A book about a teenager who is fine-tuning his own sound, that is, searching for himself.
Nina Dashevskaya is a wonderful author—intelligent, sincere, and original. Her first profession was music, and musical themes run through all of her works in one way or another. In the novella "The Search for Sound: Tvorogov," the reader can hear thousands of sounds swarming in the protagonist's head, trying to arrange themselves into a composition.
There are no adventures or a clear-cut plot here; it is mostly a stream of consciousness and a story about everyday life: Ivan attends school, interacts with friends, and tries to understand the world, defining his interests and values, and identifying the people around him. His parents are opera singers, and we meet Ivan during a period when he is contemplating who these people closest to him really are, what their profession means to them, why they love each other, and how it happened that his vibrant and successful mother married his inconspicuous and in some ways even awkward father.
And his two best friends—the handsome basketball player Jeff and the "deeply reserved" mathematician Stone—what are they all about? Could it be that he has always looked at them without noticing the many facets of their personalities? And his classmate Varya—what about her? A tall girl with a trapezoidal nose and strange quirks: she suddenly decided, for no apparent reason, to learn to play the cello. But why is he so drawn to her, if, at first glance, her head is full of nothing but oddities?
A teenager with an extremely heightened perception walks through this world, noticing, hearing, and catching an enormous amount of information in the air. Ivan looks at the city, the architecture, and the residents; a multitude of motifs and individual sounds surround him. Some are deafeningly loud, others barely audible, and the task is to choose those from which one will then compose one's own piece.
...Here is his father, who, when one of his colleagues is treated unfairly, goes out to hold a one-man picket. He knows it won't change anything, but he cannot help but go. Ivan is initially ashamed of his father standing alone with a sign, but then he begins to recognize his melody...
...Simple guy Jeff, whom Tvorogov has been friends with since kindergarten, turns out to be an active citizen who attends protests and has ridden in a police van more than once (the book was published in 2021, and this refers to real events in Moscow)...
...And Ivan himself, who scrapes by in school with grades of D's and F's and convincingly plays the role of a worthless idler, gets caught writing essays for half the class. And not just carbon copies, but as if performing each one in the voice of the classmate whose name is on the cover of the notebook...
It is a difficult business, finding your own sound; it is not given to everyone. A single book won't help here, but this one shows that you must keep searching, and that one's personality is built in everyday life, not through grand deeds, but from inconspicuous traits and small events.
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