Ruska književnost i dalje je izvrsna ali iz prijevoda o tome samo naslućujemo. Znamo za Sorokina i Pelevina ali navodno je Mihail Šiškin trenutačno najjače ime (tko zna ruski može čitati njegove romane ovdje i ovdje). Evo bloga koji barem neizravno može popuniti neke rupe.
http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Friday, November 23, 2012
Dmitrii Danilov’s Description of a City
Reading Dmitrii Danilov’s latest book, Описание города (Description of a City) was a big, huge literary relief: after enjoying his spare but detailed Horizontal Position and “Black
and Green” very much, I’d wondered what he would (or possibly could!) do next. My hope—selfish, of
course—was that he would continue writing prose that is impersonal and I-less,
but deeply personal... and, somehow, expand into another dimension. Which is
exactly what Danilov does, in Description of a City, a book that is both very touching and quietly
funny, a book that describes—and, really, defines—a city he visits once a month
for a year. Beginning in January.
P.S. In case anyone wonders what city served as the model
for the city being described, it’s Bryansk, something Danilov told me before I
read the book, though I decided not to look at photos until finishing my reading.
One reason Danilov chose Bryansk: his tremendous respect for Leonid Dobychin, a
writer who lived in Bryansk. Of course Dobychin isn’t mentioned by name—he’s “выдающийся русский писатель” (an
eminent Russian writer)—but Description
of a City mentions monthly visits to the empty lot where Dobychin’s house
once stood. It is, writes Danilov, on a street named in honor of one of the
months, though the month is neither January or February. As I said, the book
got into my livers.
The narrator in Description
of a City catalogues his goals on the first page. A summary: walk around,
ride around, look around, stay in hotels, buy things, go from end to end many
times, walk the central street and other streets a million times, make the
place feel native so it gets under the skin. The city was chosen for its
railroad connections and relatively short distance from Moscow (six hours by
train), sports teams, wealth of industry, and dearth of tourist attractions. We
learn that it’s essentially flyover country: the city’s airport doesn’t have
many flights and the narrator sees planes flying overhead.
But my description of Description
is off. Danilov uses terms like these, which I’ll translate very literally:
- описаемый город –city being described
- гостиница, название которой совпадает с названием одного из областных центров Украины – hotel the name of which coincides with the name of one of the regional centers of Ukraine
- улица, названная в честь одного из месяцев – street named in honor of one of the months
- площадь имени одного из величайших злодеев в мировой истории – [city] square named for one of the greatest villains in world history
Part of what makes this nomenclature work is that the place
names start to pile up when the narrator goes from one train station to
another, crosses a certain street, or sees a certain building. This sometimes
creates absurdly long lists of names-that-don’t-name that might not seem to
mean much. But they become names for us, Description’s
readers, and they do have meaning—a lot of very marked meaning—even for a
foreigner. I know, for example, the habit of naming hotels after other cities
from the FSU, I know there are lots of Russian streets named after October, and
I know Lenin and Marx are still pretty popular on Russian maps.
The cumulative effect of all those names-that-aren’t-names surprised
me. Not only did I create a vivid mental picture of an imaginary city that drew
on all my travel—in the years I lived in Russia I went to lots of small cities
not unlike Danilov’s—but the city being described began to feel like a mythical,
almost mystical place thanks to all the descriptions of names that draw on
Soviet-era figures and clichés. Danilov has been called a new realist but his
realism is a very particular and peculiar realism. His realism is abstract and almost
transcendent, a realism with a lot of остранение, defamiliarization.
Danilov discusses words in other ways throughout the book,
asking, for example, about the use of the word ритуальный (ritual) instead of похоронный (burial)
when discussing funeral services. I’ve always
thought this was strange, too. Also: can a wooden square that is
obviously
intended for use as a sandbox be called a “sandbox” if it contains no
sand? And he wonders, throughout the book, about the expression “войти в печенки,” something the city being
described should do to him, though he doesn’t quite grasp the expression. I
don’t quite grasp the expression, either: literally it’s apparently “get into your livers”
(!) and the Oxford Russian-English dictionary has the translation “to plague
(someone)” for when something is, in Russian, in your livers. To
me it feels a lot like “get under the skin.” In
any case, at the very end of the book Danilov wraps things up nicely,
saying
there’s no longer any sense in talking about getting into livers. “Надо
назвать
вещи своими именами,” he says. Meaning his narrator is feeling compelled
to call
things by their true names so ‘fesses up: I don’t think it gives away
anything
at all to add that he says he has come to love that city… and of course
the confession doubles as the narrator’s explanation of the livers
expression.
So, yes, Description
of a City got under my skin and into my livers, too, thanks to Danilov’s
wonderful pile-ups of names that sometimes feel poetic, hours spent sitting on
benches at train stations, on seats of buses, on seats at stadiums. The
contrast of movement and transportation with open expanses and a meditative
state I’ve come to expect from Danilov is also lovely. Most of all, though, I
appreciate how Danilov uses language to deconstruct urban naming and describe a
city that readers can build—one generic, clichéd name or building at a time—into
imagined cities that draw on memories of real places and Soviet myths his readers
already know. It’s quite a nice trick.
 |
| The train station known as City Being Described-1. |
Sunday, November 11, 2012
City/Country: Dmitriev’s The Peasant and the Teenager
Andrei Dmitriev’s Крестьянин и тинейджер (The Peasant and the
Teenager), which won the “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” Yasnaya Polyana
award last month and is also on the short lists for this year’s Big Book and Russian
Booker prizes, is a novel composed of two intersecting character sketches. Dmitriev
draws his two title characters in great detail: middle-aged Paniukov, an Afghan
war veteran who lives in a Russian village, and teen aged Gera, a Muscovite who
comes to stay with Paniukov to avoid military service. They are brought
together by Vova, an old friend and former farming partner of Paniukov’s who
now lives in Moscow.
Though I didn’t count pages or scenes, it felt to me that Dmitriev
offered more backstory for the men—often about their not-so-happening relationships
with women—than present-day interaction. In the beginning of the book, Paniukov
still thinks about his youthful romance with Sanya, whom he sees around town, and
Gera is madly in love with Tatiana, who’s in Moscow and difficult to reach by
cell phone. There’s no cell signal in the village—this is my kind of place!—so he
has to travel to call her. I didn’t find much of interest in either romantic plot
line, both of which take up lots of pages, rehashing stories of love and loss
that I’ve heard, read, and witnessed elsewhere. I didn’t find much of interest
in the interactions between Paniukov and Gera, either; Dmitriev didn’t develop their
differences as much as I’d expected.
Still, I never thought about abandoning the book. The Peasant and the Teenager
is readable
thanks to Dmitriev’s writing and his ability to create texture in the
settings and secondary
characters—including a cow—that surround Paniukov and Gera. The texture
doesn’t always feel very new to me, either, but Dmitriev combines
elements to create atmosphere,
particularly in the village, that feels real, if only in a schematic
way. He
gives us villagers who speak only in the informal you (ты) to emphasize closeness, English-influenced
slang and poor spelling, a contrast of urban and rural bathhouses, walks that don’t
quite go into the woods, illegal wood cutting, and a group of hunters who stay with
Paniukov and Gera. As the designated drinker of the pair (Paniukov is a teetotaler),
Gera has vodka with the hunters, revealing himself a buzzkill by talking too much about
Suvorov. Dmitriev also has Paniukov tell stories of unpleasant village fates:
they begin to feel identical and dull to Gera, who’s been through a bit himself
because his brother is a drug addict abandoned by his family.
I came away from The
Peasant and the Teenager with mixed feelings. On the minus side, the novel felt
a bit awkward—not quite finished (or connected?) and not quite the right length—and
I prefer a book with more conflict between characters. Dmitriev raised
expectations that he’d reveal more about Paniukov and Gera than their been-there-read-that
love stories could show. On the positive side, all the details I described above
made this medium-length book perfectly pleasant to read, particularly given
supporting characters like Lika, who changes her hair color to stave off
boredom, and Paniukov’s expressive cow. I give Dmitriev extra credit for the
cow, who became my favorite character: it’s a rare book where I want to read more about a cow who’s at the center
of everything in a place without a cell signal.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
NOSE Finalists, 2012-2013
The NOSE Award named its [somewhat curious] list of finalists last week… here they are listed in Russian alphabetical order:- Elizaveta Aleksandrova-Zorina: Маленький человек (A Little Man), “a social novel with a detective [novel] plot,” according to the publisher’s description on Ozon.ru. Update on November 17, 2012: This book was also shortlisted for the 2012 Debut Prize for long fiction.
- Lora Beloivan: Карбид и амброзия (Carbide and Ambrosia), a short story collection.
- Sergei Gandlevskii: Бездумное былое (something like Feckless Bygone Days, though I almost missed the д and made this into Insane Bygone Days, an easier title to deal with, really…), a memoir about everything from family history to political protest in 2011.
- Mikhail Gigolashvili: Захват Московии (The Capture of Muscovy), a novel that a couple friends have enjoyed, though one said it’s not nearly as good as The Devil’s Wheel… then again, Gigolashvili set ridiculously high standards for himself with The Devil’s Wheel and The Interpreter.
- Georgii Davydov: Крысолов (The Rat Catcher), a novel that’s also on this year’s Booker short list.
- Nikolai Kononov: Бог без машины. История 20 сумасшедших, сделавших в России бизнес с нуля (God Without a Machine [or, heaven forbid, God Without a Car?]. The History of 20 Crazy People Starting Businesses in Russia from Nothing), nonfiction where the second part of the title seems to explain a lot more than the first. At least to me.
- Aleksei Motorov: Юные годы медбрата Паровозова (Male Nurse Parovozov’s Young Years), an autobiographical novel that Ozon readers have loved. This one sounds like very decent mainstream.
- Oleg Rashidov: Сколково. Принуждение к чуду (Skolkovo. Necessity for a Miracle), another business-themed book, this one about the Skolkovo Innovation Centre.
- Lev Rubinshtein: Знаки внимания (Signs of Attention), a collection of columns from various publications and various years.
There’s a lot of nonfiction in that list but, as of this
writing, fiction leads the online voting: Male Nurse Parovozov is first with 559
votes, followed by The Rat Catcher with
408 and Carbide and Ambrosia with 273.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Marina Stepnova’s Lazar Lindt and All His Women
Marina Stepnova’s Женщины Лазаря (Lazar’s Women) is one of “those” books: in this case, “those” books are the ones that compel me just a touch more than they repel me. Oddly, for this reader, “those” books have a tendency to be novels where form and content are absolutely inseparable (a big plus) and books that inexplicably leave me with painfully unforgettable scenes and atmospheres (an even bigger plus).
Moving on to the specifics…
Lazar’s Women, which
is billed as a family saga, begins in the early twentieth century and continues
to the present. And, yes, it truly is a family saga: each of the women—Marusya, Galina
Petrovna, and Lidochka—that the title encompasses occupies, with some overlap,
a specific historical period, and each (sort of) has her own place in the life
of one Lazar Lindt. In my reading, Lindt is almost an incidental character, first
feeling unrequited love for Marusya (his mentor’s wife) because of her welcoming
home, then marrying the all-too-young Galina Petrovna and cosseting her in
Soviet-era ways, and finally serving as a mythical figure in the life of his
granddaughter, Lidochka, whose mother drowns in the book’s first chapter,
leaving her to be raised by Galina Petrovna, now a rather cold widow.
The plot summary sounds pretty typical and trite, even (or
particularly?) when you add in Lazar’s role as a mathematician who works on a
bomb—Lazar is a creator and a destroyer all rolled into one, living in a remote
scientist city with the mathematical-sounding name Ensk—so it’s Stepnova’s
treatment of her material that gives the book its interest. I read the first
hundred or so pages of Lazar’s Women thinking
(as I still do) the novel is overwritten, overloaded, and overwrought… but then
I grasped the book’s logic and began reading it as an allegorical, abstract
representation of history, love, nonlove, and the effects of Soviet life on the
psyche that demands all Stepnova’s literary “stuff.”
In her review for Izvestia,
Liza Novikova likened Lazar’s Women to books by Liudmila
Ulitskaya and Dina Rubina—and I completely agree with Novikova, who cites themes
and devices that Stepnova handles differently, almost rebuking her
schoolmarmish elders—but I found myself thinking even more of Vasily Aksyonov’s
trilogy that’s known as Generations of
Winter in English and Московская сага (Moscow Saga) in Russian. I disliked, almost intensely, the trilogy but
couldn’t put it down. And I still can’t forget Aksyonov’s portrayals of the
Soviet era’s perversion of life and love. Lazar’s
Women had a similar effect on me, partly because it also dissects various types
of perversion, but I think Stepnova’s book is better composed—compiled might be an even better word—than
Aksyonov’s. For one thing, Stepnova uses her magpie techniques to offer all
manner of tchotchkes, emotions, and accessories but Aksyonov uses his in what I
consider a cheaper way, stuffing in cameo roles for historical figures,
including Stalin. Stepnova’s book is also far more affecting in its
affectedness: the book is even something of a tearjerker in spots. I fogged up
more than once, and one male reader told me he cried.
I think critic Viktor Toporov’s description of Lazar’s Women as “высокое чтиво” is perfect: my English-language version of that
would be “high-class pulp” because I read Lazar’s
Women as a piece of very readable postmodernism that offers traditional
alongside trashy. Stepnova combines elements and specifics like high class Soviet-era
privileges, low-class words related to the body, a bathroom scene involving a
smoking ballerina, the flexible saga genre, and a first-person narrator with an identity
and a very distinctive voice but only (apparently) a cryptically tangential presence
to the actual story.
Early in the book, though, that narrator tells doubting
readers to check Yandex, a Russian search engine, if s/he doesn’t believe the
facts in one part of the novel. Zakhar Prilepin criticizes the mention of Yandex in his review (which I read in Prilepin’s Книгочет), but I think he’s reading too literally
and missing the point. Prilepin says (in my translation), “People write books
about what Yandex doesn’t know and will never know,” adding that it doesn’t
matter if we believe (my italics) what’s in a book or not. Okay, sure, fiction
addresses mysteries of life that a search engine’s algorithms can’t grasp. I
found the Yandex advice a bit puzzling at first but the further I read Lazar’s Women, the more I read the
mention of Yandex as a a mysterious narrator’s reminder of the hierarchies and interdependencies of
fact and fiction… that isn’t so far off from
the novel’s portrayals of hierarchies within Soviet and post-Soviet society, which
Stepnova inserts into a work of fiction that manages to feel simultaneously historical
and anti-historical.
So, yes, Lazar’s Women
irritated the hell out of me with its diminutives, barfing, and ballet.
And, no, it’s not a gentle or genteel family saga. But that’s probably why the
book works so well, why it feels a little unusual and important, and why it’s been shortlisted
for this year’s NatsBest, Yasnaya Polyana, Big Book, and Russian Booker awards.
It didn’t win the first two, and I haven’t read all the Big Book and Booker
finalists, but Lazar’s Women is a
very good book, a book I can’t help but respect—IMHO, respect > liking, when
it comes to books—so I’d be more than happy if Stepnova won either award.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Ergali Ger’s Koma & the Long NOSE List
Two items this week: quick thoughts on Ergali Ger’s novella Koma (Coma) and then an abridged version of the NOSE award’s 2012 long list…
First, Koma/Coma: I think it’s safe to
say that Koma falls into the category
of чернуха (chernukha), that wrenchingly
crushing naturalism I’ve mentioned so many times before: Ger tells the story of
Komera (“Koma”) Protasova, a retired woman who loses everything when she joins
a church. Like most of the other chernukha I’ve read, Koma feels painfully—for both better and worse—obvious because the
reader senses impending doom. From Koma’s name, with its references to
communism and mental incapacity, to the mysterious Teacher of Koma’s church who
asks members to hand over their apartments so they can all eventually live in a
church-built complex, it was clear Koma’s retirement years would be anything
but utopian, communitarian, or golden.
Yes, Koma is
obvious but it is quality chernukha—it
was a finalist for the 2009 Belkin award and the title work of a collection shortlisted
for the 2011 Yasnaya Polyana award—and Ger tells his story logically, building
suspense as he shows how Koma’s life implodes. He also works in historical details
like the default of summer 1998; no comfort there. Koma reminded me of Roman Senchin’s The Yeltyshevs, another chernukha piece that builds methodically,
almost ploddingly, as it chronicles a family’s downfall. Though Koma is well-composed and suspenseful in
its hair-pulling chernukha way (“What other tragedy could possibly befall these
people?”), I certainly see why some (okay, even many) readers wouldn’t want to
relive the darker sides of ‘90s memories via fiction about religious and
housing crises. I thought Koma was
absorbing but it didn’t show me much I didn’t already know... plus the experience
of reading the book felt a little too
reminiscent of watching a predictable haunted house movie (not a favorite
genre) where the viewer wants to shout, “Don’t open that door!”
The Mikhail Prokhorov Fund’s NOSE Award
Long List is the fun part this week: This grab bag of a long list
contains 27 books—fiction, poetry, and nonfiction—so I won’t name them all,
though I’ll mention the several I’ve read plus the books that are on my
shelves. Then I’ll list all (I hope!) the other fiction…
First, the ones I’ve read, at least in part: I read and thoroughly
enjoyed Alexander Ilichevsky’s Анархисты (The
Anarchists) (previous
post) but couldn’t wend my way through Sergei Nosov’s Франсуаза, или Путь к леднику (Françoise Or the Way to the
Glacier), a book that’s already
been shortlisted for the NatsBest and Big Book and longlisted for the Booker; alas,
Nosov just couldn’t make a guy chatting with his herniated disc work for me. Books
already on the shelves are: Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Захват Московии (The Capture of Muscovy), which a couple friends have enjoyed;
Dmitrii Danilov’s Описание города (Description of a City), which I’m looking
forward to; and Alexander Terekhov’s Немцы
([The?] Germans), which already won this
year’s NatsBest. Three other familiar titles: Eduard Limonov’s В
Сырах (In Syry) and
Georgii Davydov’s Крысолов (The Rat Catcher) were both longlisted
for the 2012 Russian Booker, and Vladimir Lidskii’s Русский садизм (Russian Sadism) was on the 2012 NatsBest short list.
The NOSE list contains a fair bit of nonfiction—based on quick
glances, it looks like one book’s about Pelevin, another is about Russian
business, plus there are essays and poems from writers like Gleb Shulpyakov,
Sasha Sokolov, German Sadulaev, and Lev Rubinshtein…—but there are a few more
novels. We have: Elizaveta Aleksandrova-Zorina’s Маленький человек (A Small Man),
Alla Bossart’s Холера
(Cholera), Veronika Kungurtseva’s Орина дома и в Потусторонье (Orina at Home and On the Other Side),
Iurii Mamleev’s После конца (After the End), Dima Klein’s Двойник Президента (The President’s Double), and Aleksei Motorov’s Юные годы медбрата Паровозова (Male
Nurse Parovozov’s Young Years), an autobiographical novel I noticed several
times in Moscow. It seems to have quite a following. The NOSE list also
includes Lora Beloivan’s story collection, Карбид
и амброзия (Carbide and Ambrosia).
Sunday, August 26, 2012
When Chickens Fly: Lipskerov’s The Forty Years of Changzhuoe
It feels appropriate that I bought my copy of Dmitrii
Lipskerov’s 40 лет Чанчжоэ (The Forty Years of Changzhuoe) at my
local Russian grocery store: I didn’t buy chicken that day but the book chronicles
the strange life of a town invaded by a horde of chickens. Still, though the residents
of Changzhuoe—the name apparently means “Chicken City”—find ways to capitalize
on the arrival of millions of birds and many people develop feathers, The Forty Years of Changzhuoe is less about
birds and feathers then about upside-down worlds and, to borrow from one of the
book’s characters, “обыкновенный
атавизм,” which I think I might call “normal atavism” here. It’s a
diagnosis of sorts.
Though The Forty Years
of Changzhuoe chronicles the city’s forty-year history (and, by many
accounts, borrows from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose Hundred Years of Solitude are but a vague, distant memory for me…),
it’s difficult to pinpoint its temporal setting in our parallel world. The novel
apparently takes place before the Russian revolution, though the passage of
time is often distorted in the town’s history, which is typed in code by a
character named Elena who works in a trance-like state. Her husband, Genrikh Shaller,
an officer who’s not really an officer, brings the text to one Mr. Teplyi (Mr.
Warm, who’s anything but warm), a teacher at the local orphanage, for
deciphering. One of Mr. Teplyi’s students is Jerome, a character who helps
connect several of the book’s threads, largely because he’s a nosy young voyeur.
Lipskerov populates his town with lots more characters,
including Liza and Françoise, who are two of Shaller’s lovers, a physicist
named Gogol, a doctor on the make, and a set of bickering town council members.
There’s also a businessman who decides to build a Babel-like tower of
happiness. For me, what’s most interesting about all these figures is the way
Lipskerov twists myth and literary expectations. [Spoiler alert!] For example,
in Changzhuoe, unlike in Nikolai
Karamzin’s sentimental classic, “Poor Liza,” Liza doesn’t do herself in because
she’s distraught—growing chicken feathers doesn’t push her to suicide—it’s her
beau, the businessman with the tower, who kills himself by diving off the
structure in front of a crowd.
Physical and metaphorical flights are a theme in the book, too,
so a physicist named Gogol feels doubly mischievous, particularly since Nikolai
Gogol’s nose-in-the-bread caper (among others), defies our world’s laws of
physics. And then there’s the cannibalistic Mr. Teplyi, who keeps a gruesome
library and kills because it helps him decode Elena’s text. Teplyi feels like a
twist on Dostoevsky, particularly when he tells Shaller that the presence of a
hatchet doesn’t necessarily indicate a killer.
Reading Olga Slavnikova’s 1997 piece about Changzhuoe in the journal Ural reminded me of numerous other aspects of this
crowded novel that I’d either forgotten or downplayed as I read. I was glad for
her mention of characters’ propensity to forget their pasts and take on new
names, and Slavnikova notes the laic canonization of people whose sins are
forgiven, calling Changzhuoe’s saints folkloric characters. This form of dvoeverie, or dual
belief, fits nicely with the (many!) carnivalistic elements I found in the book.
Slavnikova also points out the erasure of one key character’s character… in
fact, most of the town erases itself, returning the place to the same status (essentially
a hole in the ground) it had at the beginning of the chronicle.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of Changzhuoe is that it’s not nearly as confusing or messy to read as
it is to summarize. Even better, it’s a fairly enjoyable piece of work that
combines eroticism, murder, magical realism, and, of course, atavism (usual or
otherwise) and strange cycles of history. The book and its characters are
certainly quirky, combining old-fashioned and modern, so I give Lipskerov lots
of credit for placing most of his book—a debut novel—on the dark side of quirky
rather than succumbing to cuteness. I can only imagine what some other writers
might have done with all those feathers.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
All Sorts of Shorts: Short Stories from Noir and Snegirev + Two Short Summaries
After calling the Moscow
Noir short story anthology “a dark book indeed” two years ago, I
think I can sum up St.
Petersburg Noir, a new collection edited by Julia Goumen and
Natalia Smirnova for Akashic’s noir anthology series, as “a pretty dark book.” Put
another way: If Moscow is pitch black,
St. Peterburg is moving toward deep
dusk.
I loved the brutal, elemental scariness of the Moscow book—and
recognize how very skewed my perspective is after living and working near all
too many Moscow crime scenes—but wonder if the slightly lighter St. Petersburg collection,
which is very decent, might find a broader readership.
Bits of St. Petersburg
Noir’s stories blended together in my mind as I read, melding into a composite portrait
of a city loaded with poverty, aimlessness, drugs, back streets, squalid
apartments, ballet, and canals… plus murder and other violent misdeeds set
amidst cultural sites and monuments. Here are a few stories that especially distinguished
themselves for me:
Andrei Rubanov’s “Barely a Drop,” translated by Marian
Schwartz, felt the most classically noir to me, focusing on a writer who takes
the train to St. Petersburg to spy on his wife, whom he suspects of having an
affair. Rubanov is an economical writer who can fit a lot into a short story.
The first story in the book, Andrei Kivinov’s “Training
Day,” translated by Polly Gannon, looks at law enforcement, morgue runs, and
everyday fears (e.g. elevators, one of my own Russia phobias) with an apt combination
of seaminess and humor.
“The Sixth of June,” by Sergei Nosov and translated by
Gannon, stars a first-person narrator who quickly introduces himself as a would-be
assassin with plans to act on Pushkin’s birthday.
I thought Julia Belomlinsky’s “The Phantom of the Opera
Forever,” translated by Ronald Meyer, a revenge tale, was one of the edgiest
stories in the book. It begins with a small chunk of Crime and Punishment and moves on to “All our life here—it’s a
fucking Dostoevsky nightmare!”
Though Pavel Krusanov’s “The Hairy Sutra,” translated by Amy
Pieterse, felt silly and predictable with its museum zoologists, conflicts, and
specimens, it turned out to be one of the most oddly memorable stories in the
book because of its distinct setting, characters, and exhibits.
Still, the scariest and darkest story I’ve read lately is in
the thick journal Новый мир: Alexander Snegirev’s “Внутренний враг” (“The
Internal Enemy”). Snegirev’s story is rooted in sociopolitical and
historical tension: a young man, Misha, gets a call about an inheritance and
then finds out his family history isn’t quite what he thought. Snegirev plays
on Misha’s idealism, identity, and dread of the KGB as he builds a creepy, phantasmagoric
family drama set in a house that feels haunted. The story’s psychological
suspense and intensity surprised me—and sucked me in—after some early passages that felt a bit conventional.
Finally, two novels I don’t plan to finish but that I want to mention
because they’re both finalists for the 2012 Big Book Award: The first
140 pages of Vladimir Makanin’s Две сестры и Кандинский (Two Sisters and Kandinsky) also center around societal divides
and the KGB as Makanin examines the consequences of informing. Alas, the novel,
which draws on Chekhovian themes and reads almost like a play, didn’t hold my
interest and I stopped reading after the first act section. I also had
trouble with Sergei Nosov’s Франсуаза, или Путь к леднику (Françoise Or the Way to the Glacier): eavesdropping on a guy who chats with his
herniated disc just isn’t my thing. There’s more to the book than that, of
course, including a Russia-India contrast, leeches, a stolen lung, and smoking
cessation courses, but the whole package felt gimmicky, contrived, and
surprisingly dull. Françoise was also
shortlisted for the 2012 NatsBest.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Two Teas: Dmitry Danilov’s “Black and Green”
I’m glad Zakhar Prilepin’s list of favorite books and stories from the noughties reminded me that I had Dmitry Danilov’s “Чёрный и зелёный” (“Black and Green”) on my e-reader—Danilov’s novella about the wanderings of a tea salesman was fun to read, a lovely example of form and content intertwined. I enjoyed Danilov’s Horizontal Position very much, too (previous post), but “Black and Green” somehow felt even better, more homey… I’d like to think it’s all the tea, though I suspect I just feel even more at home now in Danilov’s world, finding humor and humanness in a place that initially felt bland and sketched but now feels full and almost cozy in its spareness.
Danilov tells “Black and Green” in a first-person voice that
resembles the narrative voice of Horizontal
Position: the anonymous storyteller of “Black and Green” uses clipped,
stripped language, too, offering minute detail about what he sees in his
travels and work but saying little about his background or the family he needs
to feed. Though the bulk of “Black and Green” describes tea-selling trips to places
outside Moscow, Danilov begins his story by describing a dull night job in an
office, then an attempt to sell books and postcards to bookstores. It’s futile
in the summer. Come back later. Okay.
It’s difficult to convey the strange pleasure of reading
“Black and Green.” In terms of detail, the descriptions of tea and towns are
wonderful, particularly if you are a tea drinker and/or have been to Russia,
but I think this bit, about the narrator’s tea trips with a car owner, Sasha,
gets at the essence of what I love so much about how Danilov writes:
Стали ездить с Сашей. Это, конечно, гораздо удобнее и приятнее, чем на электричках, да и вдвоем лучше, хотя последнее и не факт, потому что когда едешь куда-нибудь далеко один, не болтаешь, и больше шансов впасть в полумедитативное остолбенение и заметить вещи, которые в нормальном состоянии заметить трудно.
I began riding with Sasha. Of course this was much nicer and more convenient than taking electrichkas, and, sure, it’s better to work together, though the latter is not a hard-set rule because when you go somewhere far away by yourself, you don’t chat, so there are more chances to fall into a semimeditative stupor and notice things that are difficult to notice in a normal condition.
 |
| Kazansky Station, Moscow, with elektrichka trains. Photo: Dmitry Danilov |
“Black and Green” includes everything from advice on brewing
green tea—Maybe I’d like the stuff if I made it properly?— to quietly humorous summaries
of towns. The brief entry for the town of Chekhov, for
example, ends with this: “Чехов – не очень хороший город. Чехов – очень хороший
писатель.” (“Chekhov is not a very good city. Chekhov is a very good writer.”)
The novella also includes a passage about a funeral for a friend who committed
suicide. Danilov captures drabness before the funeral:
“Серый день и серый дым из огромной серой трубы. Перовская улица, недра неприятного района Перово. Серые пятиэтажные здания и грязно-белые девятиэтажные здания.”
“Gray day and gray smoke from a huge gray smokestack. Perovskaya Street, the heart of the unpleasant Perovo area. Gray five-storey buildings and dirty-white nine-storey buildings.”
One of Danilov’s best writerly gifts is that he stops when he’s
written enough… just as his narrator in “Black and Green” knows when it’s time
to leave the tea trade for an office job, before he tires of tea and no longer
enjoys his clockwise sweeps through the Moscow region, loaded down with
packages of tea.
A Few Notes:
- “Black and Green” mentions the Tunguska Event so, as promised, I’ve initiated a Tunguska Event tag…
- “Black and Green” was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely award in 2010, along with Horizontal Position.
- Литературная газета recently published an interview with Danilov; it’s here.
Level for Non-Native
Readers of Russian: 2/5, not especially difficult language; novella length.
An especially good choice for readers who’ve visited Russia.
Monday, July 30, 2012
People Who Need People: Maria Galina’s Mole Crickets
Maria Galina’s Медведки (Mole Crickets)
is not, alas, a novel
about entomology, though there are superficial metaphorical similarities
between the nocturnal, burrowing mole cricket and the novel’s narrator, a
man who calls himself an editor and lives alone in a rented dacha
somewhere in the vicinity of the Black Sea. Galina incorporates plenty
of humor as she patches together slivers
of various genres—particularly fantasy and picaresque—to examine
identity and
family, storytelling and mythmaking, truth and invention.
 |
| Richard Lydekker's life history of the mole cricket from The Royal Natural History, 1879. (via Wikipedia) |
It’s narrative voice rather than plot or structure that gives Mole Crickets its appeal and
cohesion. Our loner narrator, whose last name is Blinkin but goes by the
penname Trigorin—Chekhov
alert!—writes books for clients, creating pastiches by plopping the clients into
storylines from existing works. (I love that he never gives them cell
phones...) At the start of Mole Crickets,
we watch him transform Joseph Conrad as he fills a client’s order, changing the
name of a sea and concluding that Conrad was a pretty good writer.
Blinkin’s somewhat reclusive life is disturbed early in the book
when a new client, Smetankin, who grew up in an orphanage, appears and asks
Blinkin to create a family history for him. Smetankin’s request is intrusive
for Blinkin on many levels. Beyond insisting on fast service that Blinkin would
prefer to refuse, Smetankin worsens Blinkin’s relationship with his widower
father: Dad thinks Smetankin would be a better son than his editor son, whom he
considers a slacker. Smetankin even renovates Dad’s apartment. And then there’s Rogneda,
a gothish young woman who arrives at Blinkin’s dacha, claiming to be Smetankin’s Siberian
daughter and asking for lodging until Smetankin has a party, a reunion of sorts
for his invented (or not?) family. We also meet Finke, Blinkin’s dacha
neighbor, an archaeologist.
Mole Crickets is a
pleasure to read because Galina’s Blinkin is so engagingly human as he tells
all these stories, saying he tires of people, has three nipples like his
father, and loves making flea market visits to scout for china. Blinkin’s voice
is strong enough that I enjoyed the book to the end even when the interweaving
of the book’s subplots didn’t quite work for me. I think part of my (slight)
disappointment is that Mole Crickets veered
away from expectations Galina established at the start of the book: I enjoyed
watching Blinkin size up his client and rewrite Conrad so was looking forward
to observing more interactions with clients, books, and various types of
fictions.
Blinkin’s invention of a family history for Smetankin worked
well for me, though the arrival of Rogneda did not: Rogneda tipped the quirk-o-meter
enough that I had trouble suspending disbelief. Rogneda felt a little too
modishly clichéd with her attitude and dark clothes, plus I just couldn’t buy
that Blinkin would let her stay in his personal (albeit rented) space. Rogneda
also contributes to the novel’s mystical and mythical elements, most of which
felt tacked on to me. Finke, with his study of Achilles, Hecate, and
sacrifices, is part of this angle, too, and Galina even includes a scholarly
paper by Finke as an appendix to the novel.
Still, my misgivings feel pretty picky given the sheer
entertainment value of Mole Crickets:
Galina and Blinkin won me over with their observations about people who need
people… as well as family histories that put all those people in context.
Four things:
- Mole Crickets is a finalist for the 2012 Big Book award.
- Mole Crickets was named book of the year (written by a Russian author) on the site Fantlab.
- Медведки is available online on Журнальный зал (beginning) (end) and Bookmate (here).
- Amanda Love Darragh won the Rossica Prize for her translation of Galina’s Гиви и Шендерович, known in English as Iramifications and available from Glas.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Monday Miscellany: Zakhar Prilepin’s Literary Lists
I love lists—particularly when they catalogue contemporary
Russian fiction—so wanted to be sure to post two lists of Zakhar Prilepin’s
favorite books and stories from the noughties before I forget their existence.
Both lists appear online and both are taken from Prilepin’s new book, Книгочёт. There’s an interesting mix here: several writers I’d never heard of, a clump of books that didn’t grab me, some unread items on my shelf, and writers I’ve enjoyed very much. Several books and stories have even been translated. The lists are long, so I’ll keep the commentary short… but I’m always happy to hear recommendations!
Both lists appear online and both are taken from Prilepin’s new book, Книгочёт. There’s an interesting mix here: several writers I’d never heard of, a clump of books that didn’t grab me, some unread items on my shelf, and writers I’ve enjoyed very much. Several books and stories have even been translated. The lists are long, so I’ll keep the commentary short… but I’m always happy to hear recommendations!
Novels
first:
- Aleksei Ivanov’s Блудо и МУДО (I’ve seen the title rendered as Cheap Porn). Waiting on my shelf... I’m a little scared of this one because of high expectations. Like Prilepin, I thought Ivanov’s Geographer was good (previous post) but not great.
- Aleksandr Kuznetsov-Tulianin’s Язычник (The Heathen or The Pagan)—Kuznetsov-Tulianin is a new name for me. Журнальный зал calls this an ethnographic novel.
- Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Чёртово колесо (The Devil’s Wheel)—One of my own big, big favorites (previous post). I just love this book.
- Vladimir “Adol’fych” Nesterenko’s Огненное погребение (literally something like Fiery Burial)—Another new name for me. Crime.
- Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник (Letter-Book)—Letter-Book will be out in Andrew Bromfield’s English translation in 2013 (previous post). Won the 2011 Big Book.
- Aleksandr Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov’s [Голово]ломка (Headcrusher)—2003 NatsBest winner. Also on my shelf; it never seems to appeal to me. Available in Andrew Bromfield’s translation.
- Andrei Rubanov’s Сажайте, и вырастет! (Do Time Get Time)—Andrew Bromfield translated Do Time Get Time and recommended Rubanov; alas, my usual book sites and stores never seem to have this particular book.
- Sergei Samsonov’s Аномалия Камлаева (The Kamlaev Anomaly)—I’ve only read Samsonov’s Oxygen Limit, which I thought was flawed (previous post), but Anomaly sounds better.
- Aleksandr Terekhov’s Каменный мост (The Stone Bridge)—Coming out soon from Glagoslav in Simon Patterson’s translation. Another nonfavorite, though several friends loved it.
- Dmitrii Bykov’s trilogy of Оправдание (Justification), Орфография (Orthography), and Остромов, или Ученик чародея (Ostromov, Or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice)—Though I couldn’t get through either Justification or Ostromov, which won the 2011 NatsBest, I swear I will try Orthography. Too many of you have recommended it.
The stories and novellas
sound even better to me:
- Mikhail Tarkovskii’s “Гостиница «Океан»” (“The Hotel ‘Ocean’”)—This story is in Tarkovskii’s collection that won the Yasnaya Polyana award in 2010.
- Sergei Shargunov’s Ура! (Hurrah!)—On the shelf; a small book.
- Olga Slavnikova’s “Басилевс” (“Basileus”)—In the Read Russia! anthology, translated by Andrew Bromfield. About a cat; the beginning looks great.
- German Sadulaev’s Я чеченец! (I Am a Chechen!)—Available in Anna Gunin’s English translation.
- Marina Stepnova’s “Бедная Антуанетточка” (“Poor Little Antoinette”)
- Dmitrii Danilov’s “Чёрный и зелёный” (“Black and Green”)—On my reader… hmm, maybe I’ll read this next. July 25 update: I’m thoroughly enjoying “Black and Green”; the title refers to tea.
- Roman Senchin’s “Конец сезона” (“The End of the Season”)
- Mikhail Elizarov’s “Госпиталь” (“The Hospital”)
- Il’dar Abuziarvov’s “Троллейбус, идущий на Восток” (“Trolleybus Going East”)
- Maia Kucherskaia’s “Кукушка” (“The Cuckoo”)
Monday, July 9, 2012
On Edge by the River: Alexander Ilichevsky’s Anarchists
Alexander
Ilichevsky’s Анархисты (The Anarchists) was a lovely reading surprise, a novel that blends,
fairly successfully, classical and contemporary themes and stylistics. Though I
can quote my
own post from 2010 about Ilichevsky’s Booker-winning Matisse and say The Anarchists
is also “an ambitious, lumpy novel that uses complex, often poetic imagery and
language to present social, existential, and metaphysical angles on post-Soviet
Russia,” I found in The Anarchists a
more even and more satisfying novel
than Matisse.
The Anarchists
focuses on Petr Solomin, an aspiring artist who left his Moscow life as a
businessman to paint on the Oka River, in the Kaluga oblast’. Solomin’s name is
rooted in Russian words related to “straw” and he idolizes Isaac Levitan, who died
in 1900 but appears in the book as a character. Solomin wants to understand
Levitan’s perspectives. Solomin lives with a woman named Katya, whom he meets
early in the book, when she gives him a ride in Moscow. And quite a ride it is:
Katya, whose beauty is compared to Greta Garbo’s, is a flaky driver. Solomin
has to bring her home with him; she turns out to have an addiction. Their acquaintances
in the country include two doctors, an Orthodox priest, super-rich newlyweds,
and a schoolteacher who’s a specialist in Yevgeny
Onegin.
The Anarchists focuses
primarily on Solomin’s various sufferings—with himself, with Katya and her addiction, with a
Bazarov-like young doctor, and with the rest of the world—and Ilichevsky generally
paces the book nicely. The first half of the book is a bit slower and
background-heavy than the second, with tangents that take us back in history,
telling the story of a local anarchist and natural history expeditions—for
those of you keeping track, the Tunguska event gets
another mention here and may soon win a tag of its own on the blog. We see the
contemporary characters interact with nature, too, particularly the river.
There are also heavy, deep, and real conversations among the doctors and the
priest: they talk about philosophy and, yes, gossip about Solomin and Katya. Some
of this talk feels playful, on the verge of parody.
Ilichevsky folds in lots of literary predecessors, including
the afore-mentioned Yevgeny Onegin,
Dostoevsky’s Myshkin, a Chekhovesque gun, Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, and the ever-dreaded-but-popular superfluous man.
Many of the book’s themes come together when Solomin tells Dr. Dubrovin that all
the escapees to the provinces are anarchists because they want autonomy.
Solomin also admits to being a superfluous man. We already know his difficulties
with Russian society: he loves Eurotravel and fancies the idea of getting lost
or disappearing amidst spirits in the woods. Which he does.
 |
How I imagined it:
Levitan’s Тишина (Silence)
|
Rarely do I use words like “beguiling” to describe a novel…
but “beguiling” fits my experience with The
Anarchists. I loved the book’s contrasts and combinations: the feel of simultaneously
reading the present and the past, the feel of rural leisure and urban urgency,
and the feel of ancient settings inhabited by contemporary people. Yes, The Anarchists is lumpy, but I think the
lumps and tangents give the book much of its organic energy. Ilichevsky pulls
so many elements into his novel that it’s tempting to call him an anarchist,
too, but he’s careful with his material, which he seems to love very much.
Perhaps that gave him the strength to pull back from offering too much about,
say, expeditions, anarchists, or Levitan himself. The result is a curiously
timeless composite of past and present that mixes post-Soviet alienation with
language, straw hats, rural doctors, river banks, bicycles, and literary motifs
that took me back to alienated characters from Russian classics, particularly
Chekhov and Turgenev.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Ы!: Zakhar Prilepin’s Black Monkey
The core of Zakhar Prilepin’s novel The Black Monkey tells the story of the implosion of a contemporary Russian nuclear family—narrated
by a nameless father who tells of his nameless son, nameless daughter, and nameless
wife—that ends (almost) not with a bang but with the whimper of the letter ы. Prilepin extends his range beyond
the family by inserting set pieces from other times and places that show the
destruction of other families and, by extension, societies. One story, set in
Africa, includes an extreme example of in loco parentis, for child soldiers,
plus mentions of, apparently, celebrity mom Angelina Jolie.
Since Prilepin is, thank goodness, still Prilepin, he
juxtaposes episodes of misbehavior, stupidity, and cruelty, some quite nasty,
with tenderness, particularly his mixed-up narrator’s love for his small children. He
feeds them, reads to them, and worries about them. His descriptions of how they
unlock the apartment door when he rings, dragging a chair to the door so they
can reach the lock, felt especially sweet. Meanwhile, stories of child violence
and the father’s visits to his mistress and a prostitute led this reader to
wonder what will happen to these kids who chew gum like a meat grinder and eat
whatever hotdogs and pel’meni their nameless father puts on their plates…
The Black Monkey worked
best for me as an atmospheric novel, in large part because Prilepin combines realism
and abstraction, using language that has a quick, modern flow. The novel has
wonderfully mischievous humor that felt especially vivid after seeing and
hearing Prilepin at BookExpo America. And the book is a page-turner, albeit in
a strange way: I didn’t especially look forward to reading it but it held my
interest and kept me reading whenever I picked it up, despite a somewhat disjointed
structure that, I must admit, fits the topic. Most telling, though, is that The Black Monkey keeps knocking around
my poor skull; it dug its way into my subconscious.
For me, the highlight of The
Black Monkey was a brief scene where Nameless Dad reads to his children from a primer. The primer, though, is
unusual: the letters aren’t presented in alphabetical order. Instead,
they’re listed “будто в строгий
порядок букв упал камень и все рассыпал,” (“as if a rock fell into the
strict order and scattered everything”). The book presents “a,” the first
letter of the alphabet, then another vowel, “у,” which occurs in the second half of the alphabet and sounds like “oo.” Dad
plays with words for a bit with his kids then leaves them, saying he’s going
for cigarettes. He calls his mistress and plays more with the primer’s words as
he trots down the stairs and, literally, runs into his wife at the entrance to
the apartment building.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Guest Post by Olga Bukhina: Having It Both Ways
I was very happy when translator
and writer Olga Bukhina sent me a note last month asking if I’d like her to
write another guest post about Russian literature for children. I was happy to
say Yes: some of you told me you enjoyed her previous guest post, plus I’d been
so busy teaching and working on preparations for Read Russia that I was getting
behind in my own reading and writing. Of course, Olga’s topic sounded great, too—writers
who write for adults and kids—and two of the writers she mentions in her post were
in New York last week for BookExpo America and Read Russia events. I’m grateful
to Olga for writing this post (even more so because I came home exhausted and
with a bad cold)… and for being such a good friend and colleague last week in
New York!
Many contemporary writers who write primarily for adults have
tried their hands at writing for children, or perhaps it’s better to say that
they’ve experimented with writing books that can be read both by adults and by kids.
As Dmitry Bykov
eloquently put it in the subtitle to one of his books, “A Children’s Book for Adults,
or An Adults’ Book for Children.”
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
has published a lot of short stories about children, such as her series Девочки (Girls), but her Истории про зверей и людей (Stories of Animals
and People) are for kids. The book starts with three tales with very long descriptive
names. История про воробья Антверпена, кота Михеева, столетника Васю и сороконожку
Марью Семеновну с семьей (A Story of Antwerp
the Sparrow, Mikheev the Cat, Vasya the Aloe Plant, and Maria Semenovna the
Centipede and Her Family) is
about three creatures who first get together out of loneliness. They stay together for the sake of helping a muddle-headed
mother centipede to raise her enormous family. These little tales are funny and
to the point, and have just exactly the right proportion of light humor and
moral message. Yes, it is good to love everyone, including “those who do not
look like you, for example, sparrows, cats, and aloe plants.” The tales are
followed by a collection of very short stories, Детство-49 (Childhood-49),
published before as a separate book. These are more realistic vignettes of post-World
War II Soviet childhood, and the reader clearly sees the events through the
child-protagonist’s eyes and senses the child’s biggest fear or strongest
desire.
Bykov’s О зверьках и зверушах (About Critters
and Creatures), whose
subtitle I already mentioned above, is sometimes published as a part of a larger
book В мире животиков (In
the World of Animalitos). He co-authored these tales with his wife Irina Luk’ianova. They are tiny stories
about various animal-like creatures who live in different towns, Гордый (Proud-Town)
and Преображенск (Transfiguration-City). They are female and male, and behave just like people
in spite of their tassel tails. Some of them are very good, others are very
bad, and still others are somewhere in between. There is a lot of contemporary politics,
eternal religious debate, Christian allusions, parodies of Russian
intelligentsia, and gender role discussions in these tales. Some of them are truly
for children, others are more for adults, but all of them are written in a fairytalish
form with a light touch. Сказка о необитаемом острове (A Tale of the Desert Island) about the adventures of two young
ones, Il’ka and Fedya, is, to my
taste, the most touching story in the collection.
Boris Minaev is a different case: he is someone who
started as a children’s writer and moved into adult literature later on. His Детство Левы (Leva’s
Childhood) is a quite realistic story of Soviet Jewish childhood in
the early 1970s. It is almost a memoir with details which are very familiar to
anyone who lived through these times: the yard outside of the apartment
building, soccer and other games, the Victory Day celebration, the fear of
darkness, a hole in the asphalt which turned out to be a cave without a
treasure, a children’s movie for 10 kopeks in the local movie theater, and a first
cheap cigarette.
Another time-traveling experience is Boris Akunin’s Детская книга
(Children’s Book). It is a part of his famous Fandorin series, but this
time the main character is not an Erast Fandorin, an aristocrat and an
adventurist, and not his grandson, a Moscow detective, but his great grandson
and namesake who lives in contemporary Moscow and travels to 1914, to the time
of Boris Godunov in the 17th century, and to the future with the
help of “chronoholes.” It is a combination of adventure novel and historical
fiction, and a page turner.
The postmodern tales
of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (Lyudmila
Petrushevskaya) are really in their own category. The longer I read them, the
more I am convinced that they are
not in the realm of children’s literature. Their dark and absurdist humor
targets a much more mature audience, even though the series about Barbie dolls from the collection
Настоящие сказки (The Real Tales) looks like children’s stories, and many other
stories refer to classical fairy-tales. A similar literary device was used by Alexander Kabakov in his Московские сказки (The Moscow Tales), where he
applies well-known fairy-tales and legends, like the Tower of Babel, to
contemporary situations.
For more: Olga Bukhina often writes Russian-language posts for a blog maintained by the Working Group for
Study of Russian Children’s Literature and Culture. The blog also contains pieces written
in English.
Monday, June 4, 2012
Terekhov Wins NatsBest
Alexander Terekhov won the National Bestseller Award today for his Немцы ([The?] Germans).
According to Lenta.ru, he received votes from four of the six judges.
Two other writers received votes in the final round: Anna Starobinets,
for Живущий (The Living) and Sergei Nosov for Франсуаза, или Путь к леднику (Françoise, Or the Way to the Glacier).
That’s it for tonight from New York!
That’s it for tonight from New York!
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Big Book’s Rather Long Short List
I wanted to be sure to make a very quick post with the Big Book Award’s 2012 short(er) list before heading off tomorrow for BookExpo America and lots of ReadRussia events… three of the writers on the short list will be in New York:
Vladimir Makanin, Zakhar Prilepin, and Andrei Rubanov. Two books—those by Nosov
and Stepnova—are also NatsBest finalists, and Eltang’s book has already won an award
from Russian Prize. I don’t know much about the other books on the list other
than Prilepin’s, which I’m reading, so am most certainly lacking in nuance for
translating the titles!
- Maria Galina: Медведки (Mole-Crickets)
- Daniil Granin: Мой лейтенант… (My Lieutenant…)
- Aleksandr Grigorenko: Мэбэт. История человека тайги (Mebet. The Story of a Person from the Taiga)
- Vladimir Gubailovsky: Учитель цинизма (The Teacher of Cynicism)
- Andrei Dmitriev: Крестьянин и тинейджер (The Peasant and the Teenager)
- Aleksandr Kabakov, Evgenii Popov: Аксёнов (Aksyonov)
- Vladimir Makanin: Две сестры и Кандинский (Two Sisters and Kandinsky)
- Sergei Nosov: Франсуаза, или Путь к леднику (Françoise, Or the Way to the Glacier)
- Valerii Popov: Плясать досмерти (To Dance to Death)
- Zakhar Prilepin: Чёрная обезьяна (The Black Monkey)
- Andrei Rubanov: Стыдные подвиги (Shameful Feats/Exploits)
- Marina Stepnova: Женщины Лазаря (The Women of Lazarus/Lazarus’s Women)
- Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov): «Несвятые святые» и другие рассказы (“Unsaintly Saints” and Other Stories)
- Lena Eltang: Другие барабаны (Other Drums)
Monday, May 28, 2012
Potpourri: Astvatsaturov and Shargunov, Rossica Awards
Back at last: it’s been quite a month of May! This week I
have quick—and rather awkward, since their genres aren’t my usual reading—summaries
of books by two writers who will be in New York soon for Read Russia and BookExpo America events, plus aging news
on two awards, plus a bit about upcoming posts…
First the books... Andrei
Astvatsaturov’s Люди
в голом (People
in the Nude), labelled a novel, is a book of what I’d call vignettes—some
feel especially essayistic and/or autobiographical—that Astvatsaturov links with
the motif of nudity, psychological and physical. I only read Part One, which I loved
for its humorously biting accounts of childhood and its absurdities. Little Andrei
Astvatsaturov, for example, isn’t allowed to use a local swimming pool because he
talks with a friend, though the pool lady tells his mother it’s because he’s
not strong and athletic enough. The friend who lent me People
in the Nude especially liked a passage where Andrei and another friend
communicate, wordlessly, during a field trip to a Lenin museum: the friend
moves his shoulder and mouths “хрусть,
хрусть” (“crack, crack”), referencing their interest in skeletons, which
arose out of some poetry, drawing, and the idea of skeletons climbing the
stairs to Lenin… trust us, it’s funnier and more wonderful than I can make it
sound here. (I Googled because I was curious to see if anyone else liked that passage:
it’s quoted here in Власть.)
Economical communication is Astvatsaturov’s strength as a
writer, too: his portrayals of being a kid—playing at home alone, say, and
taking a phone message—are brief but feel richly (arche)typical, with a
combination of could-be-anywhere themes plus details, like involving imported
beer cans in play, that feel distinctly Soviet-era. I gave the home alone dialogue
to my first-year Russian students: the language was simple enough that they
could read and enjoy some real Russian. (Bonus: They loved the book’s cover!)
I’ll read Part Two later, if I can renew my book loan… it feels different from childhood, beginning with
reflections on writing then moving on to a scene where a literary “dama,”
smoking a cigarette, tells Andrei, “У вас не проза, Аствацатуров... а огрызки из отрывок” (literally
“You don’t have prose, Astvatsaturov… but bits of excerpts.”) True enough, but
his blend of invention and apparent autobiography were funny enough that I laughed out loud. Many times.
Reading Sergei Shargunov’s Книга
без фотографий (A Book Without Photographs) immediately after People in the Nude certainly emphasized stylistic
differences: where Astvatsaturov’s leisurely descriptions blend real life and
invention, Shargunov composes a terser, more straightforward memoir that methodically
barrels through episodes in his life, linking them through photographs and
photography. Shargunov also covers childhood and young adulthood, beginning as the
child of a priest and not joining the Pioneers, then winning the Debut Prize,
becoming a political activist, and visiting political hot spots, including
Chechnya, as a journalist. I thought the quick pace suited the material well, given
Shargunov’s writings about politics, including the October 1993 Events, his
attempt at elected office, and mentions of where he’s not allowed to
photograph. A Book Without Photographs
reads easily, as a perceptive personal history of the late Soviet and early
post-Soviet eras. I enjoyed Shargunov’s combination of toughness and honesty,
which—again!—contrasts with Astvatsaturov, whose book also feels very honest, though
People in the Nude has more of a
feel of irony and vulnerability than toughness.
Rossica Awards. Better late than never on this information! Academia Rossica
announced last week that John Elsworth won the 2012 Rossica Translation Prize
for his translation of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg,
and Gregory Afinogenov won the Rossica Young Translators Award for his
translation of excerpts of Viktor Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F. Congratulations to both.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
BookExpo America & Andrei Rubanov’s Good Life
With BookExpo
America—which has a big, huge Russia focus this year—coming up in about four
weeks, I’m focusing my reading on BEA writers for the next month or so. Today’s
post, about Andrey Rubanov’s Жизнь удалась (All That Glitters), is the first of a series
of pieces about books by writers who will be at BEA.
A brief point of information before I get to Rubanov: The Russian
global market forum at BEA is just one part of a bigger program, Read Russia 2012, which includes a slew of events in New York open to
the public, an expo of books and art for children, and a documentary on contemporary
Russian writers. As I’ve mentioned before, I am (disclosure!, disclosure!) very
happily working away on projects for Read Russia and will be at BEA, which I
love every year… meaning I am beyond excited for this year’s fair. An
intensifier for all that excitement: an anthology of Russian stories will
include two of my translations, plus some of my favorite writers, including
Margarita Khemlin and Vladimir Makanin, will be coming to New York for BEA.
So! On to Mr. Rubanov’s
book, known as All That Glitters on his
agent’s Web site. What I
found most interesting about Rubanov’s novel—which covers the disappearance and
subsequent finding of a Moscow wine salesman named Matvei Matveevich Matveev—is
Rubanov’s mixture of two genres: social novel and detective novel. Matveev disappears
after saying goodbye to his loyal wife, Marina, at the beginning of the book,
and Rubanov interweaves numerous characters’ timelines, establishing MMM’s
rise from aimless youth to a member of the upper-middle class who falls very
ill after visiting two men who promise to forgive his rather substantial debt.
Rubanov also offers histories of the men MMM goes to see:
a retired hockey player who goes on to head up an NGO for retired athletes and
his evil sidekick, a prickly former doctor known as Kaktus. He works in
a police detective, too, a hardboiled lone wolf, Svinets, (“lead,” as in Pb), whom
Marina hires to find MMM. This is a lot of main characters, but I thought
Rubanov managed them and his supporting characters efficiently, showing, for example,
how MMM and Kaktus crossed paths in high school—old jealousies run horribly deep
here—and revealing back stories in a way that combines suspense with (almost)
plodding detail.
I thought Rubanov did even better on the social side, describing
the Moscow nineties with mentions of the MMM pyramid
scheme, which interplays well with Matveev’s name, crooked nonprofit
organizations, and the idea that qualities like decisiveness and
stick-to-itiveness were more important in that era than education. He also
notes the October
Events of 1993; Matveev keeps a distance, as he did in 1991.
Another most interesting thing about All That Glitters is its kitsch element, something I noticed even
before I read that Rubanov himself called the book “чистый кич” (“pure kitsch”). I think it was
MMM’s focus on a happy orange sky, a motif in the book that sounds suspiciously
like the bright future of socialist realism, that tipped me off early in the
book. Plus characters using the title words, which, in dialogue, might sound
more like “life is good” or “the good life.” Then there’s the removal of the
pads on one character’s fingers (this has some icky consequences), the
hardboiled cop’s tractor-driving brother outside Moscow, and all those searches
for empty lives with lucre that (as we know) can’t buy happiness. Of course the novel
wouldn’t have been complete without a stripper. Or Svinets having to watch the
same TV channel as the neighbors, who live beyond a thin wall, so he can feel
like he has his own space.
The final most interesting thing about All That Glitters is that
it works fairly well as a slow-burn thriller
with lively language and a strong social element that generates sadness,
humor,
and irony. Despite being a little overloaded with information and back
story in
many spots, with Rubanov’s take on Moscow in the nineties and the choice
of hockey (which I love) instead of, say, soccer or basketball, All That Glitters managed
to keep me well-entertained even when my head was cloudy from a cold.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
More Award News: Russian Prize Winners & Big Book Long List
Another spring month, another post about awards… this time it’s
winners of the Russian
Prize plus the long long list for the Big Book Award.
The Russian Prize is awarded to
writers who write in Russian but live outside Russia. Yuz Aleshkovsky won in the long fiction category for his Маленький тюремный
роман (A Little Prison Novel). It’s
been on the shelf waiting for me for a few months… which isn’t so long,
considering I’ve been meaning to read Aleshkovsky for years. The other long
fiction winners were Darya Vilke for Межсезонье
(Off Season) and Lena Eltang for Другие барабаны (Other Drums).
The short fiction winner was Dmitry Vachedin for the short story collection Пыль (Dust), with second
prize going to Maria Rybakova for the novel in verse Гнедич (Gnedich), and third
to Evgenii Abdullaev for the novella Год
барана (Year of the Sheep). The
top poetry award went to Ilya Rissenberg
for Третий из двух (The Third of Two), followed by Alexei
Tsvetkov for Детектор смысла (Sense Detector) and Feliks Chechik for Из жизни фауны и флоры (From the Life of Fauna and Flora).
Now for the Big
Book long list. And all these awards programs really do put the “long” in the long list: Big Book claims this year’s list
contains 46 books, three of which are manuscripts listed without author names.
I’ll just trust their count. And I won’t list everybody. A few names that popped
out:
Lena Eltang’s Other
Drums is on the list as are two books that recently made the 2012
NatsBest short list: Marina Stepnova’s Женщцны
Лазаря (excerpt) (The Women of Lazarus) and Sergei Nosov’s
Франсуаза, или Путь к леднику (Françoise, Or the Way to the Glacier);
Figgle-Miggle’s Ты так любишь эти фильмы
(You Love Those Films So Much) was on
last year’s NatsBest short
list. Nikolai Kononov’s Фланёр (The Flâneur) and Nikolai Baitov’s Думай, что говоришь (Think When You Speak) were both shortlisted
for the 2012 NOSE award.
I’ve only read one book on the list: Roman Senchin’s Information, which I wrote about here.
I’ve also read bits of Oleg Pavlov’s Дневник
больничного охранника (Diary of a
Hospital Guard), which felt a little too intense to read in the PDF Pavlov
sent to me.
There are several books by authors whose previous books I’ve
particularly enjoyed: Vladimir Makanin’s Две
сестры и Кандинский (Two Sisters and
Kandinsky), Zakhar Prilepin’s Черная
обезьяна (The Black Monkey), and
Vsevolod Benigsen’s ВИТЧ (VITCh). A few more: Alexander Ilichevsky’s
Анархисты ( [The?] Anarchists), Elena
Chizhova’s Терракотовая старуха (The Terracotta Old Lady), and Sergei Samsonov’s Проводник
электричества (Conductor of Electricity).
I could go on and on… but I’ll just note that the Big Book
covers fiction and nonfiction. And mention that the books on the long list were
selected from a total
of 401 (!!) works. The short list will be announced on May 31, and winners will
be named by November 30.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
2012 NatsBest Finalists
I’m a few days late with the National Bestseller short list…
here’s the list of six finalists, in order of how many points they were awarded
during long list voting. I’m using some titles from literary agents’ pages and taking
information for these brief descriptions from various sources, mostly Viktor Toporov’s
summary of long list voting, jury member
and press reviews, and publisher blurbs.
Aleksandr Terekhov’s Немцы ((The?)
Germans) – 12 points. About Luzhkov-era Moscow. The publisher’s blurb
calls Germans satirical. (“Satirical”
is certainly a genre that seems fitting for Luzhkov-era Moscow…)
Vladimir Lidskii’s Русский садизм (Russian Sadism) – 7 points. Lidskii is the only shortlisted writer
I hadn’t heard of, and the NatsBest summary says he was unknown, calling his
book “яркий, странный и страшный” (“vivid, strange, and frightening”). Jury
member Mikhail Vizel’ said this big novel about the Russian revolution and the “totalitarian
empire” that followed is highly naturalistic.
Vladimir Lorchenkov’s
Копи Царя Соломона
(Tsar Solomon’s Mines) – 7 points. According
to the blog called Заметил просто,
this energetic action/adventure book is about a Jewish boy named Solomon Tsar.
During World War 2 he hides in a cave near a site where the Nazis shoot people;
Solomon gathers gold from the bodies, amassing tons. Decades later people want the gold.
Marina Stepnova’s Женщцны Лазаря (excerpt) (The
Women of Lazarus) – 7 points. A family saga that starts just after the
revolution and centers around a physicist and some of the women in his life. What
sounds most interesting to me about The
Woman of Lazarus is that Liza Novikova, in a review for Izvestiia, calls Stepnova’s book an “attack on the reading
audience of Liudmila Ulitskaya and Dina Rubina.”
Sergei Nosov’s Франсуаза, или Путь к леднику (Françoise, Or the Way to the Glacier) –
6 points. A passage to
India to meet a Brahmin, in which the travelers are a poet, a psychiatrist,
a jealous couple, and Françoise. Toporov says the ironic storytelling of Françoise is Booker-like.
Anna Starobinets’s Живущий (The Living) – 6
votes. Immortality in a post-disaster world, where everyone on the planet is
one. Except a man known as Zero. The cover has to be
the scariest on the NatsBest short list. April 17 update: A reader e-mailed to let me know that Hesperus will publish The Living, in James Rann’s translation, this fall.
The winner will be announced on June 3. No matter who wins, there
shouldn’t be any grousing this year that the winner is too famous or too previously
prize-laden to be an appropriate choice for an award intended to help a
deserving writer become an intellectual/literary bestseller. The writers with
the highest profiles are probably Terekhov, who won a Big Book second prize in
2009 for The Stone Bridge, and Starobinets,
who is a journalist, screenwriter, and fiction writer. But I don’t think either
of them is well-enough known to be a household name.
Speaking of last year’s winner, Dmitry Bykov’s Ostromov, Or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice…
I tried reading Ostromov but had to
stop after about 90 pages. I loved the setting—Leningrad in the
mid-1920s, with
seediness and oddities that flashed me back to Vaginov’s city and my
reading
about the Petersburg mythos—and the characters and Mason theme intrigued
me. But Bykov’s wordiness
and digressions did me in. And I don’t like to skim books, an approach
more than one of you has recommended for reading/enjoying Bykov. I just
don’t get much enjoyment from a book when I have to edit so much in my
head.
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Notable New Translations for 2012 (plus a few from 2011 and for 2013…)
Ah, lists! Now that I’ve finally finished compiling this list,
I understand why I procrastinated for so long: the titles may already
translated for me but this inventory of newish and upcoming translations is larger
than I expected. A very nice problem to have! I’ll start with brand-new and then
meander…
A few notes first: If I’ve blogged about a book, I linked my
previous post to its Russian title. I linked English titles to publisher pages.
Actual release dates (and even titles!) may vary. Finally: my apologies that translator
names are missing for a few entries. I’ll fill those in as soon as I can!
I’m happy to report that Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Happiness Is
Possible (Счастье
возможно), translated by Andrew Bromfield, is out from And Other
Stories, a new British publisher. Another book I enjoyed, Zakhar Prilepin’s Sin (Грех),
winner of the NatsBest of the decade award, was just released by another new
publisher, Glagoslav, in Simon
Patterson and Nina Chordas’s translation. Glagoslav
also recently brought out a Patterson-Chordas translation of Elena Chizhova’s The
Time of Women (Время
женщин), not a
favorite but a book that brought record numbers of questions after The New York Times ran an article
about Chizhova.
Other Glagoslav Russian-English translations on this year’s calendar
include: Igor Sakhnovsky’s The
Vital Needs of the Dead (Насущные нужды умерших), translated by
Julia Kent (June); Alexander Terekhov’s
The Stone Bridge (Каменный мост), translated by Patterson and Chordas
(Oct.); Oleg Pavlov’s Asystole
(Асистолия)
(Dec.) by a translator TBA, and Eduard Kochergin’s NatsBest-winning
Christened
With Crosses (Крещенные
крестами), translated by Patterson (Nov.).
A few other relatively new books… Pavel Kostin’s It’s Time
(Время пришло),
in James Rann’s translation, from Urban Romantics; and two books by Andrey Kurkov from Melville House: Penguin Lost (Закон
улитки) and The Case of
the General’s Thumb (Игра в отрезанный палец), both
translated by George Bird. Another book with an animal theme is forthcoming
from Hesperus in June: The
Way of Muri (Путь Мури), by
Ilya Boyashov, translated by Amanda Love Darragh, is an allegorical novel
about a cat wandering Europe; it won the 2007 National Bestseller Award. Another
British publisher, Angel Classics, will
release Muireann Maguire’s Red Spectres: Russian Twentieth-Century
Tales of the Supernatural, a collection that includes pieces by writers
including Krzhizhanovsky, Bulgakov,
Chayanov, and Peskov.
Books on the way later this year include Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair (Венерин
волос), in Marian Schwartz’s translation, from Open Letter, and St. Petersburg Noir,
edited by literary agents Natalia Smirnova and Julia Goumen, and published by Akashic
with commissioned stories from writers including Sergei Nosov, Lena Eltang, and
Andrei Rubanov (Aug.). Amazon Crossing has several books by Andrei Gelasimov, translated by Marian Schwartz,
listed with various dates in late 2012 and 2013; my favorite is The
Lying Year (Год обмана), currently listed for January 2013. I should also mention two nonfiction
books Marian translated for Yale University Press: The Leningrad
Blockade, 1941-1944, edited by Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, is
on the schedule for June, and Aleksandra
Shatskikh’s Black Square, with
scholarship on Malevich, arrives later.
What else? Another book with “happy” in the title: in
November, New York
Review Books will bring out Happy Moscow, a compilation of works
by Andrey Platonov in translations by
Robert & Elizabeth Chandler, with Nadya Bourova, Angela Livingstone, Olga
Meerson, and Eric Naiman. The book includes a revised translation of the title novel
plus two stories, an article, and a film script. Robert & Elizabeth
Chandler—along with Sibelan Forrester, Anna Gunin, and Olga Meerson—have
another title on the way: Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov,
coming from Penguin Classics in December 2012. Robert Chandler told me the book
is roughly half “true folktales”; the other stories are from Pushkin, Bazhov,
Teffi, and Platonov.
Last—but definitely not least—are titles from Glas, many
part of Glas’s collaboration with the Debut Prize: Arslan Khasavov’s Sense (Смысл)
translated by Arch Tait (spring-summer)¸ Vlas Doroshevich’s What
the Emperor Cannot Do: Tales and Legends of the Orient translated
by Rowen Glie and John Dewey (spring); and an anthology, Still Waters Run Deep: Young
Women’s Writing from Russia (September). Several other Glas books are
already available: The Scared Generation, two short novels by Boris Yampolsky (The Old Arbat/Арбат, режимная улица)
and Vasil Bykov (The Manhunt/Облава),
translated by Rachel Polonsky and John Dewey… Mendeleev Rock, with Andrei Kuzechkin’s title novella (Менделеев-рок) and Pavel Kostin’s Rooftop
Anesthesia (Анестезия крыш), both translated
by Andrew Bromfield… and Off the Beaten
Tracks: Stores by Russian Hitchhikers, with Igor Savelyev’s Pale City
(Бледный город),
Irina Bogatyreva’s АвтоSTOP (Off the Beaten Track), and Tatiana
Mazepina’s Traveling Towards Paradise;
translators include Amanda Love-Darragh. On the way: Alexander Snegirev’s Petroleum
Venus (Нефтяная
Венера), apparently in early 2013.
One more last but not least: Russian Life sent me two books
in recent months… Maya Kucherskaya’s Faith
& Humor: Notes from Muscovy (Современный патерик), translated by Alexei Bayer, is
described on the back of my review copy as a mix of fact, fiction, myth, and
history. And a story collection by Stephan
Erik Clark, Vladimir’s Mustache,
is written in English but set in Russia, in various centuries. It looks
promising.
I have a horrible feeling I’ve forgotten something or
somebody… but it won’t be Andrew Bromfield’s translation of Displaced
Person (Перемещённое лицо),
the third/last of Vladimir Voinovich’s
Chonkin books, due out some day, some month from Northwestern University Press!
Please add a comment or send me a note if I’ve forgotten (or didn’t know about)
your book(s). Or, horrors, made an error.
Post-Posting Additions:
April 17: Hesperus will publish James Rann’s translation of Anna Starobinets’s Живущий in fall 2012, as The Living.
Post-Posting Additions:
April 17: Hesperus will publish James Rann’s translation of Anna Starobinets’s Живущий in fall 2012, as The Living.
Two other bits of news:
I’ve been excited (for at least a year!) that Russia will be
the featured country at this year’s BookExpo
America. I’m especially excited now that I’m working on preparations for the
many Read
Russia events scheduled for early June in New York… the list of writers scheduled
to attend includes Olga Slavnikova and Mikhail Shishkin, plus a bunch of Debut
Prize writers. I’ll be writing more, soon, about BEA and Read Russia.
Also, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, is organizing
a conference, “Decadence or Renaissance?
Russian Literature Since 1991,” for September 24-26, 2012. Conference
organizers are soliciting proposals for papers; information is here. I hope to go!
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Insects and Comrades: Two Novellas
I’ve mentioned before that I love reading long stories and novellas…
and I still love how the genre gives just enough room for a writer to develop characters
and a complex story but not enough space for aimless wandering. That in mind, here
are two more novellas: their stories are very, very different but I think both
are successful in their own ways. I’ll try to go light on details because I
think short stories, long stories, and novellas are especially prone to
spoilage.
Though I never quite grasped why Valka fell so hard for Anna—from
a distance, in the Metro—that he felt compelled to follow her and introduce
himself, I realized that didn’t matter much. For one thing, Bogatyreva filters Valka’s
story through his dormmates, who can’t know everything. For another, the attraction
fits with the novella’s appealingly appropriate combination of reality and irreality.
Another example: Bogatyreva includes a tangent at the start of Comrade Anna that presents a dormmate
obsessed with Mikhail Vrubel’s “Swan Princess” painting. He dies and
Valka takes his place on the eleventh floor. Bogatyreva returns to the Swan
Princess at the end of the story in a way that puzzled me a bit until I read Marta Antonicheva’s
review in the journal Октябрь: to paraphrase, Antonicheva
thinks the Swan Princess helps establish Valka’s transition back to real life
after the costumes and falsity of Anna’s circle. Which makes complete sense to
me, given the fairy tales they want to believe in.
I think it’s a safe bet that Anna Starobinets’s Переходный
возраст (An Awkward Age, translated by Hugh Aplin),
a long story about Max, a maladjusted boy with a twin sister, Vika, and some
bizarre habits, will be most effective among readers with insect phobias. I was
the kid who adored her multi-module Ant Farm, but An Awkward Age contained some ew-inducing
moments for me, too, thanks to several squalid discoveries and Max’s mother’s
rather impassive reactions to her son’s behavior.
Starobinets tells her story in simple language where
repeated motifs help build suspense, and I thought she did nicely combining
nature and city by setting the story amongst the trees and birds of Moscow’s Yasnevo
outskirts. Another plus: she explains the reasons behind Max’s behavior by
having his mother discover his diaries, handily reproduced in the story. I
found some of that section particularly entertaining thanks to young Max’s
phonetic spelling.
Though I didn’t think An
Awkward Age was nearly as good or fun as Starobinets’s Sanctuary 3/9, a later work that’s loaded with fear and
fairy tale themes, I have to give her credit for stringing me along pretty well
with An Awkward Age. I read it very
quickly and not just because of the large print in my book. Starobinets is
often compared to Stephen King, something the Mainer in me can’t quite buy into,
though I have to wonder if Starobinets’s inclusion of a prom-like senior dance
is intended to remind readers of King’s Carrie.
Irina Bogatyreva’s Товарищ Анна (Comrade Anna),
a finalist for this year’s
Belkin Prize and nominee for the NatsBest, is a slower-paced, far more
rewarding (and difficult to write about!) long story, about the
relationship—it’s more than just young love because of how the story’s
written—between
Anna, a Muscovite who takes retro to extremes with her political
activity, and
Valka, an easy-going guy from Ulyanovsk who falls for Anna. I think what
I
appreciate most about Comrade Anna is
Bogatyreva’s ability to contrast the lives of Anna and Valka: Anna, for
example, lives with a politically liberal grandmother who
disagrees with her granddaughter’s views and seems to be verging on dementia, and Valka lives on the eleventh floor
of a dorm with a roommate, the roommate’s girlfriend, and a cat. Plus a model
of the solar system for perspective.
What’s most intriguing is that Valka’s atmosphere is freer and
more “collective” than Anna’s; Anna is a member of a cell-like political
organization that aims to recreate the allegedly good old days of revolution. Members
even dress in costume for new year’s eve. By contrast, Valka’s dormmates (re)tell
his story in the first person singular, observing Valka’s behavior and sliding in and out of a close
third-person narrative. Still, they speak in a unified
voice that’s far more cohesive and human than what we get from Anna’s group, where
members disagree on how and how much to act. Their language is tragicomically stagnant,
too, because it’s filled with Soviet-era phrases.
Though I never quite grasped why Valka fell so hard for Anna—from
a distance, in the Metro—that he felt compelled to follow her and introduce
himself, I realized that didn’t matter much. For one thing, Bogatyreva filters Valka’s
story through his dormmates, who can’t know everything. For another, the attraction
fits with the novella’s appealingly appropriate combination of reality and irreality.
Another example: Bogatyreva includes a tangent at the start of Comrade Anna that presents a dormmate
obsessed with Mikhail Vrubel’s “Swan Princess” painting. He dies and
Valka takes his place on the eleventh floor. Bogatyreva returns to the Swan
Princess at the end of the story in a way that puzzled me a bit until I read Marta Antonicheva’s
review in the journal Октябрь: to paraphrase, Antonicheva
thinks the Swan Princess helps establish Valka’s transition back to real life
after the costumes and falsity of Anna’s circle. Which makes complete sense to
me, given the fairy tales they want to believe in.Sunday, March 11, 2012
Roman Senchin’s New Information
I think the key to understanding Roman Senchin’s new novel, Информация
(The Information) is on its
back cover. Below a photo and a bio, Senchin says, in a quote from an interview
with the Agency of Political News, that he watches a lot of TV, particularly
sports and dumb [reality] shows that aren’t good for the psyche. And he mentions
bread and circuses. I’ll work my way back to this, including some mild spoilers
as I describe the book…
The Information begins
when a nameless first-person narrator, a Muscovite from the Volga region who
works in media buying (медиабаинг,
some information-based field I don’t truly grasp in either language), sees his
wife received a text message from another man, wishing her a good night and calling
her рыбка (how about “my
little fish”?). After intercepting this information, our anti-hero storms out,
gets drunk, and ends up with frostbite that nearly results in amputation.
Marriage over. I can typify much of the rest of the novel with a long, messy
list: Nameless Guy gets a new apartment, sees old friends that include a driver
named Ivan and a writer named Svechin who also form a rock group called Bad
Omen (echoing Senchin’s own experience),
attempts a relationship with the temptingly named Angelina, goes to Dagestan
for a work assignment, and nearly marries a woman with all sorts of emotional
problems.
Senchin is, fortunately, still Senchin so nasty complications arise to
make Nameless Guy’s life even more of a living hell. Samples: legal and
financial problems related to apartments, a bender that causes hallucinations,
and a traffic cop planting white powder in Nameless Guy’s Celica. What I like
about Senchin so very much is that I can’t say he’s unfair. Nameless Guy is one
of the most unsympathetic and obnoxious narrators I’ve had the (dis)pleasure to
read in a long time. Nameless Guy drinks himself way beyond stupid more than
once, admits to cheating on his wife (prostitutes are okay?), and describes his
feelings for women in ways that make you suspect he’s incapable of respect. He’s
typing up his story—his “information” about events—in a darkened apartment
because he’s hiding out. He thinks several people want to kill him.
I could cite many books that feel like The Information’s thematic and formal ancestors—from Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground to Sergei
Minaev’s lighter Soulless and Oleg
Pavlov’s heavier Asystole—plus Nameless
Guy compares his imaginary self to the title character of American Psycho and mentions enjoying works like Sartre’s Nausea and Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. I read (and also loved) Nausea years ago and found that the Wikipedia
page description for Journey
could almost describe The Information,
too, thanks to its nihilism, misanthropy, and cynical humor.
Existentialism is crucial here: with his behavior
and his hiding, Nameless Guy essentially crosses himself out of a meaningful
existence, both in the lives of his friends and family, and in the larger world.
Not that his life has had much meaning during the years he describes; this superfluous
man for the noughties
has had ideas to do good things, like establish a literary journal, but that’s
forgotten early in the book because all his drama, much of it self-inflicted,
interrupts plans to build a normal (normal!), comfortable life as a middle-class
office worker.
What amazes me most about The Information is that it works beautifully, as a diabolical
combination of realism, satire, parody, and the grotesque. Nameless Guy tells
his story in colloquial language that is almost painfully unpretty at
times. And the story itself is horribly lumpy, chronologically confusing,
and angry. The Information’s narrator
is so appealingly unappealing that I couldn’t put the book down—I’m one of those rubbernecker readers who loves to observe jerks
involved in psychic accidents—though I was initially disappointed in the book’s
structure and TMI, thinking Senchin had let me down with The Information after the social and formal precision and concision
of his Yeltyshevs, which looks at
some similar themes using very different settings, characters, and style.
But then Nameless Guy began criticizing his own writing and
explaining his minutiae. And then I focused on the quotation on the back of the
book and began reading The Information
as a twisted confessional novel about life in the age of reality programming, where
everyone knows absolutely everything about everyone else’s business (right, my
little fishes?), the global financial crisis wreaks havoc on jobs, and a
generation of young adults is still trying to figure itself out after the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
The most devastating aspect of The Information was reading the last page and closing the book,
wondering if anybody in Nameless Guy’s life would even care if he ceased to
exist. I also wondered if the threats were real: did any of those threateners really
care enough to want to end Nameless Guy’s existence? It’s unclear, particularly
given that this century’s superfluous men learn of death threats through
virtual seconds who use computers and smart phones instead of personal visits.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Ganieva’s Salam, Dalgat! & The Debut Prize Tour Comes to Boston
Alisa Ganieva’s Салам тебе, Далгат! (Salam, Dalgat! in Nicholas Allen’s translation), winner of the 2009 Debut Prize for long prose, is a wonderful example of fiction where form and content complement one other, creating a harmonious, readable work that has more depth than you might initially feel or see. (Regular visitors to the Bookshelf know this is my favorite kind of fiction…) Ganieva’s long story describes a day in the life of Dalgat, a young man who travels around Makhachkala, Dagestan, on a mission to find a relative, Khalilbek.
Salam, Dalgat! opens
at a market, among soaps, shampoos, henna packets, raspberries, grape bunches,
pomegranates, sad-looking kittens, and sellers’ pitches… and closes hours
later, after Dalgat has, among other things, experienced a minor mugging, sat for
a bit in a café, and witnessed such events as a literary ceremony and a
shooting at a wedding. Ganieva moves Dalgat—and the vignettes that accumulate to
form a plot and collective portrait of a time and place—at a brisk but rational
pace, weaving in language as varied, colorful, and juicy as the market goods on
the story’s first pages.
I found Salam, Dalgat!
particularly interesting because Ganieva also works in cultural
observations of what she calls a “troublesome” place: young women discuss clothing, men discuss Islam, and a female
friend of Dalgat’s discusses her plans to relocate to St. Petersburg. With its mixture
of humor, tradition (wife stealing even gets a mention, though a character says
that’s a Chechen habit), and a sense of alarm about the future, Salam, Dalgat! felt unusually energetic
and organic, all as poor Dalgat, seeking but never quite managing to find, trots
along, a perfectly agreeable, generally patient, nearly blank slate of a character,
the ideal figure for a reader like me, who’s never been to Makhachkala, to
follow.
I should note that Ganieva submitted Salam, Dalgat! to Debut under a male pseudonym, Gulla Khirachev,
because Dagestani women aren’t supposed to move around in public as freely as
men… or write about what happens on the street. Based on her comments about
reactions to the story, it sounds like Ganieva succeeded
in inspiring social discussion with Salam,
Dalgat!
I enjoyed the social aspect of Salam, Dalgat! but, given my readerly biases, wouldn’t rate the
story so highly if I didn’t think it was nicely composed, falling into a
category of writing that writer Olga Slavnikova mentioned during a Debut Prize
event in Boston last Wednesday evening: “физически сильный текст,” a “physically strong text” or “physically
sound text.” Slavnikova, who serves as director of Debut, used the term (which
she borrowed from a critic) to describe the work of Debut winners and
finalists. I’m sure sound texts are a big reason so many Debut writers continue
to find success: works by Ganieva and Irina Bogatyreva, who was also in Boston,
were nominated for this year’s National
Bestseller award.
Bogatyreva’s Товарищ Анна (Comrade
Anna), the title story of the collection on the NatsBest longlist, was also
shortlisted for the Belkin Prize. I’m very much looking forward to reading Comrade Anna: I’m interested in
Bogatyreva’s take on patriotic youth, particularly after enjoying hearing her read
from her stories of hitchhiking. (The 2012 Belkin, BTW, went to Aleksei
Kozlachkov for Запах искусственнойсвежести (The Scent of Artificial
Freshness).)
The other two writers visiting Boston—Dmitry Biryukov, who
won Debut’s journalism award in 2005, and Igor Savelyev, whose Бледный город (Pale City), a long story about hitchhiking, apparently has quite a
cult following—were also fun to hear. Biryukov and Savelyev both work days as
journalists, and both continue to write outside work. Both also continue to read
and value Russian “thick journals”; the panel’s consensus was that journals
retain an important, prestigious place in Russian literary life, despite
diminished circulation figures. Biryukov is working on a novel; the excerpt I
heard from his story Улица Урицкого (Uritsky Street) had a nice retro feel. The narrative voice of
Savelyev’s Pale City, which was
published in the journal Novyi mir in
2004 and made the Belkin Prize shortlist that year, is invitingly chatty.
I’m sure I’ll be writing more about these and other Debut
writers, and not just because a delegation of Debut winners and shortlisters
will be at BookExpo America in June. I have books from several other “Debutnik”
winners and finalists—including Sergei Shargunov and Natal’ia Kluchareva—on my
shelf, waiting.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Shulpyakov’s Fez: It’s in the Head, Not on the Head
 |
| Fez isn't about a hat. |
First, a bit on expectations: Gleb Shulpyakov’s Фес (Fez) isn’t about
cylindrical red hats with tassels, though Fez’s
part-time narrator does cover his head with a fez at one point in the book.
And Fez doesn’t seem to take place in
Fez, Morocco. But who knows? The most important exotica here—despite mentions
of specific places like Moscow and Vienna—is abstract and spiritual, a place in
the consciousness.
A summary of this short, novelesque work with a broken
narrative might start with something like this: An unnamed Moscow publisher
with business troubles takes his wife to the birth house, goes home, and somehow ends up a prisoner in a basement in an
unidentified place. A place one might think is Fez.
Those of you who watch my “Up Next” notes may have observed
that my own journey with Fez zigged
and zagged: I first found the book oddly beguiling (or beguilingly odd) then
hit a slow patch then thought Fez was
shaping up then concluded by considering it a “a somewhat disappointing
up-and-down experience.” Looking back today, I’d edit out the “somewhat.”
Fez’s allegory of
unnamed man’s journey to rebirth, which occurs roughly simultaneously with the
birth of his child, had lots of potential—he’s a prisoner, he escapes, he seems
to be in a boat with a Charon-like guy, he reflects on his life, he meets a
woman and they talk about freedom, and he comes to terms with what’s happening—but
I thought the book’s end message felt too usual, too expected, too close to hokey,
particularly because most of Fez seemed
intentionally cryptic. And Shulpyakov didn’t
win many points from me for his inclusions of dreamy states, doors leading to
new lives that avoid former emptiness and constraints, and eastern themes.
These are elements I’ve seen a lot, elements that are only interesting if a writer
gives them unexpected angles.
Shulpyakov sometimes manages to do that: he’s also a poet,
and his uses of language and imagery were the biggest positives in Fez. Small highlights included a memory
of a Soviet-era building in Minsk, self-deprecating humor, and a lovely vision
of morning lights. But there weren’t nearly enough of those moments to perk up all
the familiar material, especially since the literary devices in Fez—which contains sections with first-person
and third-person narrative, chronicle-like passages, a few pages in what
appears to be Arabic (I have no idea if it’s a logical text), and a page with
only lines of dots/periods (an excerpt: “………………………….”)—struck me as self-conscious
attempts at creating something postmodern rather than ways to add true depth,
wisdom, or intellectual excitement to the book.
My primary impression of Fez
is that I went into the book thinking
it sounded like yet another parallel reality novel, which it is on a certain
level, and came out of Fez reminded of
commenter Alex’s mention of “stories about careworn middle-aged Russian men
finding satori” in the comments about my
post on Oleg Zaionchkovskii’s Happiness
Is Possible. I think I’d recommend Fez
most to readers who have much more patience than I with the combination of spiritual
material and literary devices that Shulpyakov employs. Fez just isn’t my kind of book but, to be fair, Shulpyakov’s Web
site displays positive
critical reviews, some of which contain gargantuan spoilers.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
A Few of Max Frei’s Echo Stories
Writing about a few medium-length stories from Max Frei’s Labyrinths of Echo books feels like
breaking my own unwritten blogging rules: I rarely write about books I haven’t
finished, and I rarely write about books I read over long stretches of time. In
this case, I think “long” means two years, meaning my memory of the first three
stories has faded. A lot.
But there are extenuating circumstances: I read two more
stories this month and Frei, whose real name is Svetlana Martynchik,
has written a giant stack of Echo books
that I’m unlikely to read and finish within the next year or two or three. Plus
two volumes of English-language
translations exist and a third is coming soon. Volume one, The Stranger, contains the first seven
stories. Though I have no desire to read a crate of Echo books volume after volume, I’ve enjoyed a few stories at a
time and will certainly read more…
The five Echo stories
that I read fall into a fuzzy genre of fantasy that combines cozy with sinister:
a first-person narrator named Max describes his new life in a world called Echo.
Max tells us in an introduction that Echo doesn’t exist on any map but the city
is the capital of the United Kingdom of such places as Uguland, Landaland, and
Uruland. Residents perform magic at varying levels of ability, and Max works as
nocturnal representative of the most venerable head of Echo’s Minor Secret
Investigative Force, which solves crimes. (I’ve taken translations of titles and
lines from the book from Polly Gannon's translation,
visible through Look
Inside! on Amazon.com.)
visible through Look
Inside! on Amazon.com.)
Though the Echo
stories begin with Max telling about his earthly difficulties getting to sleep
at night, it’s only a few stories later that we learn the particulars of how Max’s
boss, a Sir Juffin Hully—Echo sounds like a rather title-happy place—brought him
to Echo, where Max is passed off as a clueless guy from the sticks to explain
away his social ineptness. It didn’t take much to bring Max to Echo: Max first meets
Sir Juffin in a dream, then makes the dream a reality (of sorts). Max’s dream life
is pretty rich, and I scribbled “lucid dream” several times during my reading. All
those foggy lines between dreams and reality brought me back to recent reading,
like Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” (previous
post) and Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
As I mentioned above, Max’s stories combine cozy and sinister.
Frei juxtaposes humorous names and fanciful objects with, for example, a serial
killer case. And Frei’s cast of characters loves drinking a beverage, apparently
caffeinated, called kamra; Max says an establishment known as Обжора Бунба, which Gannon calls the
Glutton Bunba, serves the best kamra in Echo. Gluttony for food and glory leads
to particularly strange and nasty consequences in “Король Банджи” (“King Banjee”), in which a
woman reports that her husband has turned into a (rather large) piece of meat
with a distinctive smell. Soup has oddities, too.
I think the Echo stories
appealed to me for their blend of earth-bound fears with
out-of-this-world oddities. Then there’s all that Max and I have in
common: a preference for night, the
need for kamra, and, yes, a deep love of sleep. I’m certainly not a
dangerous type
like Max, though: Lady Melamori, whom Max fancies, feels he exudes some
sort of
threat. Two other things: though I enjoy cooking, Echo’s quick food
delivery appeals
to me, particularly since places like Glutton Bunba bring food nearly
instantaneously after receipt of a mind message. Finally, I love that in
Echo there are many bathtubs but no TV… but I certainly appreciated
Max’s reference to Twin Peaks, in which he thinks about
what he would have done had he been agent Cooper.
For more: Robert
Thompson on Fantasy Book Critic offers lots
more detail on the Echo stories
in The Stranger.
Level for non-native
readers of English: 3.5 out of 5.00, though I think my biggest language-related problem
was sorting through all the Echo vocabulary. I admit I have a hard time keeping track of character names in all languages.
Up Next: NOSE prize
winners. Gleb Shulpyakov’s Фес (Fez),
an oddly beguiling (or beguilingly
odd?) NOSE finalist that friends just brought back from Moscow for me.
[Update on 1/31/2012: I just checked the NOSE site for the award
calendar and found that Fez was taken off the shortlist... a quick check of comments on OpenSpace.ru's news story showed that Fez was an on-again-off-again shortlister.] And more
St. Petersburg…
Disclosures: The usual.
I always enjoy talking with Overlook Press, which published English-language translations
of Max Frei’s books. And yes, the link to Amazon is connected with my affiliate account.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Freedom’s Just Another Word: Ivan D.’s Big Liberty
Publisher Ad Marginem’s “autobiographical novel” description on the back of Dmitrii Dobrodeev’s Большая svoboda Ивана Д. (Ivan D.’s Big Liberty)
feels utterly superfluous: with many dateline-ish chapter starts,
real-life figures, and historical events worked into the story of a man
who leaves the Soviet Union, first for Hungary, then for West Germany,
the book has the feel of a documentary novel that could only have been
written by someone who lived “it.” Which Dobrodeev has done, living in
Germany and the Czech Republic since 1989. And Dobrodeev, like Ivan D.,
worked at Radio Liberty. Dobrodeev said in an interview with Echo of Moscow
that about 90 percent of the book is true, with a “documentary basis,”
and that he included his own experiences in his Ivan D., a composite
figure for his generation.
I’ve written more
than once that I’m not a fan of finding real people in contemporary
fiction… but Dobrodeev somehow makes the device work, including people
like 1991 coup plotter Genadii Yanaev, a pre-LDPR Vladimir Zhirnivoskii,
and journalist Andrei Babitskii in Ivan D. Honestly, I’m
surprised the book worked for me at all: it’s told in very spare, nearly
affectless language and combines a good dose of abstraction (условность) with its facts. Still, Ivan D. is
that odd case of a book that fascinated even when it was a crashing
bore. Perhaps that’s what Dobrodeev intended: life west of the old Iron
Curtain may sound romantic or exciting, particularly when spy agencies
are involved and there’s freedom, but it can also be pretty dull.
Emigration, we’re told, isn’t развлечение; the old cliché “fun and games” works well here.
Ivan D. is a man with mixed feelings about the Soviet Union. He hates that he was невыездной
(not allowed to travel) for years, unable to use his talents, and
living in relative poverty. But he also dislikes the changes of the late
‘80s and early ‘90s, which he thinks demean Russia’s history. Toward
the end of the book Ivan D. visits Moscow as a Radio Liberty
correspondent during the events of October 1993, seeing the Russian White House after it was bombed by the government. He comes away thinking what happened was грязно, dirty, and that it marks the end of historical Russia. At least the Soviet Union valued brotherhood and solidarity.
Ivan
D.’s stated preference is for personal freedom, something he takes
advantage of in his life in Germany after (of course!) he’s spent time
in a remote location offering analysis of the collapse of the Soviet
Union to the German government. Ivan D. also hears Russian writers read
(Vladimir Sorokin and Viktor Erofeev are among those mentioned), has odd
dreams that probably indicate his freest thoughts, and eventually moves
in with a Russian woman. They live like, well, libertines, with lots of
alcohol and rumors of orgies. Their lifestyle is a magnification of
norms at their workplace; that Radio Liberty group is quite a bunch.
Throughout all this, Ivan sometimes feels his self (“я”)
disintegrating and he has a tendency to forget who he is and where he’s
from. He’s also disturbed when a veteran co-worker from the station is
buried in Germany, among alien souls (“среди чужих душ”).
Ivan doesn’t feel right anywhere, though a reunion with his wife in his
old Moscow apartment at the end of the book gives him the chance to see
his daughter and smell old smells. In some ways, I think Ivan D. feels
freest there. The book’s chapters end with a vibe of “the more things
change the more they stay the same.” Dobrodeev clinches that by
supplementing the chapters with a few addenda, Radio Liberty
correspondence about Ivan D. Indeed, the more things change the more
they stay the same.
I’m not sure how much I liked Ivan D.’s Big Liberty—Dobrodeev’s
style isn’t a favorite but I appreciate his portrayals of people and a
time and think he combines abstraction and concreteness to very good
effect—and I would only recommend it with the caution that it’s a rather
peculiar book that’s not likely to appeal to everyone. (Of course I
could say that about just about everything I read but I won’t expand on
that right now…)
All that said, the novel was
an interesting counterpoint to my own experiences during the era, when I
traveled to Russia and eventually moved there: I heard the bombing of
the Russian White House in October ’93 and complaints from people who
wanted firmer control than Yeltsin’s. As I wrote this post, I realized
that the book probably succeeded for me more than I initially thought.
Dobrodeev’s story about an abstract, albeit self-referential, Ivan
without a country manages to convey a lot about the sad and sometimes
humorous messiness and contradictions of cultural, political, and
personal freedoms during and directly after the fall of the Soviet
Union.
For more: Ad Marginem has links to reviews.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Happy New Year & Reading Highlights from 2011
Happy new year! С Новым годом! I
hope 2012 bring you plenty of fun and absorbing Russian books to read,
no matter what language you read in. Before we finish with 2011, I
thought I’d write up a quick list of books I particularly enjoyed during
the year:
Favorite book. I can’t decide on just one favorite, so I’ll name two, listing them alphabetically by author surname: Mikhail Gigolashvili’s The Interpreter (previous post) and Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair (previous post).
Both books felt especially exuberant, with lively voices and
structures, and subject matter that’s difficult to summarize. I think
this must have been my year for books of this type: I also loved Thomas
Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog, which I read in Ross Benjamin’s German-to-English translation (post on my other blog).
Favorite newer release. I
didn’t do so well with books released during late 2010 or 2011—an
unusually high number of the year’s Big Book finalists were clunkers for
me—but I did enjoy Iurii Buida’s Blue Blood (previous post)
once I got past the first 50 pages and got used to Buida’s patterns.
The book may be too quirky or collage-like (to borrow from Alexander
Anichkin’s comment) for some readers but something (?) managed to win me
over.
Favorite “what’s old is new” work. Andrei Platonov’s Juvenile Sea, sometimes Sea of Youth, (previous post)
still rings in my mind… it’s probably those pumpkin sleeping pods. I
think it’s safe to say that Platonov is my favorite writer who must be
read slowly; I seem to read every paragraph at least twice. I love how
Platonov arranges his words.
Favorite discovery. A few of Fazil’ Iskander’s Chik stories (previous post) and a novella (previous post)
were enough to give me a new favorite writer whose stories I want to
ration and read over time. I particularly love Iskander’s gentle humor
and his ability to portray the everyday injustices of Soviet life.
Favorite work of nonfiction. I only read a few books of nonfiction this year but Frank Westerman’s Engineers of the Human Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia (previous post),
translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, was my kind of book, thanks
to its combination of socialist realism and irrigation in the Soviet
Union.
Travel. Book-related travel was a
treat, a big highlight of 2011: I met a lot of you at the London Book
Fair, BookExpo America, and the American Literary Translators
Association Conference. I hope to see and meet more of you in 2012,
particularly given the market focus on Russia at BookExpo America—I’ve already been excited about BEA 2012 for over a year! I’m sure I’ll be writing more about BEA when details are available.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Benigsen’s Rayad and Krzhizhanovsky’s Letter Killers
My last two book commentaries for the year—about Vsevolod Benigsen’s Раяд (Rayad) and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Клуб убийц букв (The Letter Killers Club)—feel
all too typical of my reading in 2011, a year when I abandoned many
books and finished others without particular enthusiasm. In this case, I
finished both books but neither gave me quite the kick I might have
hoped for…
Rayad, a novel about contemporary Moscow, borrows heavily from
the detective genre: Benigsen begins with the murder of a man in a
moviehouse then shows us an investigation carried out by a recent
widower, Kostya. Kostya and his young daughter go to live in a clean,
orderly, and slightly creepy all-Russian neighborhood in Moscow, where
Kostya quickly meets Gremlin, the alleged perpetrator, a nationalist.
Benigsen works in a series of faux historical letters, including one
from V.I. Lenin himself, about Rayads, an invented nomadic tribe who
once lived in Kostya’s new neighborhood. Of course corruption makes an
appearance, too.
Rayad is competently composed and constructed, and it addresses
timely sociocultural and sociopolitical issues, but I think Benigsen
missed a chance to write a truly important book, a book that makes
readers feel deeply uncomfortable. Though there’s a nasty scene on a
train with Gremlin and his gang, it’s physical violence and we don’t
know the victim. To my mind, the problem with Rayad is that
Benigsen doesn’t go nearly far enough in exploring the psychology of
nationalism in a way that would encourage readers to (re)examine their
own beliefs.
Worse, Rayad’s characters and plot developments feel formulaic.
Kostya’s family is half military and half intelligentsia, his new
neighbor has problems because he’s not pure Russian, a neighborhood
woman resembles Kostya’s dead wife, and so on. The term “Rayad” is
particularly obvious because it sounds like an amalgam of the words for
heaven and hell. By contrast, Benigsen’s ГенАцид (GenAcide) (previous post) is funnier, sharper, and more literary. Rayad reminded me of Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, where Perrotta also failed this picky reader by backing away from an opportunity to write an important book; The Leftovers, too, lacked enough narrative tension and social spark to inspire introspection, rendering it mediocre “stuff.”
Nearly a century earlier, Krzhizhanovsky put literary tropes to use in The Letter Killers Club,
a novella of sorts. Krzhizhanovsky frames five stories, setting them up
by describing an apartment and the host of a club where members, each
known by a monosyllabic nickname, recite stories from memory. I don’t
want to spill many details but I’ll say that the leader, a writer,
composed his books after having to sell all his books; he imagined his
books and the letters on the pages, rearranging them to occupy
emptiness. He says writers are “professional word tamers” (“профессиональные дрессировщики слов”). (The English phrase is from Joanne Turnbull’s translation, which you can look inside on Amazon.
)
)
I think my biggest difficulty with The Letter Killers Club is
that I, a bit like the narrator, who’s an invited guest at the meetings,
was more interested in buttonholing club members for a chat than in
listening to their stories. More frustrating, the first tale, a playlet
with characters from Hamlet and the eternal question and
implications of “to be or not to be,” interested me far more than the
remaining four, despite the appearance of my beloved carnival themes and
an interesting science fiction take on mind control. Some of the
stories just felt too long.
I think the most intriguing aspect of The Letter Killers Club stems from the opening scene, where Hermann Ebbinghaus is referred to as “мнемолог,” a mnemologist. The story and my book’s endnotes also mention Ebbinghaus’s use of “бессмысленные слоги” (“nonsense syllables”)
in his research; Krzhizhanovsky’s club’s host uses Ebbinghaus’s term to
refer to club members’ nicknames. Ebbinghaus used nonsense syllables in
his research to remove associations with real words.
Of course associations develop, both in memory research and in the
story: storytellers occasionally even borrow fellow club members’
nicknames for their characters, just as they, like their leader, borrow
and reshuffle letters, syllables, and motifs from world languages and
literatures. All the club’s storytelling (well, most of, but I won’t go
into that) is from memory, playing on mnemonics; I have to think
archetypes must have been helpful devices, too. (Festival of the Ass, anyone?) The Letter Killers Club gave
my addled brain lots to think about last week when I had a nasty cold:
my dreamy, floaty head probably got me further than a clear head could
have.
I still have hundreds more pages to try in my collection of Krzhizhanovsky stories and novellas; despite the disappointment of The Letter Killers Club,
I’m looking forward to reading more. I have the feeling (or at least
the hope!) Krzhizhanovsky may be the kind of writer whose work takes
time and patience, that ideas may seep from story to story, eventually
accumulating in a way that begins to form a world or worldview. Joanne
Turnbull’s translation of The Letter Killers Club, with an introduction by Caryl Emerson, is a recent release from New York Review Books.
P.S. Here are links to some pieces, most with more enthusiastic opinions
than mine, that contain far more details about Krzhizhanovsky and The Letter Killers Club.
Just watch out for all those details: I think the unexpectedness of the
novella is one of its real virtues, so I was glad I knew almost nothing
about it when I read.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Andrei Bely Prize Award Winners & Some Links
I’m about a week late and a ruble short on this one but want to mention winners of the Andrei Bely prize. Nikolai Baitov won the prose award for Думай, что говоришь (Think When You Speak or maybe Think Before You Speak), a collection of short stories. The poetry award went to Andrei Poliakov’s Китайский десант (Parenthetical information edited: please see comments... I’ll call this Chinese Landing Force, though an online bookstore calls it Chinese Descent. This title is (of course!) complicated since десант
is usually a military landing or the troops who make them. I’m equally
uninformed about these terms in English and Russian so suggestions are
welcome.). Information on other Bely awards is available here. Just one of my rubles would endow this prize: that’s the value of the entire fund.
Bonus! Baitov is also a poet; some of his poems are available online in Jim Kates’s translations (Cardinal Points) (Jacket).
I
learned about another award winner just before posting: John Woodsworth
and Arkadi Klioutchanski won the Modern Language Association’s Lois
Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work for their translation of
Sofia Tolstaya’s My Life, published by the University of Ottawa Press. Woodsworth and Klioutchanski are both affiliated with the University of Ottawa. (press release) Thanks to the American Literary Translators Association for mentioning the award on Facebook.
I’ve run across a wealth of articles about Russian literature lately. Here are links to a few:
I
always enjoy reading Russian Dinosaur’s blog but the two most recent
posts were particularly engaging: the Dinosaur’s thoughts about The Collaborators, John Hodge’s new play about Mikhail Bulgakov, and a wonderful piece on a talk that Oliver Ready gave about translation. Oliver offered examples from Crime and Punishment,
which he is translating, and the Dinosaur included one of the
sentences, in the original and four translations. The blog called XIX век then followed with two related posts (here) and (here). XIX век is, by the way, written in English.
Last week Stephen Dodson, perhaps better known as Languagehat, opened the “A Year in Reading” series for The Millions with a post about Life and Fate. Life and Fate received more attention this week, through a review by Adam Kirsch on The New Republic’s site; the piece first appeared in Tablet. Also: The Quarterly Conversation published Malcolm Forbes’s essay about Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (in David McDuff’s translation); I still need to print this piece out so I can read it properly. (I also need to push Petersburg forward on my bookshelf… I’ve been intending to reread it for years.) Finally, Scott Esposito’s review of Victor Pelevin’s The Hall of Singing Caryatids, translated by Andrew Bromfield and recently released by New Directions, appeared on The National’s site.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Booker of the Decade Goes to Chudakov
The winner of the Russian Booker of the Decade was announced today: Aleksandr Chudakov won, posthumously, for Ложится мгла на старые ступени... (beginning) (end) (A Gloom Is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps). Время/Vremia,
a Russian publisher, wrote on Facebook today that they are preparing
the book for publication. The novel was a Booker finalist in 2001.
Rather
than attempting to summarize yet another book I haven’t read, I’ll just
say that the beginning of the book has been translated, by Timothy D. Sergay,
who received a PEN Translation Fund grant and a National Endowment for
the Arts grant to support his work. Chapter 1 is available (here) on Words Without Borders and Chapter 2 is online (here) on the PEN American Center site.
It’s
been quite a week (a good one!) so I haven’t had much time to look at
reactions to the award but I’ll add some links and thoughts over the
weekend.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
At the Heart of Buida’s Blue Blood
Iurii Buida’s latest novel, Синяя кровь (Blue Blood),
is so filled with literary allusions, peculiar characters, and odd
happenings that the book took some getting used to: on the first page,
for example, a fly-catching elderly actress with the not-so-common name
Ida gets up when the clock rings three in Africa. All this in a Russian
town called Chudov, a name a little longer than чудо (miracle or wonder) and a little shorter than чудовище (monster). I’m glad the book and I came to terms after about 50 pages. Once I settled into Blue Blood, it became, by far, my favorite among this year’s Big Book Award finalists (previous post). I’ve read (or attempted to read) all the books on the list, though have yet to give Dmitrii Bykov’s Остромов, или Ученик чародея (Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice) the real college try.
Africa, it turns out, is the name of the building where Ida lives: it was formerly the bordello known as Тело и дело—two
rhyming words that mean body and deed—where Ida’s mother worked. Ida’s
nephew, whom she calls Friday, narrates the book, telling stories about
Ida, whom Buida based on actress Valentina Karavaeva. Meaning Blue Blood
is a fictionalized, quirkily embroidered biography of Karavaeva
filtered through a (fictional?) character’s childhood and adult
observations. The nickname Friday, by the way, is just one piece of a
series of references to Robinson Crusoe; Kirill Glikman’s review on OpenSpace.ru focuses on that element of Blue Blood.
“Actress”
sounds glamorous but Ida’s life is filled with pain: a brief marriage
to an Englishman, an accident that ruins her film career by making her
face look like a broken plate, the Stalinist repression, and the sudden
appearance of a former husband’s wife and child. As Ida likes to say, “От счастья толстеют.”
– “Happiness makes you fat.” She eats little and smokes 10 cigarettes a
day, something memorable because of Friday’s habit of repeating lists
of objects important to characters. Here, Glikman recognizes something
from Robinson Crusoe (which I haven’t read) but Friday’s tic
reminded me of repetition in fairy tales, particularly given the
proximity of characters with names like Baba Zha. Blue Blood also contains dark, Soviet-era transformations of fairy tale elements identified by Vladimir Propp.
Among them: Ida leaves home, returns home, handles numerous difficult
tasks, and marries. There is villainy on many levels, and there is even a
kiss (from a general, no less) worthy of the one that awoke Sleeping
Beauty.
Buida also works in references to higher literature. Dostoevsky stood out for me, perhaps in part because I’ve been reading Netochka Nezvanova:
one night I read from both books, and a chapter in each ended with a
cliffhanger involving fainting. Beyond that, Buida offers a mention of
people униженные и оскорбленные (often translated as humiliated and
insulted), a child called Grushen’ka, and a character likened to a
Dostoevskian pleasure-seeker. Beyond Dostoevsky, Ida plays Nina
Zarechnaia in Chekhov’s Seagull. The name Zarechnaia (on the
other side of the river), certainly suits Ida, who is clearly her own
person, her own myth. One more: Ida recites Romeo and Juliet for
hospital patients, improvising as needed, thus emphasizing characters’
storytelling powers as she tells of tragedy and suffering, something she
says benefits those who come after us… I read this in a broad
context—the family of all humanity—since Ida is childless and Buida
populates his novel with orphans and broken families.
The
metaphor of blue blood also flows through the novel: in short, Ida’s
actress friend Serafima tells her red blood is hot and makes the head
spin with ideas, but cooler blue blood is a more controlled,
self-possessed mastery, “Страшный Суд художника над самим собой”—an
artist’s self-imposed Judgment Day—something Serafima says is both a
gift and a curse. It can freeze.
Buida’s novel
is also a gift and a curse, though it’s my favorite kind of literary
curse, a book that contains so much to consider, feel, and
cross-reference that it doesn’t let me go or lend itself to quick
analysis. The long list of big topics I’ve left uncovered includes death
(e.g. Ida’s work with girls who release doves at funerals), purpose in
life, a touch of something gothic, Chudov’s “Pavlov’s Dog” café,
nightmares, and acting, which has subtopics like mimesis and a list of
Ida’s various names and roles. Ida’s roles include parts she plays in
her personal home movie archive as well as “Ida,” a name she selects for
herself as a child instead of going through life as Tanya.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Booker of the Decade & Bely 2011 Short Lists
Today was a big day for Russian book award
short lists… Here are two quick bleary-eyed, late-evening lists [with a
few next-morning edits]:
First, the Russian Booker of the Decade,
for which a huge panel of past judges chose five books out of the 60
that were shortlisted over the past 10 years. The winner will be
announced on December 1. The five finalists, in Russian alphabetical
order, are:
- Oleg Pavlov – Карагандинские девятины, или Повесть последних дней (A Ninth-Day Wake/Party at Karaganda or A Story of Recent Days/Commemoration in Karaganda). This is the third book in the trilogy that begins with Казенная сказка (A Barracks Tale), which I wrote about here. Pavlov’s novel is the only book on the list that has won a Booker.
- Zakhar Prilepin – Санькя (San’kya), which I wrote about here. I have a strong preference for Prilepin’s Грех, (Sin) (previous post), which won the SuperNatsBest earlier this year, but San’kya has often been cited for its political significance.
- Roman Senchin – Елтышевы (1) (2) (The Yeltyshevs) (previous post), one of my favorite books of recent years [one I’d like to translate], a novel that was short-listed for everything but hasn’t won an award.
- Liudmila Ulitskaya – Даниэль Штайн, переводчик (Daniel Stein, Translator) won the Big Book award a few years ago. I enjoyed the book very much when I read it several years ago (previous post). Daniel Stein came out in translation, from Overlook Press, earlier this year.
- Aleksandr Chudakov – Ложится мгла на старые ступени... (beginning) (end) (A Gloom Is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps), a complete mystery to me. Words Without Borders describes the book as a “memoiristic novel” and says Chudakov wrote “widely admired memoirs of such leading Russian literary scholars as Viktor Shklovsky, Viktor Vinogradov, and Lidia Ginzburg,” plus five books and a couple hundred articles.
Now for the Andrei Bely prize short list, for which winners will be announced on December 2… fortunately there is overlap with the NOSE long list, so I can copy and paste a few of these.
- Nikolai Baitov – Думай, что говоришь (Think When You Speak). Short stories (41 in 320 pages) from a poet.
- Igor Golubentsev – Точка Цзе (Not sure… The Tsze Spot, The Tsze Point, Sharpening Tsze? [see first comment, from languagehat]), apparently a collection of very short stories.
- Vladimir Mikhailov – Русский садизм (Russian Sadism). ?
- Aleksandr Markin –Дневник. 2006-2011 (Diary 2006-2011), Live Journal posts from Russia’s first LJ blogger, who has interests in German literature and European architecture.
- Denis Osokin – Овсянки (Yellowhammers), a novella that has already been made into a film known in English as Silent Souls.
- Pavel Pepperstein – Пражская ночь (Prague Night). I know more (but still not much!) about Pepperstein as a conceptualist artist and founder of “Inspection ‘Medical Hermeneutics’” than as a writer. A friend did mention enjoying Prague Night, though.
- Мария Рыбакова -- Гнедич (Gnedich), a novel in verse about Russian poet Nikolai Gnedich, the first Russian translator of The Iliad. Rybakova is also a poet. Excerpt
The Andrei Bely award
also recognizes other types of writing, including poetry and
humanitarian research. I’m especially excited about the poetry category
this time – the nominees are Polina Barskova, Alla Gorbunova, Vladimir
Ermolaev, Vasilii Lomakin, Andrei Poliakov, Aleksei Porvin, and Ilya
Rissenberg – because I met Polina Barskova at a wonderful poetry
translation conference here in Maine last weekend. The title poem from
her nominated collection, Сообщения Ариэля (Ariel’s Message), is available in translation here on Cardinal Points, and OpenSpace.ru has a video of Polina reading another poem (“Соучастие”
(scroll down for text)). Even if you don’t understand Russian, it’s
worth clicking through just to hear Polina’s voice and watch her
expressions.
P.S. November 9, 2011: Melville House has a nice post
on Polina Barskova that mentions her collections that have been
translated into English plus some colorful background on the Bely Prize.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Totally: Novellas by Chukovskaya and Iskander
I first read Lydia Chukovskaya’s Софья Петровна (Sofia Petrovna) in the early ‘90s, when I lived in Moscow: it was one of six pieces in a collection called Трудные повести (Difficult Novellas) that also included Andrei Platonov’s Котлован (The Foundation Pit). My reading skills weren’t ready for Platonov then but I could read and appreciate Sofia Petrovna
quickly, easily, without a dictionary. The novella was even more
satisfying because I could tell Chukovskaya’s direct, unembellished
language was the perfect medium for a story about a Leningrad widow
whose son Kolya, an engineer, is arrested in the 1930s.
I appreciated Sofia Petrovna
even more this time around, watching Chukovskaya unwind the story of
Sofia Petrovna, a loyal Soviet citizen who becomes more and more
unhinged trying to handle difficulties at work and the cruelly
impossible task of finding her son. Chukovskaya experienced similar
humiliations—she wrote the novella during November 1939-February 1940,
after the arrest of her husband, which makes it even more remarkable—and
demonstrates the effects of totalitarianism with painfully striking
precision.
I’m thinking of totalitarianism in the second definition in my Webster’s New [sic: it’s dated 1981] Collegiate Dictionary—“the
political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an
absolute state authority”—more than the first definition’s “centralized
control by an autocratic authority” that creates the political concept.
Chukovskaya’s novella is less about the system itself than its effects
on the thinking and actions of regular people, represented by a circle
of family and friends anchored by Sofia Petrovna. The book draws the
reader into her psyche as Soviet life wears her down.
We
hear Sofia Petrovna’s doubts about Kolya’s activity and friendships,
experience her pain when her communal apartment neighbors say nasty
things, and feel her deflation when she has brief audiences with
government officials after waiting for hours, even days. As the novella
continues and we witness her evolution from a happy, optimistic
publishing house administrator to a recluse who barely eats, it’s not
difficult to understand her confusion, her delusions, or her fears of
everybody.
After Chukovskaya’s book I picked up a collection by Fazil’ Iskander and chose Сумрачной юности свет (The Light of Murky Youth)
for one reason: at 75 pages, it was the longest piece in the book. I
didn’t know the story was about an Abkhaz man, Zaur, whose father was
shot during the Stalinist terror. Most of the story takes place when
Zaur is an adult—there are mentions of Khrushchev—and the most vivid
aspect of the story for me, perhaps because of my lingering thoughts on Sofia Petrovna,
was the uneasy balance of private and public in Zaur’s life. That made
the story feel like a later generation’s update on totalitarianism.
Iskander
gives Zaur a childhood with public Stalin portraits and an adulthood
that values privacy and individuality, whether he’s writing to the
Central Committee about the need for more private farming or trying to
find a place to be alone with his girlfriend. Though Iskander deftly
blends believable characters with lots of telling episodes about
required volunteer work, sneaking into forbidden places, police
behavior, family pressures, and politics, the story felt a little lumpy
to me. But that’s a minor complaint, what with the strong pull of the
conflict between control and privacy (always a favorite), and Iskander’s
ability to, like Chukovskaya, create vivid scenes, portraits, and
stories out of simple words and complex human situations.
Monday, October 3, 2011
2011 Yasnaya Polyana Awards
Winners of the Yasnaya Polyana Awards were
announced today. Fazil’ Iskander received the “Contemporary Classic”
prize for his three-volume Сандро из Чегема (Sandro of Chegem). Sandro of Chegem was a popular book among NOS-1973’s online voters earlier this year. Perhaps this is the sign I need to finally buy and read Sandro after enjoying some of Iskander’s Chik stories earlier this year (previous post).
Elena Katishonok won the “XXI Century” prize for Жили-были старик со старухой (Once There Lived an Old Man and His Wife) (excerpt); Katishonok’s novel was a 2009 Russian Booker finalist.
At least some of Sandro of Chegem
is available in translation, as are Iskander’s Chik stories. A
description on Amazon.com says Katishonok’s book is a family saga about
Russian Orthodox Old Believers set in the first half of the twentieth
century.
Жили-были старик со старухой on Amazon
Sunday, October 2, 2011
The Universal Solvent: Kuznetsov’s The Circle Dance of Water
I felt like I should cue up Sister Sledge singing “We Are Family” (here’s the Oprah version) when I finished Sergei Kuznetsov’s Хоровод воды (The Circle Dance of Water): Kuznetsov’s novel is a family saga, an ode to family ties and history that examines birth, aging, flaws, and fear of death. Circle Dance
is a 2011 Big Book prize finalist, and Kuznetsov’s readable tale of
multiple generations in an extended family is big indeed, both in size,
at 600 pages, and century-long scope, with family members who include a
female sniper in World War 2, an NKVD agent, and an alcoholic artist.
Thank goodness the book had a family tree.
Though I think The Circle Dance of Water
is probably the most enjoyable of the seven Big Book finalists I’ve
attempted so far this year, I also think it’s deeply flawed. Kuznetsov’s
water theme, for example, expands to kitschy tidal wave proportions by
the end of the book, thanks to an overdose of, yes, mysticism. In the
beginning, though, the water theme flows smoothly through the lives of
three main characters living in 21st-century Moscow. Nikita
is a businessman with a custom aquarium business who is having an affair
and a mid-life crisis but loves his depressed wife. Anya (née Elvira)
is a shoe saleswoman and single mother who loves to swim. And Moreukhov
is a formerly fashionable artist who goes on benders drinking alcoholic
liquids.
I think Kuznetsov is at his best
observing the lives of his contemporary characters. Nikita, for example,
remembers having no money, when buying Danone yogurt made everybody
happy. Now it’s caviar and Paris. In another scene, Dasha, Nikita’s
much-younger mistress, looks at Nikita through the aquarium he built for
her to decorate the apartment he rents for her. Nikita, with double
chin and circles under his eyes, looks like a fish. And though I think
Kuznetsov makes too much of Moreukhov’s obsession with movies, his
choice of genre for his life, film noir, is absolutely fitting, even
touching. With his heavy drinking, Moreukhov is a literary descendent of
drinkers like Venedikt Erofeev’s Venya in Москва-Петушки (Moscow to the End of the Line) and Vladimir Makanin’s Petrovich in Андеграунд (Underground) (previous post), among others.
As
an artist and storyteller who values ancestry and the past, Moreukhov,
who also happens to be Nikita’s half-brother thanks to an extra-marital
relationship, represents artistic representation and license. To
Moreukhov, film conveys the feel of other times, blending art and life…
making it a logical next step for Moreukhov to generate stories about
various generations of family members. Moreukhov is only one of
Kuznetsov’s narrators, and Kuznetsov sometimes hands storytelling duty
from one character to another on quick notice. This is far less
confusing than it probably sounds, particularly if you’re warned.
Kuznetsov also connects individual chapters, characters, and eras with
common objects or gestures, such as entwined hands.
Kuznetsov works lots, lots more into The Circle Dance of Water:
creatures from beyond, orphaned characters, single mothers, religion,
fears of aging and commitment and death and water, reincarnation, bodily
fluids, literary references, and so on and so forth. Kuznetsov handles
lots of this material with considerable grace, energy, and emotion, so I
was very disappointed--and almost a little shocked--to find that he
ties everything up neatly, first with a chapter of new agey sacrifices,
then with an epilogue that includes a chapter called “Хеппи-энд” (“Happy Ending”). It is the 107th of 108 chapters, apparently referencing the number of defilements in Buddhism. (I’m glad literary agency Goumen & Smirnova posted a brief blurb from Echo of Moscow that mentions 108 and the Buddhist connection…)
Though
I agree with Echo’s assessment that the book is more “a history of
human passions” than a story of individual characters, I thought
Kuznetsov’s water-based methods evolved to be too obvious, too
programmed, even too superfluous to create a graceful transition from
individual characters to universal passions and values. I wholeheartedly
agree with the blogger known as Заметил просто that
(I’ll paraphrase) the book would have left a better impression if I/we
hadn’t read it to the very end. Which is too bad: trusting us, the
readers, more and leaving some of the mysticism and the water to the
imagination might have transformed the book—which I looked forward to
reading and found entertaining—into something far more moving and
satisfying.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
2011 NOSE Long List
It’s been a long time since I’ve
methodically gone through an entire long or short list for an award,
adding links and descriptions… so here you go: the entire 25-member 2011
НОС/NOSE award long list,
with a few notes, including links to previous posts about the four
books I’ve read. As usual, I’m sure some of the title translations are
awful due to lack of context. The NOSE award is a program of the Mikhail
Prokhorov Fund.
I’m also sure more summaries,
excerpts, and full texts are floating around in the Runet, but this
warm fall day keeps calling me away from my computer! Though a few books
sound interesting, I can’t say I found anything new on the list that I
feel compelled to seek out right away, particularly since there seem to
be a lot of short story collections and nonfiction books on the list.
Marina Palei, whom I’ve been meaning to read for some time, is probably
at the top of my list.
1. Andrei Astvatsaturov: Скунскамера (Skunskamera), a book that’s a veteran of long and short lists.
2. Karine Arutiunova: Пепел красной коровы (Ash from the Red Cow), a collection of very short stories.
3. Marina Akhmedova: Дневник смертницы. Хадижа (Diary of a Death Girl. Khadizha. [a
key title word can mean a prisoner condemned to death or a suicide
bomber]), a novel about a Dagestani girl that Akhmedova based on stories
of real girls in the Northern Caucasus.
4. Nikolai Baitov: Думай, что говоришь (Think When You Speak). Short stories (41 in 320 pages) from a poet.
5. Il’ia Boiashov: Каменная баба (The Stone Woman) (previous post)
6. Iana Vagner: Вонгозеро (Vongozero), a debut novel about a nasty flu; the book grew out of Live Journal posts.
7. Igor’ Vishnevetskii: Ленинград (Leningrad), a novella set in Leningrad during World War 2 that Vishnevetskii says is a postscript of sorts to Andrei Belyi’s Petersburg because he imagined Belyi’s characters in his own book. For more: Svobodanews.ru interview with Vishnevetskii here.
8. Natal’ia Galkina: Табернакль (Tabernacle)
9. Dj Stalingrad: Исход (could be Exodus or something like The Outcome), apparently about leftwing skinheads.
10. Dmitrii Danilov: Горизонтальное положение (Horizontal Position) (previous post)
11. Nikolai Kononov: Фланёр (The Flâneur), a novel set in the 1930s and 1940s. (OpenSpace.ru review)
12. Aleksandr Markin: Дневник 2006–2011 (Diary 2006-2011),
Live Journal posts from Russia’s first LJ blogger. (This seems to be a
common thread this year…) Comments on Ozon.ru note Markin’s interest in
German literature and European architecture.
13. Aleksei Nikitin: Истеми (İstemi), a novel about bored students who create a geopolitical game and get in trouble. (The description on the Ad Marginem site is much more complicated.) Risk, anyone?
14. Marina Palei: Дань саламандре (beginning end) (Tribute [the monetary kind] for the Salamander) was also long-listed for the National Bestseller award.
15. Viktor Pelevin: Ананасная вода для прекрасной дамы (Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady), a bestselling story collection.
16. Andrei Rubanov: Тоже родина (Also a Motherland), a story collection.
17. Maria Rybakova: Гнедич (Gnedich), a novel in verse about Russian poet Nikolai Gnedich, the first Russian translator of The Iliad. Rybakova is also a poet. Excerpt
18. Figl’-Migl’: Ты так любишь эти фильмы (You Love Those Films So Much),
a NatsBest finalist that lost in a tie breaker vote when Kseniia
Sobchak cast her vote for Dmitrii Bykov instead. Sobchak said in an interview that she doesn’t consider F-M’s book literature. She also compares Bykov to McDonald’s and says she hates his ЖД (Living Souls) (previous post). Take that!
19. Margarita Khemlin: Крайний (Krainii: my previous post explains the title)
20. Andrei Sharyi and Iaroslav Shimov: Корни и корона (Roots and the Crown), essays about Austro-Hungary. (OpenSpace.ru review)
21. Mikhail Shishkin: Письмовник (Letter-Book) (previous post)
22. Nina Shnirman: Счастливая девочка (Lucky Girl) (excerpt);
a book about a girl’s childhood that includes World War 2. I’m not
clear if it’s strictly memoir or somewhat fictionalized. Either way, it
was a Cosmo book of the month!
23. Gleb Shul’piakov: Фес (Fes or Fez, as you prefer), a novel. The publisher’s description says Fes is
about a man who brings his wife to the maternity hospital and, when
left to his own devices, ends up in a basement in an unidentified
eastern city… sounds like more warped reality.
24. Aleksandr Iablonskii: Абраша (Abrasha), a novel with a vague summary.
25. Irina Iasina: История болезни (Case History) appears to be a memoir about having multiple sclerosis.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Labor Day 2011 Potpourri: Dovlatov & Two Abandoned Books
Saturday, September 3 was the 70th anniversary of the birth of Sergei Dovlatov, author of The Compromise (previous post),
one of my very favorite twentieth-century Russian books. There have
been lots of celebrations of Dovlatov’s very short life this year,
including awarding the Dovlatov prize on Saturday to Eduard Kochergin, for the story collection Ангелова кукла (Angel's Doll) and Крещенные крестами (Baptized with Crosses), which also won the National Bestseller award last year (previous post). New Yorkers can look forward to a Dovlatov event on October 30, 2011, “A Life Is Too Short,”
described as “an evening of literature, music, and documentary images
dedicated to Sergei Dovlatov.” I wish New York were closer!
Meanwhile, Dovlatov had a cameo appearance in a book I recently attempted to read but abandoned, Anatolii Naiman’s Каблуков (Kablukov),
a novel about a screen writer. Joseph Brodsky also showed up. I’ve
probably mentioned before that I have a personal (and perhaps
inconsistent) dislike of mentions of writers and other historical
figures in fiction… unless they’ve been dead for at least a couple of
generations. The namedroppy resurrections of Dovlatov and Brodsky
weren’t the primary reason I gave up on Naiman’s book, though: shifts in
narrative point of view, heavy shapelessness, and lack of momentum or
arc were far more fatal.
Lest I miss out on anything, I checked a couple reviews before putting Kablukov back on the shelf. I found that Time Out called it “не самый увлекательный роман на свете” (“not the most absorbing book in the world”) then learned that Lev Danilkin wrote that it lacks “raison d’Ptre” (hmm, a [sic] might be in order…), comparing it to Panikovsky sawing at a weight in The Golden Calf, looking for gold. Indeed. The first 60 pages of Kablukov contained
some interesting material about Soviet-era life and the legacy of the
Stalin-era repression, plus lots of allusions, but the text felt so
dense and, for me, swampily aimless, that there was no reward for all
the heavy lifting. I should add that there was a big fuss in 2005 when Kablukov did not win the Russian Booker.
By comparison, the first 60 or 70 pages of Leonid Girshovich’s peculiar “Вий”, вокальный цикл Шуберта на слова Гоголя (a title I’ve seen translated as “Viy,” Schubert’s Songs to Gogol’s Words)
drew me right in. Girshovich’s novel about collaborators in occupied
Kiev is thoroughly literary, too—unusually lively notes in the back
explain numerous references—but Girshovich creates sharp, weird scenes,
situations, and characters that give the book plenty of raison d’ être.
This is a book that works despite my painful reference/subtext
deficiencies; I haven’t read Bulgakov’s White Guard, Nabokov’s Gift, or Mann’s Magic Mountain, though at least I’ve read “Viy” and listened to lots of Schubert. Maybe this winter I’ll finally just force myself to read White Guard: I’ve already tried at least three or four times, not counting my attempts at the play version, Days of the Turbins,
which I tried and failed to read when it was on my grad school reading
list. Maybe this will finally be my year. Hope dies last!
Speaking of abandoned books, I also dumped Aleksei Slapovskii’s Большая книга перемен (The Big Book of Changes). The Big Book is on the short list for the 2011 Big Book award but I think its title is its only hope for winning. Though The Big Book of Changes is
far easier reading than the Naiman and Girshovich books, Slapovskii’s
portrayal of middle-age friends from high school and a family with some
businessmen just didn’t hold my interest, even during a lazy day with
Tropical Storm Irene. As with Slapovskii’s They (previous post),
the characters and situations felt stereotypically typical and
shoulder-shruggingly minor rather than archetypically typical and
painfully emblematic because Slapovskii doesn’t portray them from new or
unique perspectives. As many Russian reviewers have noted, Slapovskii
is also a screenwriter, and the book reads more like the basis for a TV
series than a novel. At 640 pages and 585 grams (according to Ozon) The Big Book of Changes certainly
is a big book in size, but, based on the first 200 or so pages that I
read, Slapovskii missed out, big time, on a big chance to transform a
wordy chunk of writing into a big and important social novel. Cutting
lots of back story and detail would have been a great start. I’m glad I
read electronically.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
“Horizontal Position, Sleep”: Danilov’s Diary-as-Novel, Horizontal Position
Dmitrii Danilov’s Горизонтальное положение (Horizontal Position), which I read in the abridged journal version published in Novyi mir,
was a pleasant surprise: the beginning of the book looked completely
unprepossessing to me when I first scanned through it online, with many
of the very short sentences in the book’s first diary entry containing
little more than street names and information about travel on public
transportation.
But Danilov won me over. I’m
sure it helps that his narrator and I are both corporate writers and
have visited many of the same places, from Mytishchi to Arkhangel’sk to
Russian Bookstore No. 21 in New York City. Far more important, though,
was Danilov’s ability to fill—and connect—the diary entries with
everyday material about the narrator’s work, travels, and downtime. Horizontal Position is a
rare case of a book where brand names don’t irritate me. Danilov makes
them feel almost anthropological: the narrator mentions Live Journal,
Flickr, a Yankee cap, and even a Hummus Place restaurant on the Upper
West Side of Manhattan (“вай-фай, ура!” – “wifi, hurray!”), pinpointing time and place with tremendously spare, repetitive language.
So what happens in Horizontal Position?
An apparently single guy who turns 40 during the course of the book
writes diary entries about life and his corporate work, much of it for
the oil and gas industry. He travels for work, discusses taking a course
in religion, and mentions literary pursuits. He rarely reveals much if
something rattles or pleases him—he seems restrained, almost inert, at
least in the text—even when he has an unhappy client. There’s some dry
humor: I particularly enjoyed the passage when a client asks him to make
a corporate text more artistic and lyrical. He tells us he plays an
online fantasy (?) soccer game. He tells us what he does before he gets
into a horizontal position to go to sleep, sometimes in uncomfortable
beds. Countless entries end with “Горизонтальное положение. Сон.” – “Horizontal Position. Sleep.”
The key to Horizontal Position is the epigraph, from Iurii Mamleev’s “Серые дни”
(“Gray Days”): “Но в общем все осталось по-прежнему и ничего не
изменилось, хотя как будто и произошли события.” – “But for the most
part everything remained as it had been and nothing had changed, though
apparently some things had happened.” Sure, I know Danilov’s narrator
reads Crime and Punishment and Sergei Samsonov’s Аномалия Камлаева (The Kamlaev Anomaly), listens to Splin, and eats a lot of hummus in New York because of the free Wifi. I even know, in excruciating detail, his Moscow travel routes.
Despite
all those details, though, I don’t know much about the man’s ambitions.
And you can probably tell that I don’t remember if he has a name or
not… I could swear something gave me the idea he was a Dmitrii, like his
creator, but now I can’t remember/find where I got that sense. But it
suits me if the narrator is anonymous—or reveals but doesn’t want me to
remember his name—since he stands in for all our days, weeks, months,
and years that feel like we’re living in what a college friend thought
of as personal human Habitrails, shuttling ourselves from place to place to do whatever we must. Meaning: I know nothing but everything about this guy. Blogger Заметил просто, who also doesn’t use a name for the narrator, refers
to the guy’s limited choices, like taking one bus instead of another.
(Hmm, this reminds me of something else…) And no matter where you are,
at home, on a train, or in your сингл-рум (single
room) on the Upper West Side, you’re likely to end up in a horizontal
position at the end of the day unless, of course, you’re on a plane.
I should add that Horizontal Position is a 2011 Big Book Award finalist; I’ve now read four of the 10 books (Danilov, Slavnikova, Sorokin, and Shishkin) and abandoned one (Arabov). Horizontal Position is
my favorite so far in terms of sheer readability. The diary form makes
it easy to read one more entry, then another, and I enjoyed the
narrator’s sneaky humor, even if I thought Danilov shouldn’t have let
him spend so much time in New York. I forgave him when the narrator
staged a minor rebellion toward the end, exhausted from all his travel
and record-keeping.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Train Spotting: Buida’s Zero Train and Astaf’ev’s Sad Detective
There
are so many trains in Russian fiction—and history—that I suppose it’s
not at all odd that I read, absolutely unintentionally, two short novels
in a row with strong railroad themes. Come to think of it, both pieces
also involve orphans, another common theme in Russian novels. The
novellas: Iurii Buida’s Дон Домино, known in Oliver Ready’s English translation (from which I’ve quoted below using Amazon’s Look Inside! feature) as The Zero Train, and Viktor Astaf’ev’s Печальный детектив (The Sad Detective).
Beyond
the common importance of railroad, difficult family situations, and
social changes, however, the novellas couldn’t be more different.
Buida’s Zero Train, a Booker Prize finalist in 1994, is an
elegantly composed metaphysical portrayal of people whose lives are
connected by a mysterious train that passes through their town each day.
Despite allegory, the air of mystery, and odd happenings, I’d say The Zero Train’s tracks end before the Fantasy station. Astaf’ev’s Detective, dated 1986, tells of a policeman-cum-writer who’s retired because of job-related injuries; Detective felt like an uneasy blend of village prose (деревенская проза) and чернуха, that crushing naturalism I so often seem to read.
Descriptions of character and plot don’t go very far in explaining why The Zero Train
appealed to me so much: in many ways, the railroad life of its main
character, Ivan Ardabyev, known as Don Domino because he loves playing
dominoes, isn’t especially remarkable. It’s the strange, punctual Train
No. 0 that mattered most here, linking disparate characters who work on
or watch the railroad and acting almost like a mirror as they wonder
what the train carries and where it goes. Security forces are a strong
presence: Buida gives Lavrentii Beria himself some ink and Ardabyev, whose parents were enemies of the people, has dealings with a security officer.
Ardabyev
doesn’t just lack parents: he’s also told has no past, no present, no
beliefs in God or devils. He has only the Zero Train, a conveyance with a
nihilistic number that Ardabuev himself resembles. Who are you if your
parents have been x-ed out of existence under horrible circumstances and
you have little real need for meaning? Ardabyev asks Fira, one of the
women in his life, “А зачем он нужен, смысл?... Смысл только в нас, в тебе и во мне, и если мы так думаем, нет ничего другого, и смерти нет.”
(“What do we need meaning for?... The only meaning is in us, in you and
in me, and if that’s what we think then there’s nothing else, not even
death.”)
Of course the biggest mystery of The Zero Train
is the meaning of the train itself. The train’s odd existence
represents life to the town’s residents and their curiosity about what’s
at the end of the line reminds of curiosity about death and the
afterlife. As Fira says to Ivan, “Что-то там есть. Иначе зачем же тогда Линия, зачем нулевой, зачем мы, зачем все это?”
(“There must be something there. Or else what’s the Line for, the Zero?
What are we doing here? What’s it all for?”) Ivan can only say he
doesn’t know, the train reminds him of life. The ending of The Zero Train is
ambiguous, as Oliver Ready notes in his afterword, and I think that’s
part of my enjoyment of the book: Buida finds a nice balance of
allegory, history, and reality, and has the good sense to write a short
novel that reveals just enough about his people and his train to spin a
wonderfully heady tale. I’m looking forward to reading more Buida.
By contrast, Astaf’ev’s Detective
felt unbalanced and, well, sad, not just because the title character
has had a difficult life and career but because I got the impression
Astaf’ev couldn’t quite decide whether to write about life around a
train station, life in the country, the work life of a policeman, or the
personal life of a policeman. The problem isn’t one of space—all that
could fit in one novella—but I don’t think Astaf’ev succeeds in linking
his diverse people and stories into a novel(la), though everything’s a
little too connected to be a collection of linked stories.
There’s
some gritty material—for me, a crime committed with a pitchfork in a
veal barn is the most vivid scene from the book—and there are lots of
social and moral aspects of Soviet life about which to feel sad and
mournful along with Soshnin, Astaf’ev’s title figure. The Sad Detective doesn’t just feel unfinished or underdone, it also feels like a piece a bit ahead of its time. Much of what Detective covers
reminds me of later chernukha novels that contain similarly harsh
realities but more cogent structures. I feel particularly mournful about
The Sad Detective because I thought Astaf’ev’s Lyudochka was very good (previous post).
Sunday, July 24, 2011
The Best of Intentions: Oleg Pavlov’s Barracks Tale
Oleg Pavlov’s
writing seems to drive me to contradictory reactions: even when I don’t
enjoy his books, I can’t put them down. And then, upon reflection, I
find myself respecting, liking, and recommending them. Pavlov’s Асистолия (Asystole or Flatline), which I called “a real downer” when I read it
last year, still feels like a downer because it delves into the
psychology of a nameless guy in post-Soviet Russia who lacks heart
function… but it still won’t let me go, a quality I value more than
enjoyment during reading.
Pavlov’s Казенная сказка, which I’ll call A Barracks Tale
for now, is a downer, too, though in a very different way: Pavlov
offers up a sad military parable with a big share of absurdity. I came
away from this first novel amazed at Pavlov’s ability to weave together
the tragic and the absurd using wickedly expressive language that is
almost home(l)y without being cloying or fussy.
With plenty of plot and a setting in the Kazakh steppe, A Barracks Tale may be more topographically open than the extreme interiority of Asystole
but Pavlov’s depiction of relationships and close quarters at a
military company co-located with a prison, gave me a powerful feeling of
claustrophobia. The crux of the story: a captain, Khabarov, plants
potatoes to keep his men from going hungry then gets in trouble; the
potatoes are confiscated. That’s only the half of it, but Khabarov’s
actions and fate (a bad one that I won’t reveal since this book is
destined for translation) remind me of one of the most famous utterances
credited to Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, “Хотели как лучше, получилось как всегда,”
roughly “We wanted better but things turned out the same as usual.” I
won’t summarize the plot more since Pavlov’s Facebook page includes a summary (written by Susan Anne Brown for Dalkey Archive Press) of Tale and two subsequent short novels; the trilogy is known as Повести последних дней (Tales of Recent Days).
The
summary also likens Pavlov to Gogol, which is perfectly apt, though
Pavlov’s humor seemed more muted to me, perhaps because it’s so
intrinsically connected with the tragedy and recentness of horrible
degradation in the late Soviet era. Pavlov’s dense writing and vivid
imagery is perfect for conveying the deprivations and
indignities—including lice, not enough (unappetizing) food, and cold—the
men face. I felt immersed in shades of khaki, brown, and gray. Though
the imagery and action sometimes seemed a little overwhelming and even
over-extended—as with Asystole
I sometimes couldn’t quite recall what I’d read but then realized, upon
review, that I hadn’t missed anything—the novel wraps up with a welcome
clarity I hadn’t expected.
As for that title. The second word, сказка/skazka, is the easy one: it’s the word for a fairytale or folk tale. But казённая/kazyonnaya, is difficult because it’s derived from the word казна/kazna, for treasury. Казённый
is often used to refer to government property but has taken on more
metaphorical meanings that reflect how people see government property
and matters: bureaucratic, bland, mediocre. It’s a perfect choice for
the title of the book because it expresses so much, from government
involvement in a horrible episode to the ubiquitous nature of the
problems it depicts.
Toward the end of the
book, Pavlov refers to Khabarov as “our captain,” reinforcing his own
role as storyteller—this is a skazka, after all—as well as Khabarov’s
representation of his men and, by extension, humanity. That “our”—and
others before it—also reinforces Pavlov’s power to draw the reader into
his story.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
More Fairytale Transformations: Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless
I realized as I read Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless, a novel that re-imagines Koschei the Deathless and Marya Morevna
as husband and wife during the Soviet era, that I seem to enjoy the
idea of folk tales more than I enjoy folk tales themselves. I love
looking at Vladimir Propp’s
list of fairytale motifs and, though I probably shouldn’t admit this,
I’d much rather read Valente’s book – or Anna Starobinets’s Sanctuary 3/9, which I enjoyed so much in 2009 – than a book of straight-ahead fairytales or folk stories.
Not
that I’m committing a horrible literary sin: folk tales are all about
variation, and one of the main points of Propp’s work and Valente’s
novel is that plot turns and characters in folk stories repeat. And
repeat. Valente emphasizes this in Deathless,
as when Baba Yaga tells Marya, “Walk the same tale over and over, until
you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished the tale
would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to
get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and
say your lines.”
We meet Marya Morevna in the first paragraph of Deathless:
In a city by the sea that was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her.
Marya waits years for
her future husband to show up, first witnessing the arrivals of her
three sisters’ suitors, who fly to a tree as birds, fall to the ground,
and become humans who claim their wives with words specific to their
times. The passages involving Marya’s sisters were some of my favorite
in the book: Valente’s lovely language and use of fairytale-inspired
repetition fit together beautifully. I also thought the sadness of
Soviet-era communal living in the long, thin house worked nicely, when
Marya has twelve mothers and meets the building’s domovye, house spirits.
I
was less enthusiastic about Marya’s life after Koschei, the
bird-then-husband whose last name is Bessmertmyi, or Deathless, takes
her to Buyan. There we
meet many other folk tale characters including Baba Yaga, Koschei’s
sister, who smokes cigarillos and danced on Lenin’s coffin; she’s
definitely not the Baba Yaga I met in Jack and Jill magazine
as a child. Some of Baba Yaga’s comments felt a little shticky to me –
“Husbands lie, Masha. I should know; I’ve eaten my share.” – but others
felt suitably mean, and she tests Marya before her wedding to make sure
Marya can rule her husband. Control is a big theme here.
Though I enjoyed Deathless
as a way to fill in some of the holes in my knowledge of Russian tales
and even found myself missing it a little when I finished – it was my
bedtime story – I agree with a Goodreads reader
who wrote just one sentence about the book: “Fairy tales without
character development cannot be sustained for an entire novel.” Deathless’s
characters, most of whom are variations on folk tale figures, aren’t as
richly developed as their surroundings and situations, which meant, for
me at least, that the element of fear was far less palpable than in Sanctuary 3/9. Scariness in Deathless
felt abstract in the fairytale and Soviet worlds, through, for example,
Koschei’s endless reincarnations and even parallels between wars in the
Soviet Union and the fantasy world. That’s not to say Valente doesn’t
create some vivid scenes: she does, particularly when Marya lives in
Leningrad during the blockade. In the end, of course, death is, says one character, “the only story.”
One other thing: I think Deathless
may be a book that “reads” best in audio. Hearing Valente read at a
local bookstore was a more satisfying experience than reading Deathless on
the page. That’s not just because Longfellow Books offered tasty little
cupcakes: I think Valente’s language and story lend themselves to
listening, which makes the most of her writing. It also seems thoroughly
fitting, given the oral roots of folk and fairytales.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
The Russian Booker Lives
The Russian Booker Prize has a new general sponsor, Российская корпорация средств связи, known as Russian Telecom Equipment Company
in English. RTEC has a history of supporting literary awards: it began
sponsoring the Student Booker in 2010 and has been involved with that
program for seven years, according to a news story on Lenta.ru. Lenta also reports that a five-year sponsorship contract with the Booker may be signed this summer.
No
Booker will be awarded for 2011; books released this year may be
submitted for the 2012 prize season. The Booker will, however, hold a
special “Booker of the Decade” competition in 2011. All shortlisted
books from 2001-2010 are eligible. Judges from past Booker seasons will
choose five works each to develop a shortlist that will be announced in
early November. The winner will be announced on December 1; the prize
will be 600,000 rubles.
The Booker site has a summary of rules plus a list of all eligible Booker of the Decade books online here.
There are lots of books on the list that I’d love to see get more (or
less!) attention… and I’d be interested in hearing reader predictions.
For my part, I’m about to start reading Oleg Pavlov’s Казенная сказака (A Barracks Tale or Military Apologue), a 1995 Booker finalist and the first book of a trilogy that culminated in Карагандинские девятины, или Повесть последних дней (A Ninth-Day Wake/Party at Karaganda or A Story of Recent Days or Commemoration in Karaganda),
which won the Booker in 2002. (Oy, there are multiple translated titles
floating around for these books!) Readers on the lookout for
English-language translations will be happy to know that A Barracks Tale is listed as winning a translation grant from Transcript, a program of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation; publisher is And Other Stories.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Seeing the Light: Platonov’s Juvenile Sea
After reading Il’ia Boiashov’s unsatisfying Stone Woman, I decided to get back to (modern) classics with a bit of Andrei Platonov… it finally felt like time to read the long story Ювенильное море (Juvenile Sea, sometimes Sea of Youth).
And what a wonderfully disorienting pleasure it was to read Platonov:
it would have been worth reading if only for its giant pumpkin shell
sleeping pods.
And where else can a reader
find a production story – goals here include increasing cattle
production and investigating alternative energy sources – written in a
variegated language that braids poetic turns with Soviet-speak and
tropes from socialist realism? I think my biggest difficulty in reading
Platonov is that his unusual word combinations dazzle so much that I
have to read each line twice to apprehend their various literal,
figurative, and story meanings. Often, twice is not enough: Platonov’s
writing is so full of остранение (making
it strange) that almost everything feels a bit off, unusual, or
grotesque, making reading a full-on experience. Even the preface to one
of my Platonov books begins with the line “Кажется, мы уже никогда не узнаем, как читать Андрея Платонова.”
– “It seems that we will never find out how to read Andrei Platonov.”
The key has fallen away in the waters of time, explains Valentin
Kurbatov… a particularly fitting phrase for The Juvenile Sea.
Of
course I prefer back doors and loose windows to lost keys because I
don’t think there’s any single correct way to read a book or writer. And
all those layers of cryptic words and meaning are why a stubborn reader
like me so enjoys Platonov. Rather than write about the entire story,
which could take a month or two, I’ll mention a jumble of the oddities
and happenings that drew me in on the first pages, then list a few of
the themes they raise. If you want to learn more about the whole story,
Thomas Seifrid’s book Andrei Platonov summarizes some of the technical themes in The Juvenile Sea here, on Google books.
The Juvenile Sea begins
as an engineer and electrician, Nikolai Vermo, crosses the steppe in
the southeast Soviet Union on foot, spending his days staving off
boredom by imagining himself as a machinist, pilot, or geologist. He
finds himself at the home of Adrian Umrishchev, director of a state farm
for raising meat; Vermo presents papers that ordered him to the farm.
Umrishchev is reading an ancient book with old words, about Ivan the
Terrible. On The Juvenile Sea’s
third page, Umrishchev says he resolved a housing crisis with the
afore-mentioned pumpkin shells. He soon describes how he’d been placed
on the rolls of the “unexplained” (невыясненные)
after demobilization from the Soviet apparatus. Vermo and Umrishchev
talk into the night. Here’s the phrase that indicates morning has
arrived: “Ночь, теряя свой смысл, заканчивалась” – “Night, losing its point/meaning/purpose, ended.”
Light and Dark. I withered when I read that phrase about night, and I kept returning to it as I read The Juvenile Sea:
the sun as a source of power is a key piece of the story, and
brightness and mentions of electricity link into typical themes from
Soviet propaganda and socialist realism, along with more metaphorical
aspects of light, such as enlightenment.
Generations. The
phrase also struck me on a more emotional level because of the mention
of loss of purpose. Umrishchev’s name is rooted in “die” and even his
breathing feels tired; he gives off an air of boredom and doubt. And of
course he was “unexplained” – talk about lacking purpose! – until he
become fully explained through practical work. At the end of the story
we see two couples, one young and setting out to America (!) for a
business trip, the other old, staying behind.
The Dark Side of Sotsrealism. A horrible sadness – starting with тоска (I’ll just call it deep melancholy) in Vermo’s heart in the second sentence – flows through The Juvenile Sea…
along with Platonov’s characters’ optimism. Of course there are plenty
of enthusiastic workers in socialist realism, but they don’t carry this
kind of toska. Or so many rats: rats run over one character as she
sleeps, though she doesn’t hear them. It’s those jarring combinations
that make Platonov’s writing feel so wonderfully convoluted and oddly
real.
The Great Pumpkin. Russian Dinosaur’s mention of The Velveteen Rabbit in a blog post (and a college course) about socialist realism inspires me to invite Linus van Pelt’s Great Pumpkin into my post: Soviet-era promises of a bright future (the good old светлое будущее),
communism, and even superlative meat production were about as likely to
materialize as the Great Pumpkin. Belief is at the root of my
fascination with the huge pumpkins in The Juvenile Sea:
my first thought was to wonder if such pumpkins were possible. I later
reminded myself that real reality didn’t matter because I was reading a
piece of work that corrupts socialist realism, a myth-laden genre, and
its language.
P.S. Platonov’s Life. I’ve been reading and enjoying Frank Westerman’s Engineers of the Soul: In the Footsteps of Stalin’s Writers,
translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett. Among other things, Westerman
mentions Platonov’s technical education and experience (some of which
dovetails with The Juvenile Sea), difficulties publishing, and relationship with Maxim Gorky. I’ll write more about Engineers of the Soul later, probably in a nonfiction roundup post.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Boiashov’s Stone Woman
I’ll be blunt: Il’ia Boiashov’s Каменная баба (The Stone Woman,
more on the title below) just isn’t my kind of book, and not liking it
was especially disappointing after Boiashov’s wonderful The Tank Driver or “White Tiger” (past post). Subject matter probably has a lot to do with my disappointment. Tank Driver is about World War Two, which interests me, but Stone Woman looks at the phenomenon of strong Russian women through the prism of showbiz and celebrity.
The Stone Woman is
a roaches-to-riches tale of a singer from an undetermined province, and
Boishov constructs his story by layering Russian myth upon archetypes
upon more myth as the woman rises from a squalid childhood to become a
Russian TV star and singer. She reminds of Alla Borisovna Pugacheva: her hit song “Миллиард тюльпанов на площади” (“A Billion Tulips on the Square”) is clearly a parodic cousin of Alla Borisovna’s “Миллион алых роз”
(“A Million Scarlet Roses”). I’m not an avid consumer of Russian or
Western celebrity news, so I’m sure I missed out on plenty of
references.
I think my problem with The Stone Woman
is that it’s so overloaded with references to Russian and foreign
culture, popular and historical, that it feels gimmicky even if the
kitschiness of contemporary culture and the power of the entertainment
industry is part of Boiashov’s point. Examples: Tom Cruise gets a cameo
and our antiheroine has a granddaughter named Lisa-Marie. I did
occasionally laugh at Boiashov’s portrayal of an overbearing Russian
woman who attracts endless men, breastfeeds her son so long I wanted to
call in Dr. Freud, and lives at the top of a swanky building (see
image), but the exaggerated humor was a bit over-the-top for my delicate
sensibilities.
I found Boiashov’s schematicness and use of italics annoying, too, especially when he refers to his title character as stone woman.
Her real name is Maria Ugarova, which gives you
Maria/Mary/oh-you-know-Madonna +ugar, which can be carbon monoxide
fumes/poisoning, ecstasy and intoxication, or even industrial wastes of
various types, according to my trusty Oxford Russian-English dictionary.
Take that, Alla Borisovna: the pug- root of your name promises only
fright and intimidation, and a pugach is just a toy gun or an owl. The
term каменная баба, kamennaia baba, refers to a stone image of a warrior (or woman) that’s placed on a burial mound, giving Ugarova one heck of an ancient lineage.
But I shrug. That accomplished, I’ll say that The Stone Woman
may be a love-it-or-hate-it book: I finished because it’s 158 small
pages plus Boiashov’s Q&A session with himself about Russian women.
(I won’t even begin to remark on that!) Comments on ozon.ru when I wrote were positive (five stars) but I wondered as I read the novel – as did reviewer mashona on Vaffly.ru
– who’d want to read the book, given that (I’ll summarize some of
mashona’s points) Boiashov doesn’t say anything new, most readers aren’t
very interested in Alla Borisovna, and Alla Borisovna herself isn’t
going to read that she’s being portrayed as (essentially) a prostitute. I
suspect The Stone Woman would
be most interesting and fun for casual readers and scholars who enjoy
dissecting popular culture, excavating myths, fairytale themes, truths,
and fantastical elements. There’s plenty there.
If you’re in the market for a novel about an overbearing Russian woman, I’m more likely to recommend Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, translated by Tim Mohr from the German original Die schärfsten Gerichte der tatarischen Küche. The Hottest Dishes
leans toward character study and peters out in the last third or so,
but I thought Bronsky did an admirable job portraying Rosa Achmetowna, a
beautiful (or so she says) battleaxe who claims to mean well. I thought
the book was much funnier than Boiashov’s Stone Woman,
perhaps because Bronsky’s first-person narrative (from Rosa herself)
juxtaposes humor with references to Soviet woes. As I wrote on my other blog,
I’ve known plenty of women like Rosa. As bossy women, Rosa and Masha
Ugarova certainly share plenty of characteristics, but Rosa, who’s
larger than life but still feels real, is far more compelling to me than
Boiashov’s grotesque and italicized stone woman.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
It’s Always Fun Until…: Benigsen’s GenAcide
Vsevolod Benigsen’s novel ГенАцид (GenAcide)
reminds me of lines parents and teachers love to use on kids, things
like “It’s always fun until someone gets hurt.” Benigsen’s descriptions
of Russian village life and residents are gentle but unforgiving,
presented with humor that reminds me of Vladimir Voinovich’s depiction
of soldier Chonkin’s adventures. But Benigsen morphs farce into tragedy
by creating, gradually, tension within his fictional community. Fear
not: I won’t reveal specifics of the ending, though it’s clear from the
first pages that a happy end is not in store. If that’s not enough, a
weapon appears in the first half of the book, not long after a
discussion of Chekhov.
In GenAcide,
Benigsen describes a village, Bol’shie Ushchery, in which each resident
is given, according to a presidential order, a piece of Russian
literature to learn. Quickly. There will be a test. The project name, “ГенАцид” (GenAcide), stands for Государственная Единая Национальная Идея –
roughly State Unifying National Idea. It sounds like “genocide.” Book
distribution is delegated to the town’s librarian, Anton Pakhomov, a
historian who has nothing in common with his neighbors and sees history
as “бардак,” a word for brothel that has come to mean, essentially, a terrible mess.
Book
distribution goes okay and residents take to reciting their works in
public and at parties. Even local unity, however, is not guaranteed: one
resident balks at receiving Andrei Platonov’s Чевенгур (Chevengur)
and things start falling apart in a big way when cliques – e.g. prose
against poetry – develop and rivals fight. Some of this is very funny,
including residents’ neologisms for describing themselves as GenAcide
participants. I particularly appreciated a character who speaks his own
odd form of Russian: he receives Kruchenykh to memorize. Zaum, indeed!
After all the humor, GenAcide
concludes with jarring actions of a violent mob and a character’s
thoughts that Russians have a tendency toward chaos and problems. I
won’t say more than that… but I will say that I was surprised to read Lev Danilkin’s review,
which finds Russophobia in the book. Danilkin enjoyed much of
Benigsen’s laugh-out-loud humor but concludes by calling the book “Остроумный, но неприятный роман,” a “witty but unpleasant novel.” He doesn’t like the ending. Neither does Maya Kucherskaya,
who thinks the finale doesn’t fit what precedes. She thinks Benigsen
lacks empathy and says the book is too realistic, not schematic enough
for farce.
I’m not Russian but I read GenAcide
very, very differently, far less literally than Danilkin and
Kucherskaya. I didn’t find Russophobia at all but a universal,
well-constructed book about myth, a parable-like account of the
consequences of attempting to use culture – in this case, Russian
literature and its surrounding myths – to create a politically expedient
national unity, something that’s elusive (perhaps mythical?) in a pure
and benign form. Of course part of the problem with mythmaking is that
truths and stories tend to be incomplete, and GenAcide’s creators follow
the pattern by, often, commanding that people receive chunks of works,
like chapters six and seven of Evgenii Onegin
or chapters from Saltykov-Shchedrin. Receiving literary works out of
context is only one reason residents have difficulty understanding them:
one woman can’t even read.
Benigsen pours in
many other layers of myth. One example: Pakhomov, who has written about
myth, can’t bring himself to take down materials hanging in the
“military-historical corner” of his library because the corner feels
like a monument to Soviet mythmaking. And Benigsen’s characters felt
very obviously (arche)typical to me, offering another hint that Benigsen
never aimed for a literal, realistic reading of GenAcide.
Beyond Pakhomov, who’s a typical intelligent out-of-his-element,
Benigsen offers up a tractor driver (!), a World War 2 partisan, a
Central Asian immigrant, a young, pregnant postal worker who steams open
a letter to her baby’s father and contemplates how to handle the
information… and so on. Yes, everybody feels absolutely vivid, real, and
funny, even cozy, at the start of the book but that’s largely because
we already know them and their stereotypical situations, both comical
and, later, tragic, from elsewhere, from books, TV series, and even the
news.
I could write lots more but will mention
just one other way Benigsen removes the residents of Bol’shie Ushchery
from reality. We learn fairly early in the book that they weren’t
counted in a census, something Russians tend to dislike. (I’ve even read
scholarly article about this.) Many BU citizens lack documents, don’t
know their ages, and can’t explain their jobs. Without documents or real
biographies, some are, writes Benigsen, “как дети в дремучем лесу,”
“like children in a thick forest,” reinforcing that the characters are
the stuff of folktales with uncertain, even composite identities. And
documentless people are nonentities in the eyes of government
bureaucracy, making them an oddly perfect choice for a project with a
name like GenAcide.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Bykov Wins NatsBest (Again)
Dmitrii Bykov won the 2011 National Bestseller Award (NatsBest) for his novel Остромов, или Ученик чародея (Ostromov, or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice). Bykov is a repeat winner of the NatBest: he won in 2006 for Boris Pasternak. Ostromov is the final book of a trilogy, following Оправдание (Justification) and Орфография (Orthography). Ozon.ru’s listing for all three novels in one volume, which weighs in at 992 pages and 1345 grams, includes brief descriptions.
Update, June 6, 2011: Given Dmitrii Bykov's high public profile, I wondered how long this would take... Lenta.ru
reports that Vadim Levental', chair of the NatsBest Organizational
Committee, expressed his dissatisfaction with Bykov's win. My summary:
Levental' said Bykov is already well-known and widely read therefore
doesn't fit the award's goal of finding a book with unrealized potential
to become an intellectual bestseller. Prochtenie.ru
shows jury voting tied at two each for Bykov and Figl'-Migl', leaving
jury chair Kseniia Sobchak to cast the deciding vote. She voted for
Bykov but expressed her preference for Mikhail Elizarov's Мультики ('Toons), which won one jury vote.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Sorokin’s Ice Prequel: Chillin’ with Bro
Vladimir Sorokin’s Путь Бро (Bro) (sorry, no italicized Cyrillic allowed today on Blogger...), the first novel in Ice Trilogy from New York Review Books, translated by Jamey Gambrell, is a prequel that prehashes much of the core of Sorokin’s Лёд (Ice), a book I read several years ago (previous post). Sorokin wrote Ice first,
then backed up to write its back story. Apparently I’m not the only
reader (or writer) who wondered, perhaps grudgingly, why all those
blue-eyed, light-haired people were knocking each other in the hearts
with ice-tipped hammers in an attempt to gather their brethren, 23,000
chosen people, for a special rapture. I haven’t read 23,000, the trilogy’s culmination, but think NYRB’s summary of the trilogy aptly describes the first two books:
Pulp fiction, science fiction, New Ageism, pornography, video-game mayhem, old-time Communist propaganda, and rampant commercial hype all collide, splinter, and splatter in Vladimir Sorokin’s virtuosic Ice Trilogy, a crazed joyride through modern times with the promise of a truly spectacular crash at the end. And the reader, as eager for the redemptive fix of a good story as the Children are for the Primordial Light, has no choice except to go along, caught up in a brilliant illusion from which only illusion escapes intact.
I found in Bro, like Ice,
an irritatingly readable book that I didn’t especially like. I couldn’t
put either book down (despite repetition), but Sorokin’s abstractions,
though effective on one level, make the books feel, to echo what other
readers have told me, a little soulless (intentionally?) even when they
compel me to keep reading. And both times I had that sinking Peggy Lee
feeling of “Is that all there is?” So… In Bro, the title character narrates his life story: born the day the Tunguska meteor hits, goes on Leonid Kulik
expedition to site, knocks heart on ice, realizes he’s found his true
self. Now he must find 22,999 others like him who are also capable of
speaking with their hearts, eating a raw vegetarian diet before it’s
trendy, seeing the rest of Earth’s population as meat machines, and
being saved during that rapture I mentioned above. Bro begins by finding
Fer, Eve to his Adam.
Part of the paradox of Bro and Ice
is that they seem silly – the pulpiness NYRB mentions is obvious, with
calendar pages tearing off and heart-related passages so cheesy I wrote
“oy” in the margins – as they examine the nature of a group that
considers itself chosen and allowed to do anything. (I doubt it’s
coincidental that Dostoevsky is involved when Bro dreams about a book…)
It’s okay to kill, reason is bad, and books are just paper covered with
combinations of letters. Bro sees himself as part of a war to free his
brothers and sisters, people of light, from the dark, meat machine
masses. Bro’s group are higher beings, enlightened, as it were.
It’s notable that Bro’s
stylized language changes over the course of the novel. The book’s
opening reads like a classic Russian narrative of childhood and youth
but Bro’s last quarter
contains, for example, a passage about World War Two that mentions the
country of Order, the country of Ice, the country of Freedom. Freedom
and Ice beat Order. Weapons are metal pipes. Oh, those meat machines!
Another passage also uses остранение, defamiliarization,
to describe movie screenings in Germany: a box projects shadows onto
white material. It reminded me a bit of Natasha Rostova’s trip to the opera in War and Peace.
Bro brings out the hard,
cold totalitarianism of Bro and his crew, showing us how they find
siblings in the Soviet and Nazi systems and use their infrastructures.
In the Soviet Union, they cruise the streets looking for brothers and
sisters, arresting them so they can pop them in the hearts and show them
their true natures and make them happy, too. And that’s where Bro and Ice
are most interesting: showing how the ice people’s activity parallels
and intersects with that of real-life totalitarian regimes. Of course
Bro’s people are more chosen than the political regimes’ chosen, and
their intentions are (even more) purely selfish: their source and
inspiration, after all, are celestial, from meteorite ice, a piece of
another world.
I could go on and on about Bro and Ice but will just add a few notes: A big caveat: I’ll repeat that I haven’t read 23,000, which apparently Changes Everything. (See Daniel Kalder’s piece on Publishing Perspectives about Sorokin and the trilogy.)… I think New York Review Books did the right thing by placing Bro first in the trilogy book, even though it was written after Ice… According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, Sorokin once said literature was just “paper with typographic signs,” thoughts rather like Bro’s… Do I recommend the Ice books?
Sort of. If you enjoy abstract novels of ideas with science fiction
elements that read easily and offer plenty of oddity, they may be right
up your proverbial alley. It’s taken me a few years and a few books to
edge into Sorokin’s world.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Ah, Sweet Mysteries of Life: Shishkin’s Maidenhair
I love novels like Mikhail Shishkin’s Венерин волос – the title means, literally, Venus Hair, and Marian Schwartz is translating it as Maidenhair for Open Letter,
for the fern the name denotes – that seep into my thoughts and occupy
my mind so much that any other reading, whether a newspaper or another
book, feels like an intrusion. I’ll try to explain without giving away
too much… I enjoyed Maidenhair’s unexpected twists and transitions so was glad I didn’t know many specifics before I began reading.
If forced to summarize, I’d say Maidenhair is
an omnibus of life – or maybe Life – that presents full ranges of pain
and joy, simplicity and complexity, truth and fiction, love and war,
and, of course, Mars and Venus. Maidenhair
is relentlessly literary, with references to mythology and history that
cross timelines and borders, but it is also relentlessly readable, even
suspenseful, if you’re willing to accept its flow. I’ve heard
complaints about Maidenhair’s naturalism but I think the book would felt terribly empty without it. In summary:
“И всегда так было: кому-то отрубают голову, а у двоих в толпе на площади перед эшафотом в это время первая любовь.”
“And that’s how it’s always been: at the same time someone’s head is being lopped off, two in the crowd, on the square in front of the scaffold, are in love for the first time.”
And
that, dear readers – along with attendant marriages, births, bust-ups,
ambitions, aging, and finding balance in the world – is how I see the
crux of Maidenhair. A richly stitched, multi-layered homage to the coexistence of love and death. (NB: Without Woody Allen.) One other thing: Maidenhair
also reminds that we, along with the stories we live and tell, repeat,
like doubles. Shishkin reinforces the importance of our written stories
in several ways. Characters mention written records and repeat old
stories (I’m not telling). And the interpreter visits the remains of St.
Cyril, co-creator of Cyrillic, in Rome, because those letters mean so
much to him. Rome, as Eternal City, by the way, plays an important role
in Maidenhair. So do belly buttons.
Yes, Maidenhair lacks
a single unified plot and its story threads, knitted together by
history, chance, and archetypes, sometimes wander. A lot, which can make
the reading challenging but very rewarding. Two characters anchor the
novel: a Russian speaker who interprets immigration interviews for Swiss
authorities and a female singer named Izabella. We read Q&A
sessions, we read of the interpreter’s family problems, and we read
Izabella’s intermittent diaries, where we witness her growth from
gushing teenager to a wife resigned to a husband’s infidelities.
Though
the book’s structure and histories may sound complicated, despite
familiar tropes, even Shishkin says the core is simple. Shishkin says in
an interview in Contemporary Russian Fiction: A Short List: Russian Authors Interviewed by Kristina Rotkirch, that Maidenhair
presents the concept “that life is not only in Russia, life is not only
fear and is not at all to be feared – life is to be enjoyed.” At the
2011 London Book Fair, Shishkin likened Maidenhair and Взятие Измаила (The Taking of Ishmael) to conversations he hadn’t had with his parents. I heard Shishkin say that before I read Maidenhair, and
I found the thought particularly moving after I read the book and felt
the cathartic effect of its portrayal and cataloguing of the kindnesses
and brutalities that life -- and thus our parents -- give us.
With
difficult conversations in mind, here’s another line that struck me in
its emblematic simplicity. It’s from a letter written by Izabella’s
boyfriend, a soldier in World War 1:
“Это я с тобой разговариваю обо всем на свете, а здесь, в окопах, вообще никогда не говорят вслух о главном – люди курят, пьют, едят, разговаривают о пустяках, о сапогах, например.”
“I can speak with you about anything in the world but here, in the trenches, nobody ever talks out loud about the main thing – people smoke, drink, eat, and speak of trivial things, boots, for example.”
Of
course boots are pretty important to a soldier, but his meaning is
clear: the minutiae of life are fine but death, the underlying main
thing, is off the list. Things probably aren’t so different for
civilians.
After staring at Maidenhair’s spine on
my shelf for more than a year, a bit afraid of it after hearing its
reputation for difficulty, I’m happy I read straight through without
researching too much as I read. It’s not that I felt lazy: I think it
was important to accept the book’s flow – Maidenhair has
such a mesmerizing flow that one friend likened it to a fountain – so I
could appreciate the cumulative emotional effect and heady surprises of
all those drops, lives, histories, people, stories, and words that
Shishkin piles on. Though I picked up plenty of references, I know I
missed nuances (and more) because of my lopsided knowledge of history
and classics, but I’ll save a detailed analysis of Maidenhair’s shards of history, mythology, language, and, yes, Rome for another reading.
Also: Maidenhair won the National Bestseller prize in 2005.
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