Vita Nostra 

A review of Vita Nostra by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko

Kiran Fane

This is, to the best of my ability, a spoiler-free review of the Ukrainian novel Vita Nostra. I am aided in this endeavor by the fact that much of what might be revealed about the story of this novel is, to those who have not already absorbed it, quite incomprehensible. This accusation is leveled not in condemnation of the work, but in praise of it. Vita Nostra is filled with confluences between literary function and meta commentary in such a way that it transports the reader effortlessly into the mind of the main character, Sasha Samokhina.

To my knowledge, I have never been a teenage girl swept from her expected life path with all the danger and inexorable force of a rip current at low tide. I am only slightly less certain that I have never been whisked off to some distant “school” dedicated to the study of eldritch concepts beyond our mortal understanding. And yet, on more than one occasion while reading this book, I would not have been so secure in my answer to those questions.

If I were limited to only one praise in this review, and thankfully I am not, it would be the skill with which the Dyachenkos transport the reader into the strange and alien world of Vita Nostra. Even more astonishing is the subtle degrees by which the novel achieves this feat. There are few grand gestures or appeals to the readers' base sensibilities. Instead, it is in the careful selection of their words and the small, unnerving idiosyncrasies of the students and staff.

Vita Nostra has been declared by some to be a “magical school” novel, and I must disagree. If the Institute of Special Technologies were to be compared to any school, it must be the College of Byrgenwerth (of Bloodborne fame). Underneath the more obvious comparisons, the work has all of the qualities of a classic fairy tale. One where our protagonist is kidnapped by the fae (of the proper historical variety) and carried off to their strange and unusual realm. In this case, however, the fairies in question are students dedicated to the understanding of how to construct functional non-Euclidean architecture mentally.

And this tale is told wonderfully. The story is well-paced and pulls one in, although it does suffer from a lack of escalating tension. Sasha fears what will happen should she fail, but that fear, and its likelihood, remain unchanging throughout. Vita Nostra masterfully draws its reader to reach for understanding alongside the main character. Sadly, this engrossing mystery and its accompanying revelations and breakthroughs are of a nature that does not allow the reader to infer anything before it is explicitly stated within the text. This “fairy tale” aspect helps the book handle some of its more potentially uncomfortable situations. Early on, our protagonist, an underage girl, is approached by an older man and instructed to engage in what the book calls a “potentially scandalous act”. Handled with less tact, this could have killed the entire book for me. But, due to the aforementioned story-like quality, and the author’s excellent use of language, the discomfort remains within the confines of the page.

The prose is, for the most part, modern and almost a bit plain. But word choice elevates it from merely serviceable to absolutely transportative. My only complaint here, and it is a minor one, is that some sections of the book suffer from what I would call, for lack of better terminology, academically purple prose. By this, I mean that there are certain sections where the use of overly complex terminology fails to convey the reality of the moment. Take, for instance, an event near the latter half of the book in which something truly terrible is happening. Our main character is engaged in committing a rather awful act. It should fill the reader with dread, possibly even revulsion. But instead, due to the academically worded descriptions, it is not until the danger is almost past that the reader can truly grasp what that danger had been. Thus robbing the scene of its impact through unintentional obfuscation.

That obfuscation unfortunately carries through to the most pivotal point in the story, the end. From very early on, Vita Nostra gives the reader the sense that this is a story which must live, or die, by the quality of its ending. And the end, by no means, lacks in quality. The authors successfully subverted this reader’s expectations and managed to avoid falling into certain narrative traps that the book seemed almost inevitably to have drawn itself toward. However, I felt the climax lost some measure of its impact as the words dissolved into the “academic prose”. I am not averse to an open-ended story, but as previously discussed, the nature of the novel makes took little plain enough to properly theorize about. Luckily for us all, the latter two books in this series have also been translated into English, and therefore the story may continue to a more satisfying conclusion.

Though my criticisms may seem to present themselves in a multitude, I found Vita Nostra to be a wonderfully engrossing read. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to be carried away into a world of dangerous discovery. Those who enjoy academia, high-concept literature, and immersive prose should not do themselves the disservice of missing Vita Nostra.