I heard about the book Ex-Son by Sasha Filipenko, so to speak, in passing. Then, unexpectedly, it started gaining more attention when a theater production based on it was banned in Minsk. Later, it came up in the news again when the production was eventually staged, but in Kyiv. It was heavily promoted, as if it were some sort of “protest book.” However, I don’t like such loud narratives, so I would have let it pass me by if not for several acquaintances who read the novel and gave it decent ratings. So, I decided to give it a chance.
Sasha Filipenko, a native of Minsk, moved to Russia during his university years, where he worked as a journalist, screenwriter, and even a host of several well-known TV projects. As a writer, he has been favored by prestigious literary awards. In 2020, when protests began in Belarus, he actively supported political prisoners, and it seems to me that this is when Ex-Son got a second wind, moving from a rather marginal niche to the wider audience of mainstream readers.
The novel itself was written in 2014, but I personally don’t understand why it is so often associated with the events of 2020. There is no direct connection whatsoever.
The protagonist of the book is a teenager named Francisk, who is unremarkably studying to become a cellist at a music college. However, due to a tragedy at a mass celebration, he falls into a coma for 10 years and wakes up in a country that hasn’t changed much during his “absence.”
The author never explicitly names the country, and it is supposedly “not Belarus.” However, all the differences from the real country and its history are emphasized by a single word—”Germants.” This is how the characters refer to the Germans, whether they are talking about wartime events or modern life, including trips abroad for children to recover with foreign families. It’s obvious that the city depicted is Minsk and that nearly all the historical events correspond to modern Belarus.
The tragedy that essentially begins the book is a real and harrowing wound in the history of independent Belarus. On May 30, 1999, during a sudden thunderstorm, 53 people were crushed to death in a stampede on the steps leading to the entrance of the Nyamiha (Nemiga in Russian) metro station. For a peaceful Belarus, it was like a bomb exploding, like a terrorist attack. I say this based on my own memories and feelings. Following those events, to process my emotions, I even wrote a highly amateurish story that I no longer wish to show anyone. At the time, it was a way to cope with the events, as one of the 40 young women who died that day was my former classmate. Three years later, a monument was erected at the site of the tragedy:
The quote from Wikipedia:
At the site of the tragedy, near the entrance to the Nyamiha metro station, a memorial was installed on May 30, 2002. It consists of 53 bronze flowers (40 roses and 13 tulips, representing the number of women and men who died), scattered across metaphorical steps with the inscription, “53 scars on the heart of Belarus. May 30, 1999,” as well as a small chapel with a metal memorial plaque inside.
Why am I talking about this so much? To show that the novel’s starting point is a real and deeply painful event, one that in itself cannot leave any Belarusian indifferent.
However, as the story progresses, it doesn’t directly exploit this theme or these emotions. It is merely the starting point, a way to plausibly show how the protagonist could fall into a coma. The majority of the book is not so much about Francisk himself as it is about his grandmother’s struggle for his life, while everyone around her, including the attending doctor and even Francisk’s own mother, has given up on him, writing him off as a vegetable who will never return to life.
Francisk lies in a coma for ten years while the country around him continues living its life. Only a few people remain in his immediate circle. His grandmother practically lives in his hospital room, constantly telling her semi-conscious grandson about everything happening around them. A school friend doesn’t forget him and doesn’t abandon him. And then there’s the ordinary hospital nurse, who, while she hasn’t grown fond of her peculiar patient, has gotten used to him and his grandmother over the years, becoming a kind of comrade-in-arms.
Of course, at some point, Francisk wakes up, against all odds. He moves from one life into that same life ten years later, but it seems like the world has frozen in time, as if nothing has truly changed. Sure, some things have happened—life has become more stable. But the people, the expectations, the hopes… they seem to be the same. For someone who has missed ten years, this should be a comfort—you’re almost in familiar surroundings. But Francisk can’t find himself in this new reality, where most people have long since buried him in their minds, where he is no longer needed by anyone. And so, it is hard for him to fit into this new old reality. He cannot understand how it is possible for “nothing to have changed” in ten whole years. And even those around him, who might realize that something should have changed in such a span of time, still live in this “frozen” world. A kind of sanctuary, where much is deliberately preserved “in its original form.”
Here, I would return to the city. Although it is a certain “unnamed” city, Sasha Filipenko describes real places. Francisk’s mother’s apartment and his grandmother’s apartment are located in a very specific district. And as it happens, while reading about where and how the protagonist moves, I didn’t need to use my imagination at all. This is the neighborhood where my own childhood took place. My first school was here, I went to training sessions here, my classmates lived in these buildings. And this is where my own grandmother lived. These are not fictional places—I was simply “walking the streets” of my childhood. That’s why it was almost impossible to detach and not try to view the events and story described without linking them to the realities of Belarus. And the author doesn’t set himself such a goal either—he makes only the minimal effort to note that “the events and characters are fictional and have no relation to reality.”
But let’s return to the protagonist. Finding himself in a world that is both new and old for him at the same time, he cannot find his place. And just when a small glimmer of hope appears, life strikes him again with another tragedy. Once more, it’s a real and horrifying event for all Belarusians: the metro bombing at the Kastrychnitskaya (Oktyabrskaya in Russian) station. From one tragedy, through ten years of “nonexistence,” to another tragedy—and a complete loss of self and meaning in life.
The book genuinely resonated with me, but at the same time, it unsettled me. I struggled for a long time to understand my feelings about it.
In 2021, after the events of 2020 in Belarus, when global media outlets were suddenly talking about my homeland, the novel was slated for publication in Europe (and it has likely already been released). This was framed with the notion that the events described in the book “should help people understand what is happening in Belarus now.” But what does 2020 have to do with it? What is there to “help understand”? Yes, it’s about perpetual stagnation, but it doesn’t really show the current events, nor the lives and struggles of the people, or why what happened, happened. And it was written six years before 2020. Therefore, only those who didn’t spend the past ten years in a coma but lived in this country and experienced everything firsthand, as they say, will truly grasp what the book is about and what’s “between the lines.”
I let the book sit for a while before expressing my opinion. But even after a couple of months of reflection, I still couldn’t articulate what message the author might have been trying to convey. Love and faith, even in the impossible—great. But why Belarus, then? This could have been shown in any other setting without tying it to a real country and real events. And if he intended to say something specific about his homeland, that remained “off-screen.” Or rather, if I accept that one of the messages was about this frozen state, then too much focus was placed on the coma. It’s as if two ideas intertwined but never clarified which was more important or where the story was meant to lead.
One reader left a very insightful comment on Goodreads:
This is a book about love.
About a grandmother’s unconditional love for her grandson. About a grandson’s love for his grandmother. About how important it is to fight for your loved ones. About how every day we invest something in our children, shaping their personalities. And it’s also about loneliness.
And I agree that this is indeed a strong leitmotif in the book. But personally, I was bothered by the fact that the author tied in real and deeply painful events from my homeland. And he did it twice. Yes, he showed how the fate of one of the victims unfolded (or could have unfolded)… but the Nemiga tragedy is just a trigger here; Francisk could have suffered for a million other reasons, and the subsequent narrative would not have changed in the slightest.
Here’s what I took away from the book:
- A story about faith and love for one’s loved ones.
- About the loneliness of someone who has “fallen out of the flow,” and the inability to catch up and fit back in when the context has passed you by.
- And a little reflection on the homeland, though here it feels rather artificially inserted, sometimes even unnecessary for the overall narrative.
As a result, I’m inclined to rate the book quite moderately. I don’t regret reading it, but I also don’t share the enthusiastic praise and epithets attributed to it.
My rating: 3/5
