When hermit crabs molt, their eyes become muddy, because they also shed the skin of their eyes, and it seems they reflect the unbearable pain and suffering of losing their carapace and somehow having to grow a new one. TRANSCRIPT, the first novel of an American Russian author Anna Mazurova, is an attempt to catch one of these molting moments of human life, an obvious molting moment of moving to a foreign country with a different culture seen through muddy eyes of a terribly uncomfortable newcomer fully preoccupied with building a new home, a new carapace. Acquiring a new kit of survival tools, of which language is one, the human crab is always mercifully distracted from thinking about the permanent fixtures - meaning of life and, primarily, its social meaning where every individual step we take has an imperceptible but very real effect of shaping the history of the species, bringing closer or further away that moment when the ape we are observing will finally became human, responsible, conscious, aware, appreciative. Granted, the vision through muddy eyes is distorted, but the magnificently woven language in which the book is written reminds us that troubled waters (the rock of a new environment is indeed a huge weight to trouble them!) reflect the beauty, the responsibility, and the truth of being alive and growing in a very bright and artistically unique light.
