Lead Review

  • Book: The House with the Stained-Glass Window
  • Location: Lviv
  • Author: Zanna Sloniowska

Review Author: tripfiction

Location

Content

In Lviv, four generations of women inhabit an old house containing a gigantic stained-glass window which makes the building an architectural treasure.  There is ancient Great-Granma, a failed opera singer, who spends most of her time hidden away in her filthy room, from where she launches fierce verbal attacks on all and sundry.  Then there is her daughter, Aba, who has cause to hate her mother since she prevented her following her dream of becoming a painter.  Aba has never learned to stand up to her mother and is now crippled with arthritis.  Aba’s daughter, Marianna is a different character.  Feisty and determined she has followed her dreams and has become a successful opera singer and also a committed and fearless political activist, fighting for Ukrainian independence.   Finally, there is Marianna’s daughter, our narrator, a young woman on the cusp of adulthood.  Tensions abound and arguments are fierce in the house for the women don’t share the same political views and have different loyalties.

At the beginning of the novel, Marianna is accidentally shot during a protest march and the narrator describes her coffin being carried through the streets, borne aloft by her admirers who regard her as a martyr for the cause.  The narrator is left to try to bridge the gap between surviving women and, at the same time, try to establish her own identity and she finds herself drawn into an unsuitable relationship with Mykola, her mother’s lover.  We learn, as the novel progresses, something of the history of these women, how they made their relationships and how their men were taken from them.

Sloniowska gives us strong and engaging characterisation, a wonderfully natural and memorable narrative voice and convincing dialogue.  We come to know the four women well but the writer’s greatest achievement perhaps is in her portrayal of the city of Lviv itself, which is essentially the fifth central character and Lviv we come to know exceptionally well.  It’s not a story I was familiar with and the translator has helpfully provided the reader with an introductory note on the history of the region, with its conflicting identities, traditions and languages.  Our narrator takes us on a fairly comprehensive tour of the city and its buildings as she follows her mother to the opera house and Aba on her shopping excursions and, later, as she is escorted through the city by Mykola, intent on showing her some of the things that had been forgotten.  There is a real sense of the city with its peeling and crumbling facades and wonderful architectural gems being lost to developers.

The House with the Stained-glass Window is a novel, rich in wonderful description and powerful imagery. There is a brilliant passage describing the experience of shopping with Aba for basic provisions when the narrator was a child and rationing was in force.  Images evolve throughout the book. Like Lviv, whose facades, when unpeeled reveal its past history, the women are compared to a set of Russian dolls, all superficially very different but ultimately, when examined, each containing the same essential elements.

Sloniowska has been acclaimed as a great new talent on the international literary scene.  This, her debut novel, has won the Znak Publishers’ Literary Prize and the Conrad prize for first novels.  We’ll all be waiting keenly for what she produces next.

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