As
individuals we are small in the great pattern of things and tend to
comprehend great events by making them personal. We remember where we were,
what we were doing on 9/ll. Some of us remember where we were, what we were
doing, when Jack Kennedy was assassinated.
The recent Winter
Olympics in Moscow with its elegant closing ceremony and, in tragic parallel, the
violent conflict in the ex-Soviet city of Kiev brought to my mind a visit I
made to Moscow in 1991 just
after the Yeltsin coup which saw the Soviet Empire
cracking at its centre. The city was buzzing with tales of recent events. On
weird one was of the wife of the American ambassador distributing pizza to the
people on the barricades.
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| Moscow 1991 Coup |
I
experienced this post-coup buzz from the centre of the privileges
press/diplomatic community in Moscow. As a child of the cold war I realised I
was being offered an historic insight and I should make note of it. In three
weeks I accumulated six notebooks full of sketches and notes, recording what I
heard and what I saw.
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Of course there have been – and continue
to be - many historical analyses of the politics and processes of the 1991
events. As I said we as individuals are small in the face of great events and and remember them
at a personal level. As I writer, my reaction to these personal events was in
my six notebooks
As a novelist – some years on – I used my notebooks as the basis of a novel about a middle aged woman visiting Moscow just after the Yeltsin Coup. I have called the novel Journey To Moscow – The Adventures of Olivia Ozanne.
Coincidentally just yesterday I
received the first box of the paperback of this novel, which is also now
And as I
turn the beautifully fresh pages those crucial days come back, mint fresh, when
I as a small individual experienced what was a world event.
The novel is fiction of course but I hope, because of the personal impact of my experience, that it has real truth at its core.
The Novel? Well this is a first reader’s take on it:
The Adventures of Olivia Ozanne First Reader Review: -
Through Olivia’s eyes we see into the heart
of this city and its people. We peer inside their tiny flats into their
constricted interior lives, where we meet the mysterious Aunties whose
surprising histories, stretching back to the revolution, are slowly uncovered
by Olivia.
This is a richly painted canvas of an iconic
city, in many ways relevant to our understanding of the Russia of today. It is
a story about a woman in search of a new self and it’s hard not to fall in love
with Olivia with her enormous appetite for life or for that matter her lover
Volodya whom she meets at the flower stall.'
I'm hoping you like it too. If you read it and like it - and have a minute - would you be so kind as to write a short comment on Olivia's Amazon page ... w
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| On Kindle and in Paperback |
