First Lines of Oksana Zabuzhko's "The Museum of Abandoned Secrets"

"And then come the photos: black and white, faded into a caramel-brown sepia, some printed on that old dense paper with the bossed dappling and white scalloped edges like the lace collars of school uniforms, all from the pre-Kodak era—the era of the Cold War and nationally manufactured photography supplies (really, nationally manufactured everything)—and yet, the women in the pictures are adorned with the towering mousses of chignons, those stupid constructions of dead and, more often than not, someone else’s (ugh) hair."

- The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, by Oksana Zabuzhko, translated by Nina Shevchuk-Murray.

What an intriguing, sprawling, frustrating, and rewarding book. I'm about half-way through its 718 pages, having read that in fits and starts. Zabuzhko's style includes long sentences, which i'm normally okay with, but the sheer amount of clauses and parenthetical asides make them hard to follow. Luckily, that's one of the themes of the book - that life is messy and "... is an enormous, bottomless suitcase, stuffed with precisely such indeterminate bits and pieces..." so I'm looking at it as more of an impressionistic painting where the details of the plot or dialogue don't matter so much as the overall impact. Curious to know how this one plays out.