This book travels into melancholia voiced by an old soul, sharing his multiples lives; what he has left in an environment many of us would have considered as hostile. Ivan sings his lost glimpses of happiness, the cruel reality of class struggle, the void of the implosion of USSR and the living myth of communist. This character tells us about the story of millions of people, over the past decades suffused with sense modernity.
His story is traveling into decades, he knows that his messages would get where they are not expected but hoped. Ivan’s story might inspire some of us, writing to the future the one of people we care.
This book could be the inner voyage of each of us, our link with our history, the ones from our parents, the ones we transmit to our children. Our hopes, threats, frustration and yearning facing the society we live in, led by beliefs and politics; all ingredients each reader could picture in his own history. His Bayan swings between nostalgia and hope, between regrets and acceptance.
If the feeling of inner peace might be communicative, this book reminds the actual situation in Ukraine, the political issues, separation of families, the lack of access to health among other issues. Out of solidarity, Ivan as many others older persons might die from cold and forget by their society. The writer manages to share with us his preoccupations tactfully, reminding us this forgotten crisis and its survivors all around the world.
—Anne Filarizzo Pla—
PRAMUDITH D RUPASINGHE 