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.

Disclaimer. I have translated some of Roman Senchin’s work, including excerpts from his Yeltyshevs.

Up Next: List of new and upcoming translations. And Irina Bogatyreva’s Товарищ Анна (Comrade Anna).

And a very special thank you… to my friend S. and her family, who brought me The Information (plus books by Ganieva and Shulpyakov that I’ve already written about) from Moscow this winter. 

Misc. Awards News for Early March + A Penguin

There’s more award news this week: for one thing, Oleg Pavlov won the Solzhenitsyn Prize, an annual prize that carries an award of $25,000. I’ll take the easy way out and quote the message I received from Pavlov’s literary agency, Elkost, which says the prize recognizes “works in which troubles of the Russian life are shown with rare moral purity and sense of tragedy, for consecutiveness and steadiness in search of truth.” That’s not too far from the jury’s quote that’s included in a news item on lenta.ru. Previous Solzhenitsyn Prize winners include Valentin Rasputin, Aleksei Varlamov, and Viktor Astaf’ev. I’ve written about two of Pavlov’s novels: Казенная сказка (A Barracks Tale) and Асистолия (Asystole or Flatline).

Meanwhile, the Russian Prize (Русская премия) announced their longlist last week. The long fiction longlist includes Yuz Aleshkovskii’s Маленький тюремный роман (A Little Prison Novel), which I bought a few weeks ago, and Elena Katishonovk’s Когда уходит человек (When a Person Leaves). Maria Rybakova’s Gnedich (a novel in verse) and Sasha Sokolov’s Триптих (Triptych) are among the short fiction entries. The full longlists for poetry, short prose, and long prose are all on the Russian Prize Website. The Russian Prize is awarded to writers who live outside Russia and write in Russian.

Misha is a king penguin.

Finally, (in more ways than one!) I read Andrei Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin, in George Bird’s translation… I’d included the novel on my list of books for a program at my town library last week and realized too late that I could get the original through interlibrary loan. The book seems to have more than one Russian title; the most common being Пикник на льду, literally Picnic on the Ice. Picnics on the ice are a pastime of Viktor, a writer in Kiev who composes obituaries of people still among the living: Viktor and his pet penguin, Misha, go with a mutual friend to the Dnepr, where Misha swims under the ice while the humans enjoy snacks.

I was glad not to know much about the book before reading so will just say that Kurkov’s plot includes Viktor finding himself caring for a small girl and needing to keep a low profile because of post-Soviet dangers linked to those obituaries. Of course Viktor also frequently buys frozen fish. I thought the book was enjoyable, fairly light reading with an apt blend of absurdity and social commentary. And who can resist a sad, affectionate penguin, a precocious little girl, and their lonely caregiver? I almost want to say that Melancholic Absurdity is the novel’s main character.

Blogger Marie Cloutier, also known as Boston Bibliophile, recently heard Kurkov speak at a bookstore event and said he discussed similarities between penguins and Soviets. To quote Marie, “both, he said, are used to rigid civil structures and don’t know how to operate outside of their group.” I thought Aleksei Balakin’s review of Picnic on the Ice, in a 2006 issue of the journal Критическая масса (Critical Mass) offered a nice analysis of the paradox of Kurkov’s work, which is popular in Europe but relatively unknown in Russia.

Melville House, which published Death and the Penguin in the U.S. last year, has released two other Kurkov books in Bird’s translations: Penguin Lost (2011) and The Case of the General’s Thumb (2012). Additional Kurkov books are available in English translation from U.K. publishers.

Up Next: That darn list of recent and upcoming translations. And Roman Senchin’s Информация (The Information). We’ll see which I finish first.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Image Credit: King penguin photo by Samuel Blanc, via Wikipedia.

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.

For more about Debut and February 2012 tour events:

• Causa Artium, the organization that organized the Debut tour, has links on Facebook to press items about events.
• Debutprize.com has Debut information in English
• Pokolenie-debut.ru has Debut information in Russian
• Several books published by Glas contain translations of Debut writers’ work. Among them:  Ganieva’s Salam, Dalgat! is in the Squaring the Circle collection, and Off the Beaten Track contains Savelyev’s Pale City as well as Bogatyreva’s Off the Beaten Track. Some stories in the Rasskazy collection published by Tin House (previous posts) were written by Debut writers.

A Big Pile of Disclaimers: I’ve known John William Narins, of Causa Artium, the organization that organized the Debut tour, for (oh my!) decades. I’ve collaborated with Natasha Perova of Glas, which has published books of Debut Prize writers’ work. (I even translated pieces for one of those books.) And I’ve thoroughly enjoyed meeting writers who’ve come to the U.S. and England on Debut tours.

Up Next: Translation roundup. The list keeps growing! Then Roman Senchin’s Информация (The Information) and Irina Bogatyreva’s Comrade Anna, which I’m looking forward to very much.

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.

Up Next: Alisa Ganieva’s energetic, colorful long story Салам тебе, Далгат! (Salam Dalgat!), a nice antidote to Fez: the story presents a down-to-earth portrait of a young man’s day in Dagestan. I’ll combine Dalgat with a brief trip report since Ganieva is in the Debut Prize group I’ll hear speak in Cambridge, MA, on February 22. Then a translation roundup and Roman Senchin’s Информация (The Information).

Image credit: topfer, via stock.xchng. 

National Bestseller’s 2012 Longlist

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again: I’ve grown to love literary award longlists because they always seem to contain at least a dozen books or manuscripts worth investigating. And I especially enjoy the National Bestseller longlist because it notes each book’s nominator. Some interesting bits for 2012:

Most of this year’s 45 nominators seem to stick to the award’s main principle of recognizing and promoting writers whose books haven’t—yet—become bestsellers. Even if this is only the third consecutive year, it seems that someone nominates Viktor Pelevin every damn year: this year critic Veronika Emelina did the honors, nominating Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F., which (I wouldn’t-couldn’t make this up), as I post on February 12, 2012, tops the sales lists on pro-books.ru.

Last year’s Yasnaya Polyana award winner, Mikhail Tarkovskii, was nominated for Распилыш, which drew my attention because it was first on the list and because its title is rooted in words related to sawing, like распил (saw cut) and распилить (to saw up). (Translation credit: Oxford Russian-English dictionary.) It turns out that распилыш (raspilysh) is a term for used Japanese cars that are imported to Russia in pieces, to avoid import duties. The things I learn through these book titles! Appropriately, Tarkovskii’s book was nominated by Vasilii Avchenko, author of Правый руль (Wheel on the Right), a book about, yes, Japanese used cars in the Russian Far East.

Three books were nominated twice: Aleksandr Grigorenko’s Мэбэт. История человека тайги (Mebet. The Story of a Person from the Taiga), a book Lev Danilkin says is initially difficult to read because it’s filled with unfamiliar terminology and names, though he says the text in this novel about a favorite of the gods quickly becomes transparent. The other books nominated twice are Nataliia Sokolovskaia’s Любовный канон (something like The Love Canon), a collection of stories, and Anna Starobinets’s Живущий, a novel in which all of humanity becomes the one living organism of the title. Yikes!

Two books were written by writers who will be at the East Cost “Primary Sources” events I mentioned in last week’s post: Irina Bogatyreva’s Товарищ Анна (Comrade Anna), a story collection that sounds like fun, and Alisa Ganieva’s manuscript Праздничная гора, which could be something like Holiday Mountain or Festive Mountain. I’ll try to remember to ask her about it!

What else? I was more than ecstatic to see that Vladislav Otroshenko’s manuscript of the collection Языки Нимродовой башни (The Languages of Nimrod’s Tower) was nominated: I’m finishing a translation of the title story. I was also very happy to see Roman Senchin’s Информация (The Information), which friends just brought me from Moscow. And I’ve enjoyed reading Iurii Buida, so was glad to find his Жунгли (The Jungle), a collection of stories, on the list.

Three others: Lev Danilkin nominated Vladimir Mikushevich’s Таков ад (perhaps a jaunty That’s Hell for You... for some reason, I like this book’s title), a collection of stories Danilkin says are strange, carnivalistic apocryphal works; his blurb gives the impression that they are both funny and fun. Finally, one author, Aleksei Nikitin, had two books nominated: Истеми (İstemi), a NOSE longlister about students in 1984 who create a geopolitical game, and Маджонг (Mahjong), which sounds even more cryptic, with its sleep/wake theme.

Another Author Event Note: Writer Andrey Kurkov will be making several appearances in New York and Connecticut this month: the evening of February 21^st at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, CT; noon on February 23^rd at the Harriman Institute in NYC, and the evening of February 23^rd at Partners & Crime Bookstore in NYC. I didn’t even realize Melville House has brought out another of Kurkov’s books: the new book is The Case of the General’s Thumb.

Disclosures: I have met or translated work by several writers mentioned in this post.

Up next: Gleb Shul’pyakov’s Фес (Fez), which was a somewhat disappointing up-and-down experience, Alisa Ganieva’s Salam, Dalgat!, an ever-growing translation roundup, and Petersburg-Leningrad.