The most fascinating thing in this book is the task that the author has set for himself: to unravel the mystery of death. Find out what awaits each of us beyond the limit indicated by the cessation of breathing and heartbeat. One must have the courage of a debutant to dare to comprehend this most painful secret. The talented author of the novel “After the Comma” is a debutant. And his neophyte courage - the reader will see for himself - justifies itself. Even if the answers to many questions are never found, the reader is introduced to the mystery of the living life beating around us. If I really died, then who will wash all these clothes? They'll probably throw it away. And they also threw in the pink stone pendant that he gave me. It wouldn't get lost. I never managed to find out what this stone is called. So what, now I’ll never be able to find out? The debutante’s novel, nearly six hundred pages, was published by a prestigious publishing house with a foreword by Andrei Bitov. It begins with a comma, breaks off mid-sentence and tells about the ordeals of the soul, plying between shadow and light. A young woman who died in a car accident continues to exist not far from her own mutilated body. Her shell-deprived “I” risks getting lost in a mess of impersonal energies and signs; centrifugal forces pull apart and fragment consciousness. And only memory, “unflattering memory,” which creates and judges, is capable of resisting entropy. This, in essence, is immortality. The novel is read in one breath and leaves the impression of the author’s supernatural involvement in the posthumous experience...