Skip to main navigation Skip to main content

Graywolf Press is proud to announce a series of events throughout 2024 celebrating fifty years of adventurous publishing, featuring debut and longstanding authors and taking place in New York City, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Chicago, and Tucson. More here

Book Title

Compartment No. 6

Subtitle
A Novel
Author 1
Rosa Liksom; Translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers
Body

A sad young Finnish woman boards a train in Moscow, in the waning years of the Soviet Union. Bound for Mongolia, she’s trying to put as much space as possible between her and a broken relationship. Wanting to be alone, she chooses an empty compartment—No. 6.—but her solitude is soon shattered by the arrival of a fellow passenger: Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov, a grizzled, opinionated, foul-mouthed former soldier. Vadim fills the compartment with his long and colorful stories, recounting in lurid detail his sexual conquests and violent fights.

There is a hint of menace in the air, but initially the woman is not so much scared of or shocked by him as she is repulsed. She stands up to him, throwing a boot at his head. But though Vadim may be crude, he isn’t cruel, and he shares with her the sausage and black bread and tea he’s brought for the journey, coaxing the girl out of her silent gloom. As their train cuts slowly across thousands of miles of a wintry Russia, where “everything is in motion, snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people and thoughts,” a grudging kind of companionship grows between the two inhabitants of Compartment No. 6. When they finally arrive in Ulan Bator, a series of starlit and sinister encounters bring this incantatory story about a ruined but beautiful country to its powerful conclusion.


Share Title

List Price
$16.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-747-4
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
192
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
A wickedly mischievous, darkly imaginative, and completely unforgettable ride

About the Author

Rosa  Liksom
Credit: Pekka Mustonem
Rosa Liksom was born in a village of eight houses in Lapland, Finland, where her parents were reindeer breeders and farmers. She spent her youth traveling Europe, living as a squatter and in communes. She paints, makes films, and writes in Helsinki.
More by author

Lola Rogers is the translator of The Colonel’s Wife and Compartment No. 6 by Rosa Liksom. She has translated Finnish novels by Riikka Pulkkinen and Sofi Oksanen, among others. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

More by author

Praise

  • Compartment No. 6 unfolds like a poem. . . . A lingering sense of the landscape and enduring survival remains.”Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
  • “[Compartment No. 6 is] a book to be read slowly, savoring the writing. The author gives us striking characters and vivid descriptions of early spring in what was the Soviet Union.”Pioneer Press
  • “[Liksom's] rapturous descriptions, filled with minutely observed details, mix together the beautiful and the banal, the ugly and the sublime.”—The Rumpus
  • “[An] impressionistic travelogue of a novel.”Publishers Weekly
Back to Table of Contents