Nolan was focused and serious. He gave the command to start.
And I see Alexandra writing her Island:
The Creator, the Ocean, the Sky, the Wish Tree, the Moon Book and the Sun Book
Yes, thats right, like that with a capital letter and nothing else.
And this is not an artistic technique, but the essence of the authors values the system of coordinates of her Universe, in which the main word Love turns out to be so impossibly huge and holy that it becomes unpronounceable!
However, it is Love that permeates everything and all around: a randomly met person without anatomical signs, and the Girl looking for her mother in the Ocean, and the Boy, her little prince, asking for a lantern not for himself, but for the Girl, because on this Island every wish can be fulfilled by the Wish Tree, and even the barefoot Old Man, who has nothing left but black birds and other peoples memories, the fact that touches me to the core
This fragile, not too sociable girl-woman with Tsvetaevas haircut, who frankly informs that all those, who has sunk into her soul, lie without moving a muscle, and they are YOU yourself (!), manages to achieve by an apparently simple but obviously magical narration a hail of my tears!
It is incomprehensible, but Alexandra Kryuchkova, who has already grown in her literary work to the level of philosophical Thought, penetrating into the depths of the Universe and leading us, readers, step by step along the Stairway to the Sky with each of her books, remains in her soul a naive child, still discovering Love and Peace, Good and Evil, and surprising us with the purity and sincerity of the pronounced, I WANT!
And ME TOO!
I want to visit this Island, too!
The Island with no electricity, Internet, air conditioning, where our consciousness does not care if something happens only in thoughts or in reality, because the reaction of the body is always the same.
The Island, where the water from the Lake of Lovers is not usual, not mineral, but dead and not sparkling, because there is simply no other water there, however, you cannot drown in such water, because you can breathe in it!
The Island, where a Philippine fishman with Athos rosary hacks and glitches my time as if it could have any meaning on the Island of Magicians, because it is always the Full Moon on the clock, and this Time is the best (!), although only for catching Fish with a long nose and shamanic treats, such as blood with milk (!), the potion with a limited shelf life; the main thing is not to fall for the bait of black magicians, who put the spirit of a dead person into a bewitched one
To sail away!
To sail away from the world where its possible to destroy an ancient Gothic church for the sake of a coal mining, to suicide due to unpaid bank interest on a business loan, and it is not considered shameful to steal ideas if it were someone elses bag, then yes otherwise
To sail away to the Island, where ones dreams are memories, from which I would finally find out why we were subconsciously so afraid of losing each other even before meeting in a new quality, that we put off all conversations for later
To the Island, where youll hardly be able to answer immediately the question of the Stargazer, Do you really believe that you ended up here by accident? But youll have an opportunity to think about the meaning of your life, although only until the high tide, creeping as quiet (!) water, like a loving monster, because The Ocean comes here silently.
To the Island, from which it is so difficult to disappear, because everybody has his own ferry, but it has the right never to come for you, because it does not have any schedule, or rather, it depends solely on you.
To the Island, where you can kill only your own selfish Self, and no theft is possible, because there is nothing to steal there, the most valuable thing is the light of a lantern, and it is exclusively YOURS
Of course, both the Island itself and its main characters, existing in reality, have their own beautiful names, but, as for me personally, they are no longer so important, because they would be displaced from memory by an amazing feeling of freedom (!) from the present, the past and the future, which I got while sitting, wrapped my legs in a plaid or rather, in captivity yes, in the magic captivity of Alexandra Kryuchkovas prose.
Elena Tallenika,
member of the Union of Writers of Russia,
laureate of international literary awards
The newspaper Literary News (Literaturnye Izvestia) No. 1112 (197198), 2021.
http://litiz.ru/arch.html
https://reading-hall.ru/publication.php?id=30039
Another Reality
(Alexandra Kryuchkova revealed the secret of Charon)
I am familiar with the work of the famous Moscow writer Alexandra Kryuchkova not by hearsay. Back in 2012, I was lucky enough to be present at her personal literary evening at the House of the Near Abroad by A. Solzhenitsyn at Taganka, where she looked great in two capacities at once: as a poet and as a songwriter. Her performance inspired me so much that I wrote one of my most significant poems I say you hello!, citated in the epigraph Alexandras words. Later, in January 2017, at the same House took place a presentation of the grandiose film Holy Russia by A. Kulyamin (based on the book Holy Russia. Voices of Russian poets), which features the heartfelt poems of A. Kryuchkova as well.
And now, a few years later, when, being the chairman of the jury and head of the Creative Center Clouds of Inspiration, I got acquainted with her mystical thriller The Island of Charon, submitted to the literary competition Another Reality organized in honor of mystical writers Leonid and Daniil Andreev, Alexandra Kryuchkova revealed herself to me in yet another capacity as a deep and thoughtful prose writer.
The very title of the book makes it clear that we are not going to have a trivial turning over of mundane platitudes, but a journey into painstaking philosophical reflections. From the first pages, we are immersed in that very Another Reality, where the earthly life and death of the main character are closely interconnected with invisible otherworldly Forces of Darkness and Light, and the plot unfolds on a mysterious island, where everything is wrong, since it is located in the Astral World. But does an afterlife exist in principle? And if so, how is that World organized? What is it the judgment of a soul? What price does each of us have to pay for our deeds?
Unresolved tasks and unfinished works, mistakes made during life and affection for earthly things, and even unfulfilled dreams lead the soul to the island, whose lighthouse is the Wish Tree, but The Wish Tree is a trap
And it is no coincidence that the owner of the Island lives in a house in the Cemetery of Memories the reminiscences of dear to the heart people are haunting the main character.
Can the described by Alexandra Kryuchkova in The Island be exactly like this in reality? We dont know, but surely, each of us, approaching the last line, asks the same questions, to which the main character is looking for and finds answers. The author openly expresses her opinion on the possibility of cognition the Truth in a dialogue with Charon.