Остров Харона. The Island of Charon. Премия им. А. де Сент-Экзюпери / A. de Saint-Exupery Award (Билингва: Rus / Eng) - страница 5

I am holding in my hands a philosophical and mystical thriller «The Island of Charon», which received several literary awards in 2021: «Ocean, Wind, Sand and Stars» after A. de Saint-Exupery (Open Literary Club «Response»)4, «Another Reality» after Leonid and Daniil Andreev (Creative Center «Clouds of Inspiration»)5, «Running on the Waves» after A. S. Grin (Moscow City Organization of the Union of Writers of Russia together with the Museums of A.S. Grin in Feodosia and Stary Krym), «Case No.» 2021 after Alfred Hitchcock and «The Book of the XXI century» in the nomination «Wings» after A. de Saint-Exupery (Moscow City Organization of the Union of Writers of Russia together with Non-commercial Partnership «Literary Republic»)6. However, I’ve studied some reviews to decide whether to read it or not.

And I begin reading the book to the music from Christopher Nolan’s film «Interstellar», which appears almost out of nowhere and sounds like a refrain on that very Island. I recreate the reality of events, because it’s to this music that the reader is about to learn how tender the embrace of even the most horrible death can be.

«Everyone has their own island here…»

The music of the stars and planets places me to the space-time tunnel «Island» – «Island», one of them is in the Sun Book, and the other one is in the Moon Book. Christopher Nolan with his film crew beneath my windows of the hotel on Tatari Street in Tallinn, 2019, immediately came up to my mind. I was watching the process of making his new film «Tenet» from the inside.

Nolan was focused and serious. He gave the command to start.

And I see Alexandra writing her «Island»:

…The Creator, the Ocean, the Sky, the Wish Tree, the Moon Book and the Sun Book…

Yes, that’s right, like that – with a capital letter and nothing else.

And this is not an artistic technique, but the essence of the author’s values – the system of coordinates of her Universe, in which the main word «Love» turns out to be so impossibly huge and holy that it becomes unpronounceable!

However, it is Love that permeates everything and all around: a randomly met person without anatomical signs, and the Girl looking for her mother in the Ocean, and the Boy, her «little prince», asking for a lantern not for himself, but for the Girl, because on this Island every wish can be fulfilled by the Wish Tree, and even the barefoot Old Man, who has nothing left but black birds and other people’s memories, the fact that touches me to the core…

This fragile, not too sociable girl-woman with Tsvetaeva’s haircut, who frankly informs that all those, who has sunk into her soul, lie without moving a muscle, and they are YOU yourself (!), manages to achieve by an apparently simple but obviously magical narration a hail of my tears!

It is incomprehensible, but Alexandra Kryuchkova, who has already grown in her literary work to the level of philosophical Thought, penetrating into the depths of the Universe and leading us, readers, step by step along the Stairway to the Sky with each of her books, remains in her soul a naive child, still discovering Love and Peace, Good and Evil, and surprising us with the purity and sincerity of the pronounced, «I WANT!»