: a successful, shrewd and bohemian Moscow actress; a Jewish visionary; and a Russian Orthodox woman living in a tiny provincial town. Each of them is a stereotype rather than a live, flesh-and-blood person; each fulfills a function in Moskvina's narrative, and, having fulfilled it, leaves no discernible trace in the reader's memory.

The author repeats some of the leitmotifs of her previous novel, such as the burning hatred of men. Another recurrent topic is the interest in the bloodlines of characters, especially if they are not pure, ethnic Russians. Thus, the Jewish character, Rosa Shtein, is by far the most intelligent of the women and the only one who easily handles the most sophisticated issues of logic and religion -- but she is made to look alien to the tissue of Moskvina's world, and to her protagonist, Anna, Rosa is both "curious and repugnant."

So, what starts out as a mystery with political overtones (Lilia definitely resembles the assassinated journalist Anna Politkovskaya) becomes another Great Russian Novel about "soil and destiny," to use Boris Pasternak's phrase, with various visions of Russia's past and future, including an idea to install Prince Harry of the Windsor dynasty on the Russian throne. Unfortunately, this plot fails to grab attention, and stylistic excellence is not sufficient to compensate for the flaccid storyline. The best bits are the epigraphs, which come from a broad array of sources, from Goethe to modern St. Petersburg writers. Not a bad book, but entirely forgettable.