The 2020 NatsBest Short List

The National Bestseller Award announced its six finalists the week before last. (Yes, I’m still a little slow here!) Given the current uncertainties in just about everything due to COVID-19, it’s unclear when, exactly, the winner will be chosen and announced in the fall.

On the positive side, that means there’s plenty of time to read the finalists. Here they are, listed with the number of points the first jury awarded.

• Mikhail Elizarov’s Земля (Earth) (13 points) (previous post) tells, over more than 750 packed pages, of life, death, and the Russian funeral industry. And that’s only volume one! This is the only book on the list that I’ve read so far.
• Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina’s Уран (Uranium) (9 points) is apparently a documentary novel about events at and around the Sillamäe uranium plant in 1953. This one definitely interests me.
• Andrei Astvatsaturov’s Не кормите и не трогайте пеликанов (Don’t Feed or Touch the Pelicans) (6 points) concerns an urban neurotic who goes to London and gets sucked into some sort of real-life (but fictional) detective story.
• Sofia Sinitskaya’s Сияние “жеможаха” (Oh, woe is me on this title!) (6 points) contains three interconnected novellas that I suspect are probably connected with her Мироныч, дырник и жеможаха, which also has a difficult title. I started reading that first book at exactly the wrong time, late this winter, when I was just too distracted to appreciate it. I’m eager to start over.
• Kirill Ryabov’s Пёс (The Dog) (6 points) sounds like a short novel about deep desperation – if not for the book description noting hope, it might sound like The Dog is чернуха, that dark, dark realism I used to read so much of. Maybe it’s part of what I see as the new wave of chernukha, though.
• Bulat Khanov’s Непостоянные величины (Inconstants [? This title appears to play on the mathematical term for “constants.”) (5 points) is about a young teacher of Russian language and literature who graduates from Moscow State University and goes to teach in Kazan, challenging himself to see how long he can stand teaching in an ordinary school.

Up Next: More award news, a potpourri post of books read, including Turgenev’s On the Eve, which may not be my favorite Turgenev but which held my attention quite nicely.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual, plus having translated a novel by the NatsBest secretary, excerpts from one of the finalists, and having met a couple of the finalists.

Another Angry Young Man: Khanov’s Rage

True to its title, Bulat Khanov’s Гнев (which could be Rage or Fury or Anger in English, take your wrathsome pick!) is anything but cheerful: this short novel is about an angry young academic who’s a specialist on the Russian avantgarde, a not-so-pleasant husband, and, well, a real jerk for much (maybe most?) of the book. Then again, though Gleb (holy martyrdom!) Veretinsky (yes, often mispronounced as “Vertinsky”) may be an ass with a lot of “issues,” I can’t help but agree with him on certain things. Like irritating diminutives, which “recode” reality (“коньячок,” a diminutive of “cognac” gets his goat even more than it gets mine), or telling off his in-laws after they dis the meal his wife, Lida, made for her own birthday dinner. True, she’s made “navy macaroni” with a very non-traditional teriyaki sauce, but it is her birthday.

Lida, by the way, tells Gleb early in the book that he needs treatment (“лечиться надо”) and that he should be put in a cage, isolated. She tells him this after asking him to stop calling her “woman,” which isn’t a very polite form of direct address in Russian. Gleb says she’s gotten to him (“достала”) and then tells her to knock it off with her childishness, though, as I noted in the back of my book, Lida seems to want Gleb to parent her; but, then again, one of the book’s main plot threads involves her desire to become a parent. Getting there isn’t particularly pretty for several reasons and, anyway, Gleb seems to, let’s say, prefer more solitary pleasures.

Their real problem – you can probably already see patterns emerging here – is, to borrow from Valeria Pustovaya’s detailed “Счастливый хейтер” (which I have to call “The Happy Hater”) afterword, that Lida’s skirmish with Gleb shows (her) instinct butting heads with (his) “слово,” which can mean word, speech, and even, broadened, literature. Pustovaya is, of course, right: Gleb lives mostly within his own head but Lida’s all about flesh and blood, particularly since her job entails processing sales of food, the stuff that fuels and builds the body. No wonder they have such a love-hate relationship! This mind/body division is layered throughout Rage since Gleb tends to do well with thinking but not so well with getting along in real life. Speaking of which, social media come into play, too. As do, given Gleb’s specialty, Apollo and Dionysius.

I’ve cherrypicked and emphasized this layer of Rage for the sake of brevity. Khanov’s melding of an academic novel with dysfunctional relationships, Internet-inspired alienation, and a stark portrait of a generation (millennial) with Lida and Gleb as its representatives makes Rage a thoroughly unpleasant book on some levels. But it’s the sort of thoroughly unpleasant book that I tend to lap up, even if the flavor leans toward bitter or sour. Khanov sweetens everyday existential horror (like gift-giving, ouch!) with humor (see the afore-mentioned macaroni), Gleb’s occasional tenderness for Lida, and (oops, nearly forgot this!) satire. I may never have been an academic or cashier in Kazan, like Gleb and Lida, but many of the observations on human nature feel wretchedly familiar.

Given Gleb’s specialty, of course there’s plenty of discussion of the arts, too, particularly literature, but Khanov never allows anyone to natter on too long. And therein, dear readers, lies one of the reasons I took substantial pleasure in reading this unpleasant book, which strikes me as another example of what I see as a new, slightly cheerier and far more, hm, obviously fictional-feeling wave of chernukha, that realism I love even though it feels like watching a dark documentary. Rage is punchy and loaded with great material that Khanov smartly divides into relatively short chapters that lend themselves to well-placed and -paced pauses for digestion (I’m thinking like both Lida and Gleb here). Khanov sets the book over three months in 2017 and even if I’m still not quite sure what I read – I have unresolved and contradictory thoughts and feelings about Lida, Gleb, and their messages so feel the need to reread for more clarity – this short novel still won’t quite leave me alone, whether I think of it as Rage, Fury, or Anger. As a bonus, Khanov’s many wise formal decisions in Rage make me particularly interested in reading more of his work.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: Two books in English. Mikhail Elizarov’s long, long Земля (Earth). NOS(E) Award winners.