Where to begin?
The quiet expanse of a humble, ordinary life gradually unfurls.
A series of vignettes.
Laurus, the story of a life lived many times.
I won’t deceive you: this is a long book. It’s a quiet book. It’s a slow book. But it’s a book that made me feel more present. And who couldn't use a reminder to slow down and cherish what they have at this precise moment in time?
I have a profound affinity for quiet books about quiet lives. Nothing grand or excessively dramatic. Lives dedicated to an existence and purpose that exists outside the ordinary ambitions of modern life.
Eugene Vodolazkin's novel follows Laurus, a 15th-century Russian healer turned holy fool turned saint.
We first meet him as a child named Arseny living quietly with his grandfather, Khristofor, an herbalist who teaches him the healing properties of plants and how to read.
Dried herbs, scraps of thoughts etched onto birch bark, encounters with strangers, acts of healing, conversations with the dead, and long pilgrimages . . . Arseny’s life, the accumulation of small moments.
That’s right: I absolutely get my kicks reading about 15th-century herbalism and the mundane routines of daily life.
Like Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders, one of my all-time favorite novels, Laurus creates an enveloping narrative.
Seemingly insignificant moments carry remarkable weight. The smallest details radiate.
Here, the miraculous sits beside the ordinary.
The world is laid bare in all its disease, poverty, and physical suffering, yet it never feels devoid of beauty and peace. Compassion surfaces in unexpected places.
It's deeply contemplative.
Laurus changes names, locations, and callings . . . and yet . . .
Everything he does traces back to Ustina.
Spoiler warning: If you prefer to go into books blindly, stop reading here and simply know that I highly recommend it.
(Well, at least to the reader who appreciates a slow, understated book)
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Now, back to Ustina.
The core of the novel centers on a devastating loss, Larus’s one and only love, Ustina.
After her sudden death, Laurus spends the rest of his life trying to atone for what he believes was his failure to save her.
Most of us have something that follows us through the years. For Laurus, that something is Ustina.
Throughout the novel, he speaks to her constantly, telling her about the places before him, the people he meets, and the world as it reaches out around him, refusing to let her slip away. He speaks to her with such tenderness that she never truly disappears from the narrative.
Ustina lives on through his experiences.
Laurus affected me. The plot isn’t propulsive, and yet you want to keep going.
Like sprawling epics and sagas built from the passing of ordinary days, this novel is masterful.
Life gives Laurus a path to walk, but love gives him a reason to keep walking.
A reason to keep going.