The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko

Summary (from the publisher): A hilarious, heart wrenching, and powerful debut novel about a disabled boy who finds love and hope in a Russian hospital.

Seventeen-year-old Ivan Isaenko is a life-long resident of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus. Born severely deformed, yet mentally keen with a frighteningly sharp wit, strong intellect, and a voracious appetite for books, Ivan is forced to interact with the world through the vivid prism of his mind. For the most part, every day is exactly the same for Ivan. That is until the seventeen-year-old Polina arrives at the hospital. At first, Ivan resents Polina. She steals his books. She challenges his routine. The nurses like her. But eventually, he is drawn to her and the two forge a romance that is tenuous and beautiful and everything they never dared dream of. And now Ivan wants something, whereas before he survived by being utterly detached from things and people: Ivan wants Polina to live.

Hilarious and full of heart, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is a story about finding hope within the most desperate of circumstances, and it is one that readers won't soon forget.

 

Review: I received an advance readers' edition of this book as a giveaway on Goodreads.

 

Ivan Isaenko is seventeen years old and has spent his whole life in the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus. Ivan was born with a severely deformed body but a mentally astute mind. Aside from a kind nurse, Ivan spends each day alone and in the same way until Polina, a seventeen-year-old orphan suffering from cancer, arrives at the hospital. Ivan and Polina become friends and give Ivan a reason to hope and to care for others.

 

The frame story of this novel is that Ivan's journal was discovered by a journalist filming a documentary in Belarus. Ivan and the other children being treated are the result of the fictional catastrophic radiation explosion in the Ukraine in 1986. Ivan's story is told in the first person, in a series of journal entries recounting his life story. He is frank and unsentimental about his poor physical state and living circumstances, and conveys the facts without self-pity: "My body is horribly incomplete. I only have one arm (my left) and the hand attached to the end of it is deficient in digits (I have two fingers and a thumb). The rest of my appendages are short, asymmetrical nubs that wiggle with fantastic effort. [...] Mostly, I choose to leave the hell of my surroundings in favor of the slightly more palatable hell of my mind" (9).

 

Stambach seems intent on disgusting his reader with senseless scenes. For instance, Ivan takes an interest in a disabled toddler and (for not fully clarified reasons) wants to learn how to change the boy's diaper. He approaches this by practicing on himself: "I removed the diaper, which, by now, I could do quite easily, and used the towel in my room to clear out all the chocolate pudding that managed to coat every crack and contour of my backside" (27). Aside from grossing out the reader, I'm not sure what the purpose of this scene is. Perhaps the author was attempting to highlight the odd manners of a boy raised with little social contact or perhaps to highlight his latent compassion for other children. Either way, this seemed a flawed way to go about achieving these aims.

 

Ivan tells the reader that his "favorite pastime is to act catatonic and eavesdrop on conversations among nurses and doctors. This feigned obliviousness disarms the adults into lengthy streams of uncensored talk; it's the only way I can get accurate news and information" (11). I found it difficult to believe that nurses wouldn't notice that Ivan was smart and was fooling them. Furthermore, the whole premise of this novel rests on the supposedly grand friendship between Ivan and Polina. Yet I never saw much evidence of true depth of feeling between the two, who are largely thrown together by circumstance and spend very little time together before Polina becomes very ill. As a reader, it was difficult to see the supposedly profound affect Polina's friendship has on Ivan.

 

The book reads like a post-Soviet Union telling of The Fault in Our Stars, minus the depth of feeling or connection between its starring characters. Although Ivan has a lonely and tragic life, I was less than moved by the writing and characters of this novel.

 

Stars: 3