The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko: A Novel

by Scott Stambach Narrated by Dan Bittner

Overview

The Fault In Our Stars meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Seventeen-year-old Ivan Isaenko is a life-long resident of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus. For the most part, every day is exactly the same for Ivan, which is why he turns everything into a game, manipulating people and events around him for his own amusement.

Until Polina arrives.

She steals his books. She challenges his routine. The nurses like her.

She is exquisite. Soon, he cannot help being drawn to her and the two forge a romance that is tenuous and beautiful and everything they never dared dream of. Before, he survived by being utterly detached from things and people. Now, Ivan wants something more: Ivan wants Polina to live.


This program features a bonus interview with the author.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

05/16/2016
Stambach’s impressive, well-structured debut is set at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus. Seventeen-year-old Ivan Isaenko has lived there all his life. Due to the Chernobyl disaster just before his birth, Ivan has no legs, one arm, a hand with a thumb and two fingers, and a droopy face that makes it difficult to speak or smile. Unlike many of his fellow patients, Ivan is self-aware and stubborn, as he describes in one of his amusing short lists: “There are two things I’ve learned... (A) I can eventually... learn to do just about anything with only one arm... and (B) if there is a God, then I should thank Him for my thumb, since it is the only thing that makes (A) possible.” Ivan’s clever, bleak observations about life at the hospital—an underfunded post-Soviet hell mitigated only by the inexhaustible kindness of the maternal nurse Natalya Beneshenko—make up the book’s first half. In the second, he narrates his love affair with Polina Pushkin, a recently orphaned 16-year-old dying of leukemia. Through their romance built on mischief, Russian literature, and a need for recognition, Ivan begins to grapple with his fears and take responsibility for his future. Stambach’s surprising, empathetic novel takes on heavy themes of illness, suffering, religion, patience, and purpose, with a balanced mix of humor and heart. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders & Associates. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is comic and staggeringly tragic, often both in a single sentence… A grittier, Eastern European, more grown-up The Fault in Our Stars." –Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child

“Ivan Isaenko is a beautiful, heartbreaking, and hilarious novel whose closest literary relative might be One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest... Will appeal to any reader with a beating heart—a true gem.” –Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs

“The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is told in the voice of Ivan…His imagination may help him survive. And, as audience, we can only read about his life and allow our hearts to break more than once.” –Psychology Today

"Impressive... Stambach's surprising, empathetic novel takes on heavy themes of illness, suffering, religion, patience, and purpose, with a balanced mix of humor and heart."—Publishers Weekly

"An auspicious, gut-wrenching, wonderful debut." —Kirkus (starred review)

"The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko must be counted as a miracle of a book.” –BookPage

"An extraordinarily brave and original debut. Ivan is an unforgettable narrator, and his story ripples with intelligence, humor, heartbreak, and humanity." –Carolina De Robertis, author of The Gods of Tango

“Only a writer with considerable heart and imagination could transform a hospital for post-Chernobyl fallout kids into a captivating, complex, nearly magical world. Scott Stambach has done exactly that. And in the character of Ivan Isaenko he has created an irresistible narrator, just what one would hope for in a seventeen-year-old raised on Nabokov and Dostoyevsky: by equal measures self-aware, hilarious, quick-witted, and profane. He is an original in every sense of the word, and his story is a marvelous one.” –Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, National Book Award Finalist and author of Madeleine is Sleeping

“It would be an easy injustice to spackle Ivan Isaenko with a bunch of clichéd praise: hilarious, poignant, heart-warming, heart-wrenching. While these are true, Ivan is so much more. It’s an enchantingly acerbic and endearingly charming story about love, hope and humanity in the face of death; truly a tender and thoughtful reflection on our universal malady.” –Bradley Somer, author of Fishbowl

"The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is comic and staggeringly tragic, often both in a single sentence…Ivan Isaenko is one of the most surprising narrators I have encountered—witty, adolescent, well-read, at times quite vulgar, and confined to a life that seems nearly unlivable, until he discovers that even at Mazyr Hospital, love is possible. A grittier, Eastern European, more grown-up The Fault in Our Stars." –Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child

Library Journal

03/01/2016
Preempted by the publisher, a nice sign of enthusiasm, this work focuses on a 17-year-old who has lived his entire life in the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children. Soviet-style medical ethics or lack thereof frame an intimate story that the publicist calls One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest crossed with The Fault Is in Our Stars.

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-05-17
Ivan Isaenko was born 18 months after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded near Pripyat, Ukraine, in 1986, and like many newborns from that region, he came into the world with numerous health problems and physical abnormalities.In Ivan's case, he's missing legs and has just one three-fingered hand. But his brain works perfectly, and his sharp mind brings him to places dark, brooding, and inventive. The only home he's ever known is the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus, and he detests the other patients, most of whom lack the ability to communicate with the intellectual rigor he craves. On top of this, Ivan has never met his parents and has never had a visitor. He has no friends, save for elderly Nurse Natalya, who not only treats him as a worthy conversationalist, but brings him books, puzzles, and games to keep him occupied. It's not much, but it helps. Then, when he's 17, a new patient enters the mix. Orphaned Polina is everything Ivan is not—beautiful, able-bodied, lively, and full of teenage curiosity and sass. She's also suffering from leukemia. As she and Ivan bond, their deep conversations and passionate exchanges rip the boy from his solitude, and, for the first time in his life, he finds camaraderie and connection with a peer. Not surprisingly, he falls in love with Polina, and the pair's unfolding relationship is both tender and tragic. At the same time, their interactions are seasoned with humor, wit, and astute observation, and the hospital itself is as full a character as Ivan and Polina. What's more, despite the presence of a corrupt health care bureaucracy, the story highlights the ways random acts of kindness can illuminate individual lives and make the seemingly unbearable tolerable, if not wholly acceptable. An auspicious, gut-wrenching, wonderful debut.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171838058
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	08/09/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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