Forty rooms

Resource Information

The work Forty rooms represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Vancouver Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Audio, Nonmusical, Sounds, Music.

Label

Forty rooms

Statement of responsibility

by Olga Grushin

Creator

• Grushin, Olga, 1971-

Contributor

• Lewis, Christa

Author

• Grushin, Olga, 1971-

Narrator

• Lewis, Christa

Subject

• Russian Americans -- Fiction
• Psychological fiction
• College students -- Fiction
• Moscow (Russia) -- Fiction
• Ambition in women -- Fiction
• United States -- Fiction
• Intellectual life -- Fiction
• Self-realization in women -- Fiction
• Domestic fiction
• Women poets -- Fiction
• Interpersonal attraction -- Fiction

Genre

• Fiction
• Domestic fiction
• Psychological fiction

Language

eng

Summary

"Forty rooms" is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family's Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life and is protective of her, and they eventually drift into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts-- until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her. Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocative novel

Cataloging source

BLACP

Dewey number

813/.6

Form of composition

not applicable

Format of music

not applicable

LC call number

PS3607.R85

LC item number

F67 2016ab

Literary text for sound recordings

fiction

Music parts

not applicable

PerformerNote

Read by Christa Lewis

Target audience

general

Transposition and arrangement

not applicable