A review by emmacatereads
Deathless, by Catherynne M. Valente
5.0
To be honest, I don't remember the first time I read this book. I don't remember the second, or the third. This could be my fourth reread, or my tenth, it doesn't matter. This book ignities the same cold fire in me today as it did the first time I turned the final page.
This book will steal the breath from your lungs and the heart from your body. Even sitting by the fire in my parents’ house, I could feel the freezing wind of Leningrad chill my bones. This is a fairy-tale that feels achingly true, in a way that writers covet all their lives but can never quite capture. Valente pulls directly from the history of the Russian Revolution to hammer out the outline of the story, and fills it up with well-known slavic folktales. But the gleaming lines of silver, gold, and blood that mend the gaps between, like Japanese Kintsugi pottery, are all Cat Valente's own.
No description of the story I try to give will do it justice. Its skeleton describes the life of Marya Morevna, a young girl with one eye tuned to the magic under the skin of the world, who is swept away by the mythical Koschei the Deathless to be his bride. But the soul of this book is much, much more. It is about the cyclical nature of time, death, and stories: how life can be lush and beautiful in one moment and cold and brutal in the next. It is about marriage as romance, as a contract, as a shackle, as all of those things at once. It is about yearning to return to a world that is gone, and the bittersweet agony of the punishing, ever-forward march of progress. "Let it never have happened" pleads Marya. "Let me be young again, and the story just starting.".
But the truth is, as Deathless so gently, so creully reminds us: there is not going back. There is no changing the past, there is no forgiveness, and no resurrection. There is only life in all its madness, beauty, and ugliness. My favorite quote comes from the sly witch Baba Yaga, on the second to last page of the book, which I think captures the essence of the book: “You will live as you live anywhere. With difficulty, and grief....But what does it matter? You still have to go to work in the morning. You still have to live.”
This book will steal the breath from your lungs and the heart from your body. Even sitting by the fire in my parents’ house, I could feel the freezing wind of Leningrad chill my bones. This is a fairy-tale that feels achingly true, in a way that writers covet all their lives but can never quite capture. Valente pulls directly from the history of the Russian Revolution to hammer out the outline of the story, and fills it up with well-known slavic folktales. But the gleaming lines of silver, gold, and blood that mend the gaps between, like Japanese Kintsugi pottery, are all Cat Valente's own.
No description of the story I try to give will do it justice. Its skeleton describes the life of Marya Morevna, a young girl with one eye tuned to the magic under the skin of the world, who is swept away by the mythical Koschei the Deathless to be his bride. But the soul of this book is much, much more. It is about the cyclical nature of time, death, and stories: how life can be lush and beautiful in one moment and cold and brutal in the next. It is about marriage as romance, as a contract, as a shackle, as all of those things at once. It is about yearning to return to a world that is gone, and the bittersweet agony of the punishing, ever-forward march of progress. "Let it never have happened" pleads Marya. "Let me be young again, and the story just starting.".
But the truth is, as Deathless so gently, so creully reminds us: there is not going back. There is no changing the past, there is no forgiveness, and no resurrection. There is only life in all its madness, beauty, and ugliness. My favorite quote comes from the sly witch Baba Yaga, on the second to last page of the book, which I think captures the essence of the book: “You will live as you live anywhere. With difficulty, and grief....But what does it matter? You still have to go to work in the morning. You still have to live.”