At 50, Gleb Yanovski, an internationally celebrated guitar virtuoso, is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Gleb accepts an offer from a Russian writer, Sergei Nesterov (writing under the penname Nestor), to recount his life for a biographical book. They meet regularly for several years and Gleb recalls his life: childhood spent in Kiev, university studies in St Petersburg, and years in Munich, where Gleb lives with his German wife, Katharina. Munich becomes a platform for Yanovski’s rapid career development, first as a tutor of Russian and guitar at a theological collegium, later as a prodigy guitarist touring in major international venues.

Gleb’s life appears in these recollections as a continuous string of changing attitudes towards music and death, and the connection between the two grows tighter — clashing and balancing — over the years. And Gleb thus sees the case for his domra, the first instrument he learned to play, as a coffin that figuratively “poisoned his life”.

Witnessing a tragic accident with a drowned girl in the Dnepr River causes Gleb to abandon music school — for Gleb, death defies music, just like any other activity. Gleb’s life-changing discovery prompts his grandfather to bring him to church. It is then that Gleb learns to see music as a way to overcome time, as a path to eternity. This becomes the birth of Gleb’s extraordinary gift as a performer, something that will support him throughout his life, especially when his grandparents and the father pass away. This is likely why Parkinson’s disease shatters Gleb so severely: deprived of music as his guardian against death, the illness makes him especially vulnerable.

And then Gleb meets Vera, an exceptionally gifted thirteen-year-old musician, whom he — together with his wife — willingly embraces as a longed-for daughter. Vera, however, is dying of a rapidly developing kidney cancer, and their determination to fight the girl’s imminent death is not enough. In his phone conversation with the girl’s mentally ill mother, Gleb explains Vera’s absence by saying the girl departed for Brisbane, the dream city of Gleb’s mother, where she, too, once went.

Vodolazkin is loyal to his literary universe in his new novel: he dwells on time and eternity. In Brisbane, death is overcome not through music, since music gives up on the protagonist through illness, and not through love, since his new-found daughter, Vera, dies during an operation: death is defeated through memories. Ultimately, the only path to Brisbane, the world of Gleb’s dream, the world where time does not exist — is the word.