It is important to name every phenomenon, because as long as there is no specific word for it, the phenomenon itself is as if non-existent; there is nothing to focus attention on and no one to appeal to.
Yet gaslighting does exist and always has. It is a good thing that people have started talking about this, and it is a good thing that more and more people are learning what this ugly phenomenon looks like.
Sasha, a young, smart, and beautiful woman, takes her little daughter and flees from her husband. She is driven from a good home into the unknown by the atmosphere within her family: the fact is that her own young, smart, and handsome husband turned out to be a terrifying manipulator and aggressor, dangerous not only to his wife but also to their daughter.
We find Sasha and Mia at the airport; they have been wandering for a long time, their money and acquaintances have run out, and Sasha doesn't know where to go next... By chance, a kind elderly man appears nearby who is ready to help them with all his might, and he has a completely different life story: he, on the contrary, lived in a happy marriage and now finds himself alone and unhappy. There are other people here too, whom the protagonist meets at the airport, and there is a separate narrative for each of their stories. And then there are... NOT-people, who are given arguably even more attention: talking animals with interesting fates—a hare and a dog (in reality, they only talk to each other; people cannot hear them, although these animals have rich biographies and have much to say).
We alternately hear the voice of the protagonist talking about her experience living with a manipulator, the voice of the hare dreaming of flight, the old man’s memories of his late wife, the dog’s reflections on all these two-legged creatures around him, and the thin little voice of baby Mia, who misses her father terribly. Interwoven into this is the motif of the life of a young man who photographed Sasha; he also has a non-trivial story stretching back to his very birth. And now, the old, old neighbor of our kind grandfather enters the scene—what will she tell us? In theory, all these initially disparate melodies should gradually merge into a general chorus, and in the end, firmly fall into place and create a single, monolithic work...
But that is at the end; for now, we read about how the protagonists' childhood affects their adult lives. We learn from Sasha's psychotherapist what to do when encountering gaslighting. We pity the little girl, who believes there is a spell capable of defeating the monster living inside her father. And, of course, we look for traits of a manipulator in our own acquaintances and, let's be honest, in ourselves...
A great deal in this book is good: the plot, the style, the language, the psychological depth, and the wonderful illustrations, but here comes a fly in the ointment. This novella abounds with the phenomenon known as "Bondarchuk's gun": the storylines of certain characters remained on the sidelines of the main plot—that is, unlike Chekhov's gun, they never fired, and it is unclear why we were told about them in such detail if they did not contribute to the overall picture at all. The same applies to these sentient animals—it is as if they wandered in here from another story entirely. They have no connection to gaslighting or domestic violence, they do not help uncover the theme at all, and they do not interact with the protagonist. A monolithic work, unfortunately, did not emerge.
Well, even if these technical shortcomings prevent us from calling this book perfect, it is still a very worthy and important book, and it is definitely worth reading. I am grateful to the author just for talking about this topic with the Russian-speaking reader; that is more important than minor defects.
We recommend this book to people who will soon be entering adult life: it is better to learn about the non-obvious dangers lurking within it in advance. There are no truly terrifying details (such as physical abuse or sexual violence) here; all the focus is on the unbearable psychological environment, so it can, in principle, be read at any teenage age, provided the child is already interested in reading about complex human relationships. We also recommend it to adults.
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