What to read: a runaway nun, a story about stars, and a madhouse as a home
“Realnoe Vremya” selected three new book releases for January.
In January, books that work differently with memory, fiction, and personal history were published in Russian. “Realnoe Vremya” literary critic Ekaterina Petrova selected three new book releases of the month — about an escape from a 14th-century monastery, about searching for support in a new school, and about childhood spent in the La Borde psychiatric clinic.
Paul Turenne. “The Book of Joan," “Livebook” (translated from French by Nina Khotinskaya, 304 pp., 16+)
In 2019, Paul Turenne read in The Guardian an article about nun Joan of Leeds, who in 1318 staged her own death and fled from the Benedictine abbey of St. Clement in York. The source of the story is the ecclesiastical registers of the Archbishopric of York, studied by a medievalist, a member of the Royal Historical Society. The documents recorded the escape itself and the search ordered by Archbishop William Melton. But the documents did not report how it all ended. The gaps became the working space of the novel. Turenne relied on archives, monastery architecture, and historical research, while artistically filling in the missing links.
The action unfolds in 14th-century England. Joan is an orphan, a member of the minor aristocracy, raised in a monastery. She knows Scripture, participates in the daily life of the convent, works in the kitchen, observes nature, and reflects on the meaning of the words that sound daily in prayers. An internal conflict forms in a clash with the abbess, for whom asceticism, order, and immutability are important. In the novel, this rift is marked from the first pages — with a damaged angel statue, a crack in a perfectly built system. Joan's escape is constructed as a complex and technically thought-out plan. Using medicinal plants, she feigns illness; other nuns make a mask and a mannequin to replace her body. The staged death is an act of theatrical deception involving disguise and doubles. After the fraud is uncovered, the abbess sends a former constable after the fugitive, and from this moment the novel is built as a story of pursuit.
Outside the monastery walls, Joan encounters a different structure of time and life. Her path passes through English country roads, forests, and London. Random companions enter the narrative: a giant carpenter, a wandering herbalist, a one-handed dwarf with experience of street life, merchants, and people with completely different fates. The heroine masters new social roles, observes the life of the urban lower classes and the life of a prosperous household, learns to navigate an environment where there are no familiar rules or routines. This experience is presented as a succession of changing states and practices, not as linear maturation.
A separate line in the novel is connected to language and reading. Joan reflects on the divergence between the literal meaning of texts and their theological interpretations. In particular, she reads the “Song of Songs” in her own way, returning to the words the bodily and sensual meaning which, in her observation, had been displaced by church interpretation. Through this, the theme of power over meanings and control over the body arises in the book. As a result, “The Book of Joan” combines a reconstruction of monastic life, a travel narrative, and a detective chase line, offering the reader an experience of immersion in the 14th century and in the story of a woman about whom the sources say almost nothing.
Kim Torres. “Constellations," “Polyandria” (translated from Catalan by Anna Uruzhumtseva, 176 pp., 0+)
“Constellations” became Kim Torres's first literary work. Before this, Torres was known as an illustrator who worked with publishers in Spain and beyond, as well as a workshop leader where drawing is a tool for self-discovery. Torres not only wrote the book but also illustrated it himself. The story emerged from an interest in storytelling through images and in connecting personal experience with myths and knowledge about the world — an approach Torres developed in visual projects and educational work.
At the center of the plot is a girl named Night, who comes to a new school and immediately feels out of place. She is bored, lonely, and doesn't understand how to fit into an unfamiliar environment. Home is changing too: Arnau, an astronomy student, settles in the attic, renting a room and starting to live with Night and her mother. Arnau knows the language of stars and is versed in constellations, myths, and astronomical stories. For Night, who feels lost, this becomes a point of support. Their communication is built around observing the sky. Together they invent legends about new constellations and look for a key that, as the book says, opens all doors.
As the narrative progresses, the reader learns details of Night's past. She gradually understands why her father left the family, looks at her relationship with her mother in a new way, and for the first time encounters what can be called true friendship. These discoveries are woven into the fabric of the story about stars, Greek myths, and legends. Information about constellations and celestial bodies is not relegated to a separate reference layer but is connected to the heroine's states and questions. Looking at the sky becomes a way to seek answers to what cannot be clarified directly. Over the course of over 170 pages, Night goes from a feeling of isolation to an awareness of a chosen family. The text explicitly states that family is not only blood ties but also people one chooses for oneself. This thought is formed through the shared experience of the characters, their conversations, and the stories they invent.
An interesting feature of “Constellations” is the combination of literary text with authorial illustrations. Torres uses drawing as another way of telling a story. This corresponds to his professional path: he studied illustration at the Eina school in Barcelona and has worked with visual storytelling for many years. For him, people are made of stories, and the book reflects this belief, suggesting viewing a personal biography as a set of constellations that can be connected in different ways. As a result, the reader gets an experience of slow and attentive reading, where school routine, family changes, and astronomical plots exist in the same space.
Emmanuelle Guattari. “Me and the Little Madhouse," “KoLibri” (translated from French by Stanislav Mukhamedzhanov, 160 pp., 16+)
The book “Me and the Little Madhouse” is based on the personal experience of Emmanuelle Guattari. The author grew up in the La Borde psychiatric clinic in the Loire Valley, where her father, psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, worked all his life. The clinic was founded in 1953 by psychiatrist Jean Oury as an experimental space where patients were not isolated but included in collective life. In the 2000s, the kindergarten for staff children on the grounds of La Borde was threatened with closure: the authorities considered such an environment unsuitable for children. Then former “children of La Borde” were asked to write letters in defense of this experience. It was this letter that became the starting point for the book, first published in France in 2012 under the title “La Petite Borde.”
The text is constructed as a story about the childhood of Manu — a girl for whom the clinic was home. Adults with psychiatric diagnoses are perceived as “lodgers," just other adults living nearby. Children freely move around the grounds: the castle, park, forest, ponds, chicken coop, telephone switchboard, medical buildings. In one episode, they swallow raw eggs in the chicken coop; in another, they play pranks with yogurt or wait for hours by the phone, listening to endless dial tones. Everyday life is composed of short scenes, family episodes, children's games, and random observations. The book is written in fragments — separate vignettes with their own titles. Chronology is absent: memories jump between ages, places, and situations. The author consciously maintains a child's “optics” and avoids adult commentary. The text often shifts from “I” to “we”: it's not only about the family but also about the group of staff children who grew up together and existed as a collective. Older children looked after younger ones; decisions were made within the children's pack.
La Borde is shown without medical terminology. Diagnoses and theories remain outside the text. Instead, the reader sees how children learn to separate “madness” from ordinary human relationships and how patients become a source of care, humor, strange conversations, and help. The book contains scenes related to the political context of the time: posters, magazines, conversations about the Algerian War, episodes of police searches when the author's mother hides documents in a baby's diapers. A special place is given to the theme of disappearance. Through a child's perception, the death of the mother, and later the father, is described. These episodes are experienced through images, objects, and sensations. The text also contains echoes of the collective memory of the 20th century: mentions of concentration camps, war, losses, which the child registers bodily through the weight of books, sounds, colors. This book provides a rare reading experience: a look at the history of a psychiatric experiment through the bodily, sensory memory of a child for whom the clinic became a space of everyday life.
Ekaterina Petrova is the literary critic of the online newspaper “Realnoe Vremya," host of the Telegram channel “Poppy Seed Buns.”