Nikolai Grozni is the author of the memoir Turtle Feet, which recounts the four years he spent as a Buddhist monk in India and was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. His new autobiographical novel, Wunderkind (Free Press, September 6, 2011), set in Bulgaria right before the end of the Cold War, examines the effects of totalitarian society on the lives of piano and violin prodigies studying at an elite music school. Grozni's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian and the Seattle Review. He lives with his wife and children in France.
On your nightstand now:
Livy's History of Rome, books VIII and XI; Walter Friedrich Otto's Theophania; Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch; John Fante's Ask the Dust.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Alice, Girl from the Future by Kir Bulychev, a Russian science fiction author. This was a very popular book on the dark side of the Iron Curtain, back when I was growing up. It told the story of young Alice who incidentally traveled back in time and got stuck for a while in the Soviet Union.
Your top five authors:
Thomas Bernhard, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, Luis-Ferdinand Celine.
Book you've faked reading:
Tolstoy's War and Peace. This was obligatory reading in my seventh-grade Russian class. We had to memorize long descriptive passages from the novel and recite them in Russian. I think I got a D, and I was cheating, too. If I remember correctly, there was something like a 10-page-long description of a tree. Reading it I felt as if my head had gone numb.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew, which I think is one of the best novels of the 20th century. Bernhard's voice, prose aesthetics, humanity, acute sense of life's sometimes fatal ironies, his storytelling--he is simply outstanding.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. I bought it in Barcelona, tried reading it unsuccessfully in the hotel room, and the next day it was stolen by a gang of thieves who broke all the windows of my car and left a trail of my socks and underwear on the sidewalk outside Juan Miró's museum. I really hope that the thieves liked it.
Book that changed your life:
Bodhisattvacharyavatara by Shantideva; The Trouble with Being Born by Emile Cioran; The First and Last Freedom by Krishnamurti.
From Shantideva I got a taste of metaphysics. Cioran added gin. Krishnamurti added tonic.
Favorite line from a book:
From Endgame, by Samuel Beckett:
"CLOV:
Do you believe in the life to come?
HAMM:
Mine was always that."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.