From a broken leg to a glorified crutch, Svetlana Boym transforms her medical treatment into a waking dream, casting herself as the Russian Baba Yaga, a witch with a bone leg. Between fiction and reality, the broken bone at the center of this story becomes a metaphor for other breaks. While on bedrest, Svetlana Boym embarks on a ghostly journey across Boston, Budapest, Moscow, New York, Sarajevo, St Petersburg, exploring the worlds fractures. Referring to other writersNicolai Gogol, Viktor Shklovsky and Vladimir NabokovSvetlana Boym wonders over and over in echo: Who am I when I am alone? A rich, colorful, and fascinating novel.
Kristian Feigelson, Professor of Sociology, University Sorbonne Nouvelle, Research Fellow at NYU (Jordan Center)
With wit, tenderness, and intellectual daring, Boym reflects on fractured bodies and fractured worlds. A modern Decameron, the book is crowded with friendsreal neighbors and lovers, and no less real artists and writers, some living, some living on.
Cristina Vatulescu, Director, Center for the Humanities, New York University
This, the last of Svetlanas works, escorts us, via a set of recurring motifs, through a succession of non-linear episodes which traverse etymology, autobiography, fairy tale, detective story, poetry and cryptic observations on her own life and the passing of the old world into the new. Famed for her work on nostalgia, her writing will be read with delight into the far future.
Ron Roberts, Honorary Lecturer in Psychology, Kingston University, London, author of The Off-Modern, Psychology Estranged
