Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Natashas
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1984
WEBSITE:
CITY: Paris
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1984, in Ukraine.
EDUCATION:Emerson College, Boston, MA, B.A.; Lecoq School of Physical Theatre, Paris, studied; University Paris VIII, Vincennes in Saint-Denis, Paris, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Playwright and novelist.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Yelena Moskovich is a playwright and novelist living in Paris. She was born in Ukraine in 1984, immigrated to the United States in 1991, then studied at university in Paris, France. She holds a degree in playwriting from Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, and earned a master’s degree in art, philosophy, and aesthetics from University Paris VIII, Vincennes in Saint-Denis. Her plays have been produced in the United States, Vancouver, Paris, and Stockholm.
In 2018, Moskovich published her debut novel, The Natashas, an unconventional story of escape, sexuality, and impulse. In Paris, two characters are struggling with their identity in an unsettling world. Beatrice is a jazz singer coming to terms with her body, which is sexualized by her friends and even her family. She meets, or she imagines, a woman named Polina who seduces her and warns her that she will become a “Natasha,” a woman who leaves her body but the body lives on without her. This is a reference to sex trafficking in which all the women sold are called Natasha. “Moskovich’s prose radiates with heat as she describes the life animating the city from within, a breath that unites us in our humanity, even the most marginalised—those whose identities are subsumed into the categories of their catastrophes,” said Lauren Elkin online at Financial Times.
Meanwhile, Cesar is a gay Mexican actor who is auditioning for the role of Manny, a violent serial killer, for a French television show. He finds himself drawn into the character and falls in love with him. Cesar’s past haunts him as his brothers bullied him for being gay, and a mysterious woman could come back to destroy him. “The story is hard to follow, but the collective effect of Moskovich’s images is strangely captivating. The novel builds to a somewhat unexpected ending,” observed a writer in Kirkus Reviews.
Kirsty Logan noted in the Guardian Online that as English is not Moskovich’s first language, this leads to wonderfully original turns of phrase, saying: “These unusual phrasings are the book’s strongest moments.” Logan added: “Once the book has sat in your mind for a while, clarity begins to emerge. This isn’t everyone’s favourite sort of reading, but Moskovich’s debut offers something different.” Explaining that Moskovich’s too-muchness in her metaphorical story is appropriate for a novel so intense and bewildering, Katharine Coldiron commented online at Masters Review: “I feel that she’s merely dropped a handful of beautiful, grotesque puzzle pieces on the bed. The whole picture will come only, I suspect, in dreams.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2018, review of The Natashas.
ONLINE
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (January 15, 2016), Lauren Elkin, review of The Natashas.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (January 14, 2016), Kirsty Logan, review of The Natashas.
Masters Review, https://mastersreview.com/book-review-natashas-yelena-moskovich/ (June 1, 2018), Katharine Coldiron, review of The Natashas.
Yelena Moskovich was born in 1984 in Ukraine (former USSR) and emigrated to the US with her family in 1991. After graduating with a degree in playwriting from Emerson College, Boston, she moved to Paris to study at the Lecoq School of Physical Theatre, and later for a Masters degree in Art, Philosophy and Aesthetics from Universite Paris 8. Her plays have been produced in the US, Vancouver, Paris, and Stockholm. She lives in Paris. The Natashas is her first novel.
Moskovich, Yelena: THE NATASHAS
Kirkus Reviews. (Jan. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Moskovich, Yelena THE NATASHAS Dzanc (Adult Fiction) $16.95 3, 13 ISBN: 978-1-945814-48-8
A murky, dreamlike collage of corporeal escape and sexual fantasy.
Moskovich's debut novel opens with a mysterious, unexplained room full of "Natashas"--women who've abandoned their own names and whose existences are woven through this discontinuous story of two artists. Moskovich writes of BAaAaAeA@atrice, a shapely jazz singer who lives with her sist and parents, and CAaAaAeA@sar, a Mexican-born actor living in Paris. BAaAaAeA@atri body is sexualized from an early age; her family and friends--even her father--tease her, calling her "Miss Monroe" or "Miss Marilyn." This sexualization is echoed by the insertion of chapters about the Natashas, who also exist as both caricatures and sex objects. While CAaAaAeA@sar is disappearing dangerously deep into the characters he play using the violent back stories he creates for his parts to drive his own courage, BAaAaAeA@atrice is visited by a woman named Polina, who tel her, "There are people who leave their bodies and their bodies go on living without them....These people are named Natasha." Readers looking for a traditional story without gaps will be disappointed, but the mystery surrounding a woman from CAaAaAeA@sar's past and the purpose of t Natashas propels this tale forward. Are the Natashas muses? Prostitutes? An otherworldly entity? Is BAaAaAeA@atrice going to become one of them? A how are they connected to her vocal gift? Moskovich's perspective on language is one of the most interesting parts of this novel. "In Russian, you don't have to go missing," she writes. "It's a single verb. The verb sits next to your name and you're gone." At times, the story is hard to follow, but the collective effect of Moskovich's images is strangely captivating. The novel builds to a somewhat unexpected ending that is, if not satisfying, at least provocative.
Strange and carnal; a riddle of language, the body, and the artistic impul
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Moskovich, Yelena: THE NATASHAS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522643110/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e86e83cb. Accessed 14 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522643110
The Natashas by Yelena Moskovich review – poisonous sex permeates a surreal debut
Reality is hard to pin down in Moskovich’s distinctively written novel, which plays with themes of creation and illusion
Kirsty Logan
Thu 14 Jan 2016 12.00 GMT
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 12.54 GMT
Shares
221
Comments
10
Exploration of identity … Yelena Moskovich
T
he debut novel from Ukraine-born Yelena Moskovich is a surreal and distinctively written exploration of identity that offers no easy answers. Although Moskovich writes in English, it is not her first language, as is immediately clear in her prose style. This can be irritating, but also leads to some wonderfully original turns of phrase: one character paints the stairs “with short, stubby strokes as if painting an elephant’s toenails”; another has “the look of a boy who’s hiding a beetle behind his back”. These unusual phrasings are the book’s strongest moments.
Béatrice is a jazz singer fighting for autonomy over her body and identity in modern Paris; César is a gay Mexican actor grappling with his sexuality while disappearing into a violent, misogynistic acting role. Their narratives are framed by a group of women known as the Natashas – named, presumably, after Victor Malarek’s 2003 non-fiction book about women and girls sex-trafficked from eastern Europe, each one of whom is known as “Natasha”. The Natashas function as a sort of Greek chorus, commenting on the novel’s themes in a concrete, windowless room. Their remarks can be tragically naive, and lead to moments of dark humour: “The head Natasha of the Natashas says, ‘OK girls, who here has ever had a papaya?’ All the Natashas perk up, even the wilting one on the floor. ‘I’ve had … a baby … ,’ the sunflower Natasha says unsteadily.”
Sex permeates the book like poisonous gas. To the characters, it is insidious, confusing and used as a threat. Both Béatrice and César fear their own sexuality. Béatrice’s sexual autonomy was taken from her at a young age, when puberty arrived early and the boys at school nicknamed her “Miss Monroe” (as in Marilyn) – a nickname that, uncomfortably, even her father uses. César was bullied by his brothers for being gay. He explores his sexuality and identity by auditioning for the role of Manny, a serial killer in a TV drama. Like everything in The Natashas, the role of Manny is not what it seems. César is handcuffed to a chair and barraged with questions: at several points, César seems to truly become Manny.
Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books our weekly email
Read more
Béatrice is also obsessed with a character: the mysterious Polina, whom Béatrice seems to have created herself. Appearing suddenly in a clothes shop, Polina entices Béatrice into buying a skimpy black lace dress, and later seduces her and then disappears. This theme of creation and illusion suffuses the novel: everything is imagined, nothing is real. The Natashas are not really called Natasha. Polina and Manny are fictional characters within the narrative, but they impose their will more strongly than the “real” characters of Béatrice and César.
At several points I had to reread sections, scrabbling for traditional coherence. If you are expecting the story to be in any way tied up at the end, you will be disappointed. Think of it, instead, as taking a train journey through the surreal: allow the images to scroll past, pause at the unsettling turns of phrase. If you are a fan of David Lynch or Haruki Murakami, this sort of joyful acceptance of the bizarre will come easily.
Advertisement
Once the book has sat in your mind for a while, clarity begins to emerge. This isn’t everyone’s favourite sort of reading, but Moskovich’s debut offers something different, and sometimes we all need that.
• Kirsty Logan’s The Gracekeepers is published by Harvill Secker. To order The Natashas for £9.59 (RRP £11.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
‘The Natashas’, by Yelena Moskovich
The author’s unsettling depiction of the global sex trade owes a lot to the conventions of physical theatre
© Miguel Rio Branco/Magnum Photos
Share on Twitter (opens new window)
Share on Facebook (opens new window)
Share on LinkedIn (opens new window)
Save
Save to myFT
Review by Lauren Elkin
January 15, 2016
Print this page
0
That its title is an allusion to the global sex trade becomes clear only about a quarter of the way through Yelena Moskovich’s debut novel. “A woman from Eastern Europe can be sold for 800 US Dollars to, say, Amsterdam or Prague or Istanbul,” one of the characters explains. “Whether she’s Bulgarian or Ukrainian or Latvian, to the customers, she’s Russian. Whether she is Pavla or Olena or Salomeya, to the customers, her name is Natasha. Once the money is exchanged and her passport taken from her, it is then that she leaves her body.”This charged subject is given a surreal, even theatrical treatment in Moskovich’s brave, original work. We open on a room full of girls each called Natasha, who are spread out in the space as if in a black-box theatre. Their relationship to each other is indeterminate. One blows on her nails, one blows smoke at the wall; one declares she’s a sunflower, another pushes her over. Who they are, how they’ve come to be there, who keeps them there, is explained over the course of the novel in a way that is equal parts perplexing and satisfying.Written in a Cubist jumble of voices, languages, and textures, The Natashas reads as if one were spinning a radio dial of the world, as Moskovich’s fragmented narrative moves between the room with the Natashas, and the lives of a Parisian jazz singer called Béatrice and a Mexican actor called César. Béatrice and César weave around each other on the streets of Paris, searching for love and artistic fulfilment, and as they do the story casually ignores all sorts of realist conventions.Time slips its bounds, and things that happened decades ago happen at the same time as the present-day events of the story. People appear and disappear; dresses have inner lives; dead women visit the living to tell the stories of their murders, then turn into other dead women, then send emails. Living women split off from their bodies, which appear to be present, visible onstage, while they themselves slink offstage. The novel eschews anything like a plot, preferring to delineate, almost tenderly, the various people on whom its gaze falls, who are in the midst of experiencing various types of human cruelty. Moskovich seems interested not only in the way sex slaves dissociate from their bodies, but also in the way we all do. The Natashas urges the reader to sink back in, connect, breathe.Moskovich’s training at the Jacques Lecoq School of Physical Theatre in Paris is apparent throughout the novel. Lecoq students throw themselves around rooms, training in clowning, acrobatics, stage fighting. They don blank masks, and have to express emotion through their bodies, instead of their faces, or they have to wear one mask and then play against it. The body is poetic, Lecoq argued in a manifesto; “gestures replace words”.In a novel, nothing can replace words; they’re all you have, graphic and photo novels aside. And yet The Natashas is intensely preoccupied with the experience of bodily being; the very language takes on a contorted physicality, in its rhythms, its shapes, its repeated allusions to the breath common to us all: “The marble twilight of the sky faded into a blue-grey of early evening. Lights in the windows. Voices in the buildings. This street was inhabited. The city was alive.“From far off, in the horizon, a black dot continued to breathe. It breathed with the breath of the people in the city of Paris, and the people of other cities too. It breathed with the breath of a girl far away, stepping into a car one leg at a time. And the breath of the actor on the TV screen. And the breath of the singer in the spotlight. And the breath of those who breathe and breathe and still can’t remember who they are.”Moskovich’s prose radiates with heat as she describes the life animating the city from within, a breath that unites us in our humanity, even the most marginalised — those whose identities are subsumed into the categories of their catastrophes: hostages, refugees, slaves. In The Natashas, Moskovich locates that delicate point of equilibrium between aesthetics and outrage.The Natashas, by Yelena Moskovich, Serpent’s Tail, RRP£11.99, 240 pages
Book Review: The Natashas by Yelena Moskovich
What story is told by The Natashas, Yelena Moskovich’s rich, bizarre, spellbinding first novel? In short: a young woman grows up, becomes beautiful, and is harassed by nearly every male person she encounters; finally, something terrible happens to her. At the same time, a young man grows up, moves away from home, tries to become an actor, and possibly loses his mind due to the stress of various symbolic masks he must wear. But neither story is resolved. We don’t know exactly what happens to the young woman, Béatrice, and we don’t know whether the young man, César, gets the TV role he wants or becomes the killer toward which his delusions push him. Between these two characters are degrees of connection and notes of resonance, but no specific similarities. And then there is a mysterious woman, Polina, who appears and disappears without explanation; the “box-shaped room” full of girl-women named Natasha; and the many ghosts and dreams drifting through Paris. All these elements float, loosely tethered, to the scaffolding of this object called a novel. This might sound vague, and confusing, but that is exactly how it feels to read The Natashas—and what a glorious, shivery feeling it is.
Any graduate student can tell you that the term “novel” includes far more objects than it excludes. Even with that in mind, The Natashas is an unusual specimen. It maintains high quotients of confusion and surrealism, but it’s also funny and emphatic. It has a phenomenal focus on language, but not to the exclusion of characterization. Normally, as a critic, I seek to write about the literary structures that a book either obeys or subverts: binary oppositions, standard conflicts, placement and replacement, the hero’s journey. But I am quite at a loss to write about these structures when considering The Natashas.
Béatrice and César are set up as opposites in a handful of ways; César narrates his desires as a gay man but has almost no experience, while Béatrice has a lesbian experience but offers almost no narration on her sexuality. Béatrice is a singer and César is an actor, but for César, performing is an ambition, and for Béatrice, it’s an afterthought. However, to say these characters are wrestling each other in a binary opposition would be incorrect. They are just two characters, living in Paris, coerced and seduced by situations bigger than they are. The book might be an elegant, interlocking puzzle, since the characters and themes do collide with grace near the end. But the sense of the novel is atonal, untamed, and how can a piece of literature be both well-organized and untamed?
The lack of these familiar literary structures renders The Natashas completely unpredictable, and potentially indecipherable. It’s a surreal novel, laden with beautiful language, dream logic in place of rational scene-building, and supernatural flourishes. In the following scene, Béatrice is called down to her garden by a voice that is first on a cell phone and then comes from the air. The voice knows what she is wearing, yet Béatrice, from her window, sees no one in the garden.
Béatrice turned her head, peering carefully through the dark for Polina, but everything was as quiet as a pencil drawing.
She was not sure how long she had been standing there, waiting for Polina to come. A wind blew through the garden and Béatrice crossed her arms beneath her breasts and squeezed in, warming herself. Her breasts rose beneath her forearms as bathwater rises when a foot steps in.
A foot stepped in. Polina’s.
Polina’s hair was spread over her shoulders and looked almost as dark as her eyebrows now against the beige trench coat. Her lips had a joke playing across them.
“Well, do you see me now?” Polina said.
For some readers, the book might seem to lack focus or even sense, but I found it fresh, enticing, like nothing I’ve ever read before. In considering artists to compare to Moskovich, I thought of some of the same names listed on the back matter—Angela Carter, David Lynch, Cindy Sherman—but I thought of others, too. Elena Ferrante, for the unapologetic tone Moskovich conjures and the heartless behavior of young girls she depicts. Roberto Bolaño, for the frank ugliness of murder and misogyny into which the novel dives. Kate Durbin, for a precise, biting account of how it feels to inhabit modern femininity. If you tossed all these artists in a blender, you might approximate The Natashas. But Moskovich’s voice is really her own, even in a simple scene between Béatrice and her parents.
“Don’t you want to stay for breakfast?” the father said. “I got you a chausson aux pommes.”
Béatrice thought about his question. It felt like a room full of empty shoes. Her father waited. Words formed in her head, then melted like ice into puddles on the floor of that room. There was one shoe floating across a puddle on its sole. She remembered what it was she could say.
“No,” she told her father.
“All right,” the father said and backed up. “You want me to take you into town and drop you off?”
Béatrice paused. She held the feeling of the floating, solitary shoe. It reminded her of the word at her disposal.
“No,” Béatrice said firmly.
If this book has a failing (beyond the surreal and enigmatic qualities that make it simply not everyone’s cup of tea), it’s the sense of overload that accompanies it. Similes fly thick and fast, and though they are often wonderfully new, there are so many that the prose starts to seem heavy, even amateurish. Metaphor must attach even to hair and musical notes:
A breeze from the open window blew a strand of her blonde hair loose. It swept across her cheek, as thin as an ant’s antenna. She swept the strand back, then sat down on the piano seat and placed both hands on the keys. Her finger mindlessly pressed down on a note and a sound ran out like a mouse. She ran her finger a bit further down and pressed a B flat. A fatter mouse scrambled out.
Still, this too-muchness is appropriate for a novel so intense and bewildering. I’ve been writing about the book for hundreds of words and I fear I haven’t offered much concrete information about it, beyond explaining what a profound pleasure it is to read. This means, I think, that I’ve written something in the spirit of Moskovich’s own project. I will not stop thinking about The Natashas after I finish this review, after I prod your clicking finger to Amazon or IndieBound or wherever to get a copy delivered to your door (or so I hope). And I have the sense, from reading it, that these characters’ stories aren’t over, either. Whether Moskovich pulled this artifact from the ether between this world and the one where dreams come from, or whether she wrote it as most novelists do, typing uneventfully at a keyboard, I feel that she’s merely dropped a handful of beautiful, grotesque puzzle pieces on the bed. The whole picture will come only, I suspect, in dreams.
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Publication date: March 13, 2018
Reviewed by Katharine Coldiron
The Natashas: A first novel by Yelena Moskovich
Browser review
Lorraine Courtney
Sat, Aug 6, 2016, 05:13
First published:
Sat, Aug 6, 2016, 05:13
Buy Now
Book Title:
The Natashas
ISBN-13:
978-1781254585
Author:
Yelena Moskovich
Publisher:
Serpent’s Tail
Guideline Price:
£11.99
That its title is an allusion to the global sex trade becomes clear only about a quarter of the way through Yelena Moskovich’s debut novel. “A woman from Eastern Europe can be sold for 800 US dollars to, say, Amsterdam or Prague or Istanbul,” explains one of the characters. Brief chapters introduce seemingly unrelated characters. We meet Beatrice, an enigmatic jazz singer so beautiful that her family nickname is Miss Monroe and men drool at her in the streets of Paris. Cesar is an aspiring actor who left his native Mexico to escape the homophobic taunts of his brothers and is hoping to land a part in a telenovela. There’s also Polina, who seems to materialise out of Beatrice’s reflection in the mirror; Sabine, a cruel blonde in a wheelchair who connects Beatrice to Cesar; and all the Natashas, or sex-trafficked women trapped in a “box-shaped windowless room”. This is a surreal, unknowable novel, reminiscent of a David Lynch film. Written in a Cubist jumble of voices, languages and textures, the pleasure’s not so much in the story but in how it is told.