The Smile of Shakti

A novel, but without a core around which it typically revolves. A person, but not the one familiar to domestic literature. India, but not the one we expect. Love and burning closeness, yet through them - a desire for something else. Complex intellectual optics with reckless openness, like in childhood. A paradise of metaphors, a symphonic writing with elusive shifts of registers. Jungles, tigers, elephants, extreme experiences, Buddhist caves, life with hermits, a garden of Sanskrit, trance mysteries, a meeting with the king of forest tribes, a Sufi wheel of speech between the West and the East, but through this romantic exoticism - a path to the source, a glimmering kinship with the world. A world that began and set in motion from the smile of Shakti. This path is dramatic and wondrous. An odyssey of writing, drifting to a place where words are avoided. Sergey Solovyov - a poet, one of the bright representatives of meta-realism. Born in Kyiv, lives in Munich, has been traveling in India for the last 17 years. The author's prose is considered to belong to the so-called intensive writing, in which "the text draws you in - and then meanings and associations branch out, expand - and reading comes to a halt by itself, and you want to place a bookmark not between pages, but between sentences. Or between words" (A. Ulanov). "The Smile of Shakti", while remaining a separate book, together with the novella "Amort" (2005) and the novel "Adam's Bridge" (2013) forms a kind of trilogy.