I want to start this with an anecdote from the fabled Presidential Primaries of 2016. I was working for a for-profit geriatric nursing company1. I was reading The Brothers Karamazov at lunch. Nursing is not known for the intellectual acumen of its practitioners (I can say it, both grandmothers were nurses), and yet it still pissed me off when some white woman named Tammy was like “IS THAT A RUSSIAN BOOK? YUCK!”
Yuck indeed!2
Speaking of yuck, I have not read Eat, Pray, Love, nor do I intend to. Missed the boat on it. Not the target audience. I’ve opened a few fortune cookies in my day; I get the gist.
I will also not be reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book The Snow Forest, but for different reasons.
The Snow Forest is (was) a novel. It is apparently about a group of Siberians who start an environmentalist commune in “the 1900s”3 to resist Soviet deforestation or something. It was due to be published in eight months (February 2024).
But Penguin Random House is not moving forward, as Gilbert announced on Twitter. Why not? Well, because it’s set in “Russia.” Never mind Siberia isn’t Russia. I guess it used to be, but I wouldn’t get too hung up on the historicism of this whole affair… Lord knows no one else has.
No, Gilbert and Penguin Random House are pulling The Snow Forest because it is vaguely Russian. As the linked piece indicates, a whopping 500 people—who know as much about the book if not less than you or me—gave The Snow Forest’s Goodreads page 1-star reviews.4
We are to believe these accounts belonged to Ukrainians, which I tend to doubt. If you are actively being invaded, or worse, a refugee, I would hope you would have better uses of your time than leaving shitty Goodreads reviews. There’s plenty of dams or pipelines to blow up, I would think.
And even if these accounts are real, I would think that a book written by the Eat, Pray, Love lady would be of almost no consequence when compared to Bakhmut being turned into a parking lot. Toughen up.
Furthermore, I would hope that $75 billion and counting in aid would ameliorate the ANGER and SORROW somewhat, but then again, it sounds like a lot of it is getting flipped and sent to Zelenskyy’s Italian dacha .
Now, I would hate to call into question the sincerity of anyone’s flagfucking. However, at the risk of stating the obvious, Russia—one of the largest contiguous land masses—is real, and although I’m sure The Snow Forest sucks right out loud, it stands to reason Americans may have the TEMERITY to acknowledge it in fiction occasionally.
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