Rose

"As a young writer living in Moscow, Oksana Vasyakina attempts to solve the riddle of her aunt's brief and apparently tragic life. Svetlana was the black sheep of a family of hard-working, hard-drinking women in Siberia. Flighty but kind, indolent but exact, she spent her teenage years minding Oksana when she'd much rather have been out partying. Her painful early death from tuberculosis seems entirely preventable-so why did it happen? In lapidary fragments, Oksana pieces together memories of family dinners and forbidden forest excursions, Siberian funeral customs and depictions of tuberculosis from Edvard Munch to Thomas Mann. The result is a portrait of her aunt as a woman whose difficult relationship with her mother, domestic instability, and indifference to her own fate coexist with an almost childlike purity. And the further Vasyakina delves into Svetlana's story, the more aware she becomes of her own inextricable connection to her aunt and the rest of her family, crucial for her understanding of herself and her writing.