"The Revolution of Marina M."

Janet Fitch is a writer and a teacher of fiction writing.

She is the author of the #1 national bestseller White Oleander, a novel translated into 24 languages, an Oprah Book Club book and the basis of a feature film, and Paint It Black, also widely translated and made into a 2017 film.

Fitch applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, The Revolution of Marina M., and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Revolution of Marina M. turns out to be deliciously representative of the novel. Would a person encountering this page be likely to read on? I’d say he or she would be more likely to want to back up—it’s the aftermath of my protagonist Marina’s first sexual encounter, with a seductive young man named Kolya Shurov. She’s had a passion for him since she was six and he was twelve. Now she’s sixteen and he’s a 22-year-old officer in the Tsarist army. It’s 1917, the midst of WWI, the moment before the start of the Russian Revolution.

“It looked like we’d fought a war on the white sheets, completely untucked from the striped mattress ticking, the puffy eiderdown crushed, everything soaked with our sweat.”

The Revolution of Marina M. has a wide erotic streak. My protagonist, Marina Makarova, is a passionate, daring girl who is discovering politics, herself and her powers as a poet and as a woman. Sex is a laboratory of self, then as now--a young woman testing, pushing the limits, a wild revolution in itself.

Each erotic encounter in the book is absolutely specific to the partner and the circumstances, because for me, sex is a type of dialogue—an aspect of relationship that is only known to the two participants.  Communication is not always clear, it can be murky and stemming from questionable motives, terrifying, pitiable, obsessive or transcendent.

Visit Janet Fitch's website.

--Marshal Zeringue