Past
When I was six or seven, I used to sneak onto the balcony where we had a big desktop computer. There, I would retype the stories I had first scribbled into oversized accounting ledgers. Years later, I came back home and read them again. What I felt was a strange mix of mania and despair: one story slipped into another mid-sentence, with no chance of being understood or ever finished. Back then, at six, I wanted to become a journalist—but I never did, “because they get killed.”
Inspiration in reality
This year, on March 23rd, we were in Berlin, introducing our child to relatives. On the last day before our train, we went for a walk in Spreepark. Our stroller didn’t survive the trip—Dennis fixed its handle with plastic zip ties. The park was abandoned, and what struck me most were the scattered pieces of a broken plastic dinosaur. I loved the visual of it. That’s when I thought: it would be fascinating to write a book about this park.
I did it
Five months later, I did. Each chapter tells the story of a different ride, of the people who could have lived there, and of all of us who live on the fringes in Berlin—or elsewhere. All the chapters are in Russian, except one, because the character simply doesn’t speak Russian.
As a child, I often got bored of my own stories because I already knew how they would end. With this one, that never happened. The book is now available on Bookmate, MTS Strokes, and LitRes.