June 13, 2023, 1:16pm
Monday, June 12th, began with two literature-related tweets. One noted the replacement of newspapers in a bodega with a wall of Welch’s fruit gummies. “This says a lot about society,” went the tweet, which to be frank I don’t have a read on.
The other was a video post from Elizabeth Gilbert, the bestselling novelist who is most widely known for Eat, Pray, Love, but which Gilbert fans typically rank below some of her other novels. Gilbert addresses her fans as “Dear Ones.”
In the video, she announced that she would push back publication of The Snow Forest, a forthcoming February 2024 title from Riverhead Books about a Soviet family who escape into the forest, after an “overwhelming” amount of criticism on Twitter and Goodreads from Ukrainian users.
That was really all the information the internet had. There appears to be no statement from Riverhead at this point on Tuesday, June 13th.
However, we have thinkpieces on The Atlantic, Unherd, and PEN America, and a steady stream of “Liz noooo”-s on Twitter:
Are you telling me that the world is going be robbed – however briefly – of a new Elizabeth Gilbert novel?
This goes to far https://t.co/3zahJUlk2x
— Caitlin Flanagan (@CaitlinPacific) June 12, 2023
Obviously the soft-touch people on that website are unwell, but does this mean we…shouldn’t be reading books set in Germany, let alone America???? lol pic.twitter.com/yeBJFkKi5a
— Brandon (@blgtylr) June 12, 2023
surely elizabeth gilbert is doing this out of sheer boredom
— jo livingstone (@Jo_Livingstone) June 12, 2023
Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a very white feminist, colonial-imperialist take on travel that exoticized and romanticized indigenous people. Ukrainians don’t seem to be reacting to the book being set in Russia, but in the orientalist POV of Russian mysticism as political innocence
— El Norte Recuerda (@Vanessid) June 12, 2023
I applaud Elizabeth Gilbert’s choice to not publish a book about people resisting the Russian government, in order to avoid doing harm to people resisting the Russian government
— Adam O’Fallon Price (@AdamOPrice) June 12, 2023
It could not be more counterproductive for American cultural authorities to proclaim that they believe that even Russians who resist authoritarianism are irreparably tainted by their Russianness
— Erik Baker (@erikmbaker) June 12, 2023
unserious. almost certainly a bad novel; at least we’ve been spared https://t.co/LPVrEOXwqb
— Glenn Bertram (@glennbertram) June 12, 2023
Trying to parse the politics is difficult, since everyone comes to the news with slightly different monocle affixed to the eye peering into The Portal. There are those purporting to be Ukrainian (suspicious) on Goodreads (suspicious). There are those standing up for fictional stories about the Soviet Union a century prior the current iteration of a centuries-old shuffling of borders around the place we currently call Russia. There are those who genuinely wonder if a story about a reclusive forest family might accidentally perpetuate a pro-Putin viewpoint in novel form. There are those who wonder where the indigenous Siberian representation in the novel is. Then there are those who don’t want to read the novel particularly but feel it should be published on schedule for the good of the arts. (And some who feel bad for Riverhead.)
And that’s before we dig into the realm of subtweets, which read a bit like ChatGPT swallowed the Norton Anthology of Criticism.
The description of a novel is not the argument of the novel. If a good novel has an argument at all, then it will be the novel itself. You can’t know what the book stands for without reading the book.
— Matt Bell (@mdbell79) June 12, 2023
The February 2024 pub date overlaps with the February 24th three-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which came a few years after the annexation of Crimea. That appears to perhaps have prompted a campaign to mass review-bomb the title’s page on Goodreads with one-star reviews, based on the brief synopsis provided by the marketing department. Gilbert’s decision appears to be her own—I cannot find a statement otherwise from Riverhead—presumably something she can afford to do if, as a proven entity, she has other book projects on the boil to sub into the calendar.
We’d like to open the telephone lines and allow you to drop your best take on the situation below. If you would like to let us know your stance on The Saint, that would also be okay.