Paranoia: A Novel (Paperback)
Description
Immediately banned after it was published, Paranoia is a novel about how dictatorships survive by burrowing into the minds of those they rule, sowing distrust and blurring the boundaries between the state’s and the individual’s autonomy. Although Minsk and Belarus are never mentioned, they are clearly the author’s inspiration for the novel’s setting. The plot focuses on a doomed romance between a young man whose former lover has disappeared and a young woman whose other lover is the minister of state security. The novel evokes classic dissident literature while artfully depicting the post-Soviet, globalized world.
About the Author
VICTOR MARTINOVICH is a deputy editor of BelGazeta, a Belarusian weekly newspaper, and the dean of the Faculty of Politics at the European Humanities University, a Belarusian institution closed by the authorities in 2004 and now based in Vilnius, Lithuania.
DIANE NEMEC IGNASHEV is Class of 1941 Professor of Russian and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College in Minnesota and the translator of No Love Without Poetry: The Memoirs of Marina Tsvetaeva’s Daughter by Ariadna Efron (Northwestern, 2009).
Praise For…
"Martinovich’s debut novel conjures up 1984’s Big Brother as it tells the story of Anatoly and Elisaveta’s star-crossed affair . . . A thrillingly twisted tale of a love triangle set in an all-too-plausible political nightmare." —Kirkus
"Full of passionate intelligence and incisive wit." —Publishers Weekly
"An exciting novel that is not easy to forget." —Times Literary Supplement
"Victor Martinovich is a funny writer . . . the novel is as hilarious a send up of modern Belorussian tyranny as one can expect." —Russian Life
