It is a long book recounting the story of a man's life over several decades. The main character, the composer Matvei Kamlayev, is a rather unusual hero. He writes music of a very avant-garde and daring kind. He is a darling of the Western festivals and has an ear for flashy publicity stunts. One of his pieces is titled "An Opus for Four Helicopters and a String Orchestra," and he talks of hearing divine music in the fall of the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
The story is set in the present, with numerous flashbacks dating back to the 1960s. The dates don't completely add up, and the author confesses this right away. He needed to place the hero's childhood in the '60s, he writes, but didn't want him to be much older than 50.
Another unusual feature of the novel is the prominence of sex scenes. Even though current trashy literature swarms with them (and they are invariably appallingly written), mainstream literature has steered away from them ?€“ from fear of resembling pulp fiction, I guess. Samsonov is not afraid of this comparison, and in many instances he seems to soar above it.
Most unusually of all, Samsonov devotes long pages of the book to the music itself. He describes both its texture and the process of its creation in such minute detail that the reader is almost forced physically to hear it. Not surprisingly, some critics have hailed Samsonov as the Russian Thomas Mann and see his novel as a tribute to "Doctor Faustus."
Samsonov is a graduate of the Literary Institute, a strange institution which supposedly teaches young people creative writing. He works as a copywriter for a publisher.
Afisha magazine's critic Lev Danilkin, one of the few journalists who managed to wrench an interview from the reclusive Samsonov, was exasperated with his laconic answers about his latest novel. "I don't understand music," the writer said, "I don't have an ear for that."
That may be so, but he faked it very convincingly. And he certainly has an ear for words. "Kamlayev's Anomaly" may herald a new generation of Russian writers who are not jaded by postmodern cynicism and are not afraid to speak of the basic things that make up life -- love, sex, music, art -- without irony or embarrassment.
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