The central character of Dina Rubina's new novel, "Pocherk Leonardo," or "Leonardo's Handwriting," recently published by Moscow's Eksmo, has a special relationship with mirrors. She is also ambidextrous and sees glimpses of the future, not in a ball-gazing way, but quite matter-of-factly. Anna is quite surprised, at least at first, that other people don't have this ability. The reader follows Anna's career as a circus acrobat and later as a stuntwoman.
As usual with Rubina's books, the description of everyday life in a large city outside central Russia in the not very distant past is the novel's strongest element. In several of her books, that place was Tashkent, her native city; in "Leonardo's Handwriting" it is postwar Kiev, with its blend of nationalities, traditions and languages. Some of the characters jump out of the page (fittingly for a book about mirrors) -- Anna's no-nonsense nanny Christina or her friend and math mentor Eleazer.
The chapters dealing with the heroine's international career are less convincing. Montreal does not get close to the vividness of the Kiev chapters. However, circus life, both in the Soviet Union and in Canada's famous Cirque du Soleil, is described in minute detail and is a treat for anyone interested in other people's professional lives. Rubina's research is commendable in other aspects, too: It is evident that she has thoroughly studied the special needs and problems of ambidextrous people. It is quite appalling that the cruel practice of "rightifying" left-handed people, described in the book, is still sometimes encountered in Russia.
The novel's title stems from the unusual method which Leonardo da Vinci, apparently ambidextrous, used for encoding secret messages (the real "da Vinci code"!) that can only be read in a mirror. This, among other things, gives the book a mystical flavor, but it does not degenerate into a wacko supernatural novel. The combination of Anna's gift with realistic details of everyday life remind even the staunchest skeptic of strange things that happen now and then: a prophetic dream, an accurate prediction, a feeling of the presence of recently deceased people. Rubina's masterful novel provides a way of looking into that strange world -- not through a door or a window but through a looking glass.
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