I recently sat in on an interview with Father Timothy Danaher for Fare Forward’s Death Issue. Danaher has had a lot of experience talking with people who are about to die, but he says that there’s no preparation that can make you ready to talk to a dying person—though in another sense, everyone is equally equipped. “If you’re constantly learning to be human, and to be Christian, those are the things you go back to,” he says. And in the end, talking to a dying person isn’t really any different from talking to someone on say, a plane. Except that when someone is on their deathbed, there’s a little more urgency to the conversation.

Eugene Vodolazkin’s newest novel, Brisbane, is about many things, but at heart, I think it’s about precisely that—about learning to be human, and to be Christian, especially in the face of death. Which is another way of saying, it’s about the universal experience of learning how to live. That Vodolazkin is tackling these sorts of fundamental questions again will not surprise readers of his last novel, Laurus, though this time instead of adopting the idiom and atmosphere of medieval Russia, he has created an equally convincing late Soviet Ukraine and modern-day Munich and St. Petersburg.

The novel opens with a section labeled “April 25, 2012, Paris–Petersburg,” and with a sense of impending disaster:

Performing at Paris’s Olympe, I can’t play a tremolo. Or rather, I can, but not accurately, not cleanly—I play it like a beginning guitarist, producing a muffled gurgling, not notes. No one notices, and the Olympe explodes in ovations. Even I forget my failure… How could I have stumbled in concert?

Our narrator is Gleb Yanovsky, a world-famous guitarist of the sort that people recognize on planes and ask for autographs in the street. He is also an authentically creative artist, happily married, financially successful, and although he doesn’t quite know it yet, dying.

Immediately after this ominously imperfect concert, Gleb meets a writer named Nestor on a plane. Spooked by the tremolo he couldn’t play, he agrees to let Nestor write a book about him. They begin right then and there, with the story of Gleb’s first musical failure: when, the night before first grade, he failed to reproduce a rhythm for his father, who promptly declared him the first musically untalented person in the family. “It’s too bad,” he says. And that’s the end of the conversation.

In response to this pronouncement, Gleb ignored the bad news and enrolled in music classes anyway, beginning with the traditional Ukrainian domra when it turned out his hands were too small to properly hold the neck of a guitar. And in response to his disastrous tremolo, he tries for some time to forget what happened at the Olympe and return to his normal life. He continues playing concerts, avoiding his emails, riding his bike through the Munich parks with his wife, Katya. But though he resists getting his tremor “checked out,” it’s getting worse. It’s clear that something is very wrong, and even Gleb himself isn’t really surprised when he’s finally diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.