Launch Party! JENNIFER duBOIS / A Partial History of Lost Causes
“Hilarious and heartbreaking and a triumph of the imagination.
Jennifer duBois is too young to be this talented. I wish I were her.”
-- Gary Shteyngart
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, thirty-year-old English lecturer Irina Ellison has witnessed her father -- a brilliant, multi-lingual professor of music -- succumb to Huntington’s. After a genetic test
reveals that not only is she likely to get the cruel brain-atrophying disease, but that it will arrive within two years, Irina finds herself seeking the most appropriate way to make her exit and wondering if she has actually made any mark on the world. After her father’s funeral, Irina finds a copy of an unanswered letter he wrote to Soviet chess prodigy Aleksandr Bezetov asking the profound question: How does one proceed in a lost cause? She believes her father—already aware he was entering his final declension—reached out to Bezetov because the young hero, like himself, was “a person who knew the value of his own intelligence, and the shortness of its reign.” Looking for a graceful departure from her Cambridge life and a last adventure, Irina travels to Russia to find both Bezetov and the answer to her father’s question.
In St. Petersburg, Russia, former world chess champion Bezetov is haunted by memories of a woman he loved in his youth who married a Party official and a close friend who was murdered by the KGB. Weighed down with guilt for his lack of action in those moments, Bezetov launches a dissident political movement. He decides to run for president against Vladimir Putin—a campaign he knows he will not win and that may get him killed—but his conviction to make the current regime uncomfortable drives him.
"By what exquisite strategy did duBois settle on this championship permutation of literary moves? Her debut is a chess mystery with political, historical, philosophical and emotional heft, a paean to the game and the humans who play it. DuBois probes questions of identity, death, art and love with a piercing intelligence and a questing heart." -- Heidi Julavits
Spanning two continents and the dramatic sweep of history, Jennifer duBois has crafted a beautiful novel about many things: the power of memory, the stubbornness and splendor of the human will, the endurance of love, but above all, how one proceeds in a lost cause. The result is spectacular and is clearly going to be one of the most notable debuts of 2012.
"An amazing achievement—a braiding of historical, political, and personal, each strand illuminating the other. Wonderful characters, glimpses of elusive wisdom, and a gripping story that accelerates to just the right ending." -- Arthur Phillips
Jennifer duBois was born in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1983. She earned a B.A. in political science and philosophy from Tufts
University and an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She recently completed her Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, where she now teaches. Jennifer's short fiction has appeared in Playboy, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, The Northwest Review, The South Carolina Review and The Florida Review.
- Street:
- 1644 Haight St.
- City:
- San Francisco ,
- Province:
- California
- Postal Code:
- 94117-2816
- Country:
- United States
