Checkago: A Novel of Moscow Life
 |
"Especially acute as a satire of Western illusions about Mother Russia." Michael Ignatieff in The Observer "A first novel of startling originality and a weird through-the-looking-glass effect." The Guardian "You could say that Chekago is another novel about the disaffected searching for love in the naked city; a wonderfully quirky style, part Dostoevsky, part Marx Brothers. Lowndes's wry prose conjures up a memorable fictional world that is both poetic and bawdy, tender and violent, serious ands slapstick. Make no mistake, Chekago is beautifully written, fast-paced and deadly funny. And Lowndes tackles the tough subjects, - love, sex and death - with refreshing eloquence and power." The Philadelphia Inquirer "Some of the characters are almost worthy of Gorky, particularly Sasha a love-starved garbage collector...The novel's plot is also promising and there are vivid details which put the reader right into the smelly communal kitchen where much of 'Chekago' takes place..." The New York Times "A uniquely well-informed, vital, sexy story." Victoria Glendinning |
Chekago was the reason why Sarah adopted the pseudonym Natalya Lowndes. The novel describes the lives of a group of Russians living in central Moscow during the 1980s. Based on true stories, Chekago became famous as one of the first foreign novels to give an accurate pictures of Soviet domestic life before Perestroika and the second Russian Revolution of 1991.
The anti heroine of this novel is an American academic writer visiting the Soviet Union in order to research a book about Soviet women. She ends up ruining the lives of her Russian friends by publishing her findings and not concealing her identity so that her connections are traced back to the people who have unwittingly provided her with contentious and unflattering source material about the Soviet Union. Even in the 1980s and 1990s contact with foreigners could be dangerous for ordinary Russian citizens. In order to avoid the kind of catastrophe she outlines in the novel, Sarah hid her identity in order to protect her friends from possible harassment by the authorities. The pseudonym remained as her fictional persona for two subsequent novels and she has abandoned it only recently.
This first novel took Sarah a number of years to write and was borne out of experiences she and her family encountered during visits to the Soviet Union. When the manuscript was finished it took a long time to find a British publisher and at home Sarah still keeps a box of more than thirty rejection letters.
Published finally by the London firm Hodder, Chekago went into three editions in the first year of publication and was widely reviewed. Dutton in New York published the first American edition and the book was translated into Portuguese for the Brazilian market.
More reviews for Chekago
"An accurate and honest depiction of the lives of ordinary people, whose hopes and dreams and problems you'd find anywhere...Lowndes has an astute understanding of human nature." The Irish Times
"The time is early 1980s: the scene is Moscow. Stalinism is dead but the suspicions, the eternal food shortages, the drunkenness, the appalling overcrowding live on, as does the thuggishness of the militia . The title, Chekago, comes from a bitter jest that Moscow was a wide-open town run by official gangsters quite as ruthless as any in old-time Chicago. The action centres on the occupants of one flat, broken up into single rooms with a communal kitchen. In other places the tenants would have seemed middle-class ( a university lecturer, a schoolmaster and a translator, among them) but here there is also a dustman who earns more than the rest of them. This man, Sasha, is the central character. He is almost the Town Bull, sought after as a sexual partner by, among others, a visiting American sociologist and the daughter of a Politburo member who edits a magazine. Both baffle him. Those who have looked from their tourist buses at the wan and wooden faces and wondered what Muscovites are really like will find many of the answers here in this remarkable first novel." The Daily Telegraph
"Some of the characters are almost worthy of Gorky, particularly Sasha a love-starved garbage collector...The novel's plot is also promising and there are vivid details which put the reader right into the smelly communal kitchen where much of 'Chekago' takes place..." The New York Times
"The debut of an English writer who calls herself Natalya Lowndes is a cause for rejoicing and her novel Chekago is that rarity in fiction, an inside look by an outsider at contemporary life in Moscow. Details peculiar to Moscow aside, we could be in Dublin or a rundown section of Brooklyn. The story is about the humanity of ordinary people and, in some cases, their inhumanity; their nationality is secondary." Palm Beach Life