Jennifer duBois
Fiction
This is not an uplifting read, people. I should’ve realized that going in, but I didn’t really think about it until I was halfway through and by then I knew I had to finish it.
A Partial History of Lost Causes is about Irina and Aleksandr. The chapters switch back and forth between the two, hers during 2006, his a long time ago and 2006. Aleksandr was a chess champion in Russia when he was young but then politics derailed his career and now he’s trying to run for president. Irina is just about to enter the early stages of Huntington’s disease and goes to Russia to meet Aleksandr, whom her father (who also had Huntington’s) admired and wrote once. After quite a bit of maneuvering, Irina finally gets to meet Aleksandr…and that’s all I’m going to tell you because mentioning anything else would spoil the novel.
I really, really hate when books go back and forth between two POVs. Aleksandr’s chapters were in third person and Irina’s were in first person. It was very jarring switch POVs every chapter. I got used to it by the end, but I never grew to like it. Jennifer duBois is a good writer, I’ll give her that: she managed to get me to read most of the extremely long paragraphs sprinkled throughout the book. The overall tone of Lost Causes was just so depressing, though. I knew it wouldn’t, couldn’t, have a happy ending, but what did happen shocked me. I cannot recall the last time I read a novel set in Russia that didn’t bring me down. No more Russia-based novels for me for awhile.
So I’m not sure I would recommend this. I suppose if you can stand a lot of downer stuff and you enjoy political history, you’d like it.
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