Master of the Grass

Glas 33,224 pages
ISBN 5-7172-0066-8

Master of the grass is a short novel about the drama of a narcissistic man who is irresistibly drawn to his own reflection in the mirror, his best companion since childhood and throughout life. He is unable to understand the nature of his repeated failures in personal life or to establish full-blooded relationships with women. His late marriage ends in disaster for his young wife. Although Gabrielyan chooses to tell the story in the name of her male hero, her intention is to alert women to the danger of being trapped with this widespread type of man. Written in an impressionistic style the novel is a treat for lovers of fine literature.

Typically for this author, in her story "The Lilac Dressing Gown" an intense young girl takes refuge in her imagination and never more effectively than when she sneaks into her mother’s wardrobe and puts on her lilac dressing gown.

"The reader can’t resist Gabrielyan’s happy amazement at the unceasing wonders of the world she sees all around her. Ordinary objects in her stories reveal their multiple guises so that their only constant feature is their changeful nature. Moving from the real to the surreal, she invites the reader to come with her into these two realities, which eventually turn out to be one and the same, a place where the magic and the mundane merge, a reality that may be tragic or ridiculous." – NLO

"Nina Gabrielyan belongs to the literary land inhabited by Hoffmann, Kafka and Gogol... She is a virtuoso analyst of nightmares and children’s dreams. She feels at home in the fragile space between dream and reality, penetrating such depths of consciousness, where neither daylight nor traditional psychology can reach. Her imagery stays in your mind long after you’ve finished reading her... Her poetic and profound stories are about the deep and secret bond existing among all objects and phenomena in this world." — Ludmila Ulitskaya, winner of the Russian Booker Prize

Nina GABRIELYAN, born in 1953, an Armenian aurhor and artist living in Moscow, writes poetry and prose in beautiful Russian. She is a famous activist in the feminist movement in Russia. She has two collections of poems and two collections of stories to her credit as well as numerous translations of Armenian poetry from the Middle Ages to the present.