The 2016 NOSE Award Longlist

Thank goodness for the NOSE Award longlist! I have to admit that a rainy Saturday and a windy, blustery Sunday weren’t very conducive to writing trip reports or book reports… but an award longlist (oops, almost a “lostlist”) feels like just the thing. And the NOSE Award—a program of the Prokhorov Foundation—is always a quirky matter (I still don’t quite understand the NOSE), whether we’re talking about a longlist, shortlist, or award final, and that makes NOSE all the more appealing today. Beyond that, there’s not much time to post the list: the shortlist is apparently on the express, scheduled for debate and arrival on November 2. So here’s the whole longlist, in the order presented on the Prokhorov Foundation site and with my completely inconsistent transliterations of names:

• Yuri Buida’s Цейлон (Ceylon), which has already hit other longlists and which I’ve read (previous post).
• Eugene Vodolazkin’s Авиатор (The Aviator), which is already on the Big Book shortlist and which I’m already translating and loving all over again (previous post).
• Polina Zherebtsova’s Тонкая серебристая нить (Thin Silver Thread) is a collection of stories about civilian life in Grozny during the Chechen Wars. Brief extracts from Zherebtsova’s diary (NB: this is a different book!).
• Kirill Kobrin’s Шерлок Холмс и рождение современности. Деньги, девушки, денди Викторианской Эпохи (Sherlock Holmes and the Birth of Modernity. Money, Young Women, and Dandies of the Victorian Epoch) is nonfiction that the title and this excerpt explain.
• Sergei Kuznetsov’s Калейдоскоп (excerpt) (Kaleidoscope) involves dozens of characters and their stories, set in the twentieth century; one of my Goodreads friends noted sex and vampires. This one sounded interesting from the start but for some reason hearing it described—in a positive way, mind you—as “Pynchon lite” more than once in Moscow intrigues me all the more.
• Vladimir Martynov’s Книга Перемен (The Book of Changes) is described as more of a palimpsest than a book and as a sort of hypertext for hyperreading that uses zapping and (appropriately enough, I suppose) fortune telling practices from that other The Book of Changes. I was an I Ching fan as a teenager and don’t want to sound dismissive but, hmm.
• Aleksandra Petrova’s Аппендикс (excerpt) (The Appendix, in a metaphorical sense, it seems) is a novel about Rome. (A review)
• Moshe Shanin’s Левоплоссковские. Правоплоссковские (The title refer to residents of the villages of Levoplosskaya and Pravoplosskaya) is a collection of stories written by a young writer—he was a Debut winner for short fiction in 2014—from Severodvinsk, which interests me from the start because of my many visits to Arkhangelsk.
• Vladimir Voinovich’s Малиновый пеликан (excerpt) (The Raspberry Pelican, perhaps referring to the bird’s color, based on the cover…) is more Voinovich satire with absurdity.
• Dmitrii Lipskerov’s О нем и о бабочках (expert from GQ) (Lipskerov reads from the book on YouTube) (About Him and About Butterflies/Moths/Bow Ties, I’m betting on the lepidoptera, based on a reader review and other factors…) seems to be about a man who loses, ahem, intimate anatomy. The GQ excerpt intro compares it to Gogol’s “The Nose,” one of my all-time favorites, and it’s obvious why, even just skimming the excerpt.
• Igor Sakhnovsky’s Свобода по умолчанию (Freedom by Default) is apparently a novel about love, internal freedom, and political absurdity.
• Vasilii Avchenko’s Кристалл в прозрачной оправе (Crystal in a Transparent Frame) carries the subtitle “lyrical lectures about water and stones,” and Avchenko is said to cover many aspects of life in Vladivostok, including fish(ing), as in this excerpt. Ocean lover that I am, I bought this one after it hit the 2016 NatsBest shortlist.
• Aleksei Zikmund’s Карело-финский дневник (Karelian-Finnish Diary) is a bit of a mystery…
• Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Тимошина проза (Timosha’s Prose), which I read and don’t quite know how to describe… it’s a detached but close narrative about a young man. The novel lacks the, hmm, snap and pop (and crackle, too, I suppose) of Zaionchkovsky’s previous books.
• Boris Lego’s Сумеречные рассказы (Dusky Stories) is a collection of nineteen Russian gothic stories; a cover blurb calls it the scariest book of the year…
• Sergei Lebedev’s Люди августа (People of August, click through for synopsis and excerpt) is also on the 2016 Booker shortlist.
• Andrei Shary’s Дунай. Река империй (The Dunai. River of Empires, okay fine, The Danube…) has a lovely cover (I like old maps) and looks at history and the Danube over three millennia.
• Ivan Shipnigov’s Нефть, метель и другие веселые боги (Oil, Blizzard, and Other Cheerful Gods) is a collection of stories in which, according to the publisher, oil is the most cheerful of the Gods or gods, I’m not sure which, particularly since the publisher also compares Shipnigov’s prose to the young Pelevin’s. Here’s a sample story from the collection.

Up Next: Trip reports (Moscow and Oakland), the afore-mentioned Zaionchkovsky book and Alexander Snegirev’s patient Faith/Vera, more award news, and other Big Book finalists, though this second half of the list brings me little joy and much left unfinished…

Disclaimers and disclosures. The usual, plus translating that Vodolazkin book and the fact of support for my translation work from Prokhorov Foundation grants.

Sakhnovskii on the Hazards of Knowing It All

If you’ve ever wondered about the ups and downs of knowing everything, you might enjoy Igor Sakhnovskii’s Человек, который знал всё (The Man Who Knew Everything). Sakhnovskii did a nice job convincing me that a character can take hold of an electrical wire, nearly die from electrocution, and then gain the ability to know everything. The Man Who Knew Everything was a finalist for the Booker and Big Book awards, and won the 2008 Bronze Snail award for full-length fiction.

The Man Who Knew Everything blends so many genres – fantasy, action, spy, rich-to-poor, existentialism, morality tale, and so on and so forth – that it sometimes seems as if Sakhnovskii thinks he knows everything, too. The story takes the title Man, Alexander Bezukladnikov, from poor scholar whose wife leaves him for another man, partly because he’s something of a milquetoast, to a wealthy, confident seer. He has some run-ins with criminals and spy agencies, as well as some interesting comments about visions of his own death.

Sakhnovskii tells the story through a friend of Bezukladnikov’s, who describes his meetings with Bezukladnikov – including a trip to Gaugin territory in the South Pacific – and includes documents like e-mail from Bezukladnikov and the transcript of a talk show interview with The Man. All this works, I guess, and the language is clear and direct, but it feels a touch too spare, as if the 250-page book is 25-50 pages too short.

Sakhnovskii’s dropping of certain plot lines, such as Bezukladnikov’s initial focus on trying to win back his ex-wife, who takes up with a bad guy, didn’t bother me nearly as much as coming away without a deeper feel for what it would mean to know everything. As a reader called Lartis points out on a Fantlab comment, Sakhnovskii’s use of documents means we don’t get much of a feel for Bezukladnikov’s inner workings. I think that’s why the book felt a little soulless to me.

That’s not to say Sakhnovskii doesn’t cover some good and varied territory between Moscow and Papeete: he incorporates a bit of carnival with Bezukladnikov’s gambling success, gives his character the ability to read books telepathically (wow!), and works in a reference to Ecclesiastes with “He who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” The book, predictably, I think, ends with a simple truth that I won’t reveal, lest you want to read the book, too. Alas, unless you’re Bezukladnikov and have the power to know everything, you’ll need to know either Russian or French (for the Gallimard translation from Véronique Patte) to read the book.

The Man Who Knew Everything didn’t meet my high expectations – those finalists for multiple major awards can be awfully tricky! – but it was a decent piece of intelligent entertainment with lots of fun bits. I particularly enjoyed the TV interview, which combined the host’s huckster-like persona with Bezukladnikov’s descriptions of his situation and a sharp, truthful answer to a guest in the studio audience. And when Bezukladnikov says people generally only know see about six percent of what goes on around us because we’re not capable of seeing the rest, I have to wonder if he might be telling the truth.

Level for Non-Native Readers of Russian: 2.5 or 3.0, not particularly difficult, plus the book has relatively short chapters, making for a good feeling of progress.

Up Next: Favorites of 2010, then some medium-length fiction from Gleb Alekseev, a find from my October visit to the Russian bookstore in Tarzana. I’ll also be compiling a list of Russian-English translations that came out in 2010 and are expected in 2011… Reports on new releases would be most welcome!