Bursting against the expectations

In our afternoon tea setting in Covent Garden here in London we have Natalie Meyer, literature critic from California who read and reviewed Pavel's latest book, James Rann who is currently translating IT'S TIME into English and your host Max Bollinger, the editor of Interactive Media and Urban Romantics. www.urban-romantics.com

This whole novel is about bursting out against a role, against the expectations laid out for us and against surroundings we've grown too comfortable in. That theme has been done before, of course, many times, the rebellion of youth against society, the need for immediacy and a return to our simple desires. But the way Kostin portrays this really struck a chord with me. Kostin often returns to his opening scene of the protagonist on the roof, watching the sunset and the horizon and the city. You begin to match it with Max's character: he is not crazy, he's just that sort of his person, that's what he does. Only later on in the novel are we forcibly brought back to that beginning and realize that there is in fact an underlying thread of urgency, an unanswered question, that Max takes it upon himself to discover, and that premeditated all of this.

Much of the book is a succession of impressions, of ruminations on life, on art, on reality, on our surroundings. The protagonist, Max, is reminiscent of a Fitzgerald-type narrator, pulled in every which way and wandering through the conflict of the story. Toward the end of the novel though we get struck with a realization, one which I didn't see coming probably more because I was absorbed in the protagonist's impressions and less because it wasn't predictable. - Natalie Meyer, California, USA