Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's VITA NOSTRA (Tr Julia Meitov Hersey, Narr Jessica Ball)

Book review sites, jacket copy and other official and unofficial arms of what passes for book promotion these days all seem to regard the remarkable Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's Vita Nostra as "dark academia" but the inestimable Popqueenie (to whom I owe a million more thanks for recommending this book to me) and I agree that where this book and its sequels really belong is in a category we've created, Beyond Yacht Rock-style, as The Magic of Language. To wit, it has more in common with books like Pontypool Changes Everything, The Flame Alphabet and Embassytown than it does with such wizarding school classics as the TERFing Classist Lady's books and Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Most of all, it is of a kind with R.F. Kuang's Babel, which overlaps these two made-up sub-genres in much the same way.

The school in Vita Nostra, the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies -- is a lot more rigorous than most literary magic schools, and I don't just say this because they use actual Latin on matriculation day. The curriculum is much more conceptual, bizzare, nearly incomprehensible, because in the Dyachenkos' magical system, the students first must undergo a lot of weird training designed to fundamentally alter, first their neurological makeups and, later, their very nature as physical beings on this earth, before they can ever even dream of exercising any abilities that defy or alter the laws of physics and other norms we consider as constituting realilty. Indeed; Vita Nostra feels to be fundamentally concerned with what the effect of supernatural-ish abilities would be on a human's nervous system than with depicting any jolly accidents with turning each other into critters or misfiring with a magic wand.

Our point of view character is a young woman, Sasha Samokhina, who catches the notice of a Torpa recruiter while on vacation with her mother. As Sasha's long-divorced Mum meets a wonderful new man and cautiously begins a relationship at a seaside resort, Sasha is stalked by an unsettling man in dark glasses and dark clothing that might at first seem like a Man in Black type but turns out to be much stranger and scarier; without ever spelling anything out or giving any overt demonstration of his power or how it works, he asserts a sudden and uncontestable power over Sasha. Within moments of his finally addressing her, she just knows that if she doesn't obey him, he has the power to destroy everything she loves or could love. Her Mum and Mum's new boyfriend, Valentin, are suddenly hostages to Sasha's good behavior.

Through a series of bizarre commands and requirements that begin with her being trapped in a time loop reliving the same single day of her vacation endlessly until she finally agrees to a bizarre sort of exercise program, and follow Sasha through her final year of high school, this man, Farit Kozhennikov, steers her right clear of her intended future -- a philology degree from her local university, which she will attend while continuing to live at home with her Mum, and someday a job as a professor -- and into enrollment at the mysterious Torpa Institute, where the professors are strange and the curriculum even stranger; their first year at school is largely spent poring over paragraph after paragraph of complete gibberish, which they must memorize and recite without ever being told what it's all for.

Of course what it is for is to begin transforming them from mere humans into, and here's where the Magic of Language stuff comes in -- parts of what is known as The Great Speech. And while most of the transformations are internal and not readily visible, some wild talents like Sasha's manifest early and unpredictably in the form of unstable metamorphoses that in some cases -- Sasha's and one of her stranger professors -- include the development of wings. Wings that actually let them fly about above the rooftops of Torpa late at night. 

Indeed, were it not for the fact that Vita Nostra -- the title coming from the Gaudeamus sung on the students' first day at the school -- contains no references to religion or spirituality beyond this title at all, I'd almost suspect that the school exists actually to turn humans into something very like angels, and yes of course once again I thought of my patron saint Jacopo Belbo (actually Umberto Eco, of course)'s quip that "God created the world by speaking; he didn't send a telegram" as Sasha's teachers carefully allow her only little drabs here and there of useful information about why she's at this school and being put through these courses of gibberish reading and, later, strenuous application of a peculiar form of mental geometry exercises.

Meanwhile, this is still at least in part a coming of age/school days novel, which means that yes, there is a soupçon of teen romance. The first fellow student Sasha meets upon arriving in the out-of-the-way town of Torpa, Kostya, becomes a bit more than her first friend, and she has another short but fairly intense relationship with a younger student in her second year at the school. These never overwhelm the overall plot or flavor of the story, though; they are all but inevitable experiences in a young person's life but they are very much not the point, which might frustrate readers who come into this expecting more dark academia but suited me just fine.

What I've found most remarkable about this book is how little anything gets spelled out for us but how perfectly we feel we understand what's at stake and what the consequences might be for Sasha if she fails, making the closing scenes of Vita Nostra a marvel of tension and anguish for all that what is actually going on is just the handing out of exam papers for the third year Placement Exam toward which they've all been working, the midway point of a Torpa education beyond which an impenetrable wall of mystery stands between first, second and third-year students and the final two years before graduate school.

Vita Nostra doesn't quite end on a cliffhanger as such, but does end on a note of possibility and ambiguity as Sasha experiences an even weirder Placement Exam than we've been led to expect. Having been given a general idea of the kind of part of the Great Speech she is going to manifest as and then Reverberate, she and we think maybe we know what's coming next, but boy do we not. So it was a good thing that a sequel, Assassin of Reality, has already been a) translated and b) released on audio; Jessica Ball's crisply British delivery was both enjoyable enough and unobtrusive enough for me to wish to continue this series on audio -- and I had a credit waiting to use to get that one, which I'm already devouring. And, well, there is a third book out in the world and it's already been translated, per Julia Meitov Hersey, but I don't know when it's going to be available and I'm getting pretty good at reading Russian and the Russian language ebook edition was just three bucks and so...