Anastasia's Midnight Song

Longing to cure her deep, hysterical fears involving a diabolical dream fox living inside her womb, Anastasia T. Grace takes a post making occult mirrors in the hope that she may someday convince herself that she commands the power to banish her nemesis into one of her creations. However, when a troubled, young Englishman grows obsessed with her beauty, she is forced to confront the pressing, all-too-real, misogynistic danger of male psychopathy.

read an excerpt...

Saint Petersburg, Russia. 27 August, 1917.

At dusk, Anastasia T. Grace collected the urn containing her mother’s ashes and brought the vessel to Moskovsky Prospekt Railway Station. ‘The cremation services went well,’ Anastasia whispered, holding the urn close. ‘You’ve been purified by fire, and now I’m taking you to be blessed by water. Baptised. Yes, Mama, I’ll sprinkle your remains all about the Arkhangelsk shore.’

A memory of their first journey to the White Sea whirled Anastasia back to the past—that time her mother had described Arkhangelsk as a harbour town. And in the days of 1907, that was all it was.

So, why did we travel there? A lady from the House of Fabergé asked Mama to meet a steamship out of Reykjavík. Yes, Mama aimed to collect a consignment of volcanic glass.

The hissing and shunting of the train brought her back to the present. It’s 1917. Clutching the urn containing Mother’s ashes, she pulled herself up into the train. Then she edged along the narrow passage and slid into the sleeping car. She placed the urn beside the bed.

With a rumbling of the wheels and a piercing whistle, the train set off on the long journey to Arkhangelsk.

Late in the night, as the train approached a deserted outpost and clanked over a section of the line lacking proper railway ties, Anastasia jerked awake. Sitting up, she looked to her lap and revisited that first journey, a decade ago, that moment the engineer had jammed on the brake and she’d been shaken awake as she had just now. What happened that night?

 

my review... 

This is a story of mental health, Russia’s 1917 Revolution in St. Petersburg, and bizarre and unearthly happenings. Sounds like some weird stuff written on top of a real, live revolution, doesn’t it? I suppose it is.

This felt like I was living in a phantasmagorical dream. I always felt a little off balance while reading Anastasia’s Midnight Song. Its overall story exists, but a swirling, dizzying sort of unreal cloud was going on around my head. Anastasia, believing that a fox lives in her womb, and poor, gangly, pale and ugly Jack somehow make quite a focus of the story.

Having said all that, I must say that Laszlo’s writing is somewhat poetic and dreamlike. What seems strange and esoteric to me has nothing to do with his writing skill. This is a well-constructed, surreal story that I think will strike many people in many different ways. 

about M. Laszlo...

M. Laszlo is the pseudonym of a reclusive author living in Bath, Ohio. According to rumor, he based the pen name on the name of the Paul Henreid character in Casablanca, Victor Laszlo.

 M. Laszlo has lived and worked all over the world, and he has kept exhaustive journals and idea books corresponding to each location and post.

 It is said that the maniacal habit began in childhood during summer vacations—when his family began renting out Robert Lowell’s family home in Castine, Maine.

 The habit continued into the 1990s when he lived in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem and worked as a night clerk in a Palestinian youth hostel. In recent years, he revisited that very journal/idea book and based Anastasia’s Midnight Song on the characters, topics, and themes contained within the writings.

 M. Laszlo has lived and worked in New York City, East Jerusalem, and several other cities around the world. While living in the Middle East, he worked for Harvard University’s Semitic Museum. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio and an M.F.A. in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.

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