Polyphony, Hermetic Settings, and Two Novels: Medvedev’s Zahhak and Buksha’s Detector

Some novels leave me with little to say. Sometimes that’s because I enjoyed the book so much that I just want to let my enjoyment be enjoyment, without any analysis, and just write “Read this.” Those feelings are often strongest if I read the book electronically: a virtual leafing through my electronic notes rarely feels very practical, satisfying, or edifying, as is the case with Vladimir Medvedev’s Заххок (Zahhak). I read Zahhak months ago but the book has stayed with me thanks to Medvedev’s vivid voices, settings, and plotlines. But. Then there are times when I have little to say because a book doesn’t affect me much and seems to fade as soon as I finish the last page. Unfortunately, that’s close to the case with Ksenia Buksha’s Рамка, which I’ll just call The Detector, though that only covers part of the meaning here. The Russian title refers to a walk-through detector used for security; the basic meaning of “рамка” is “frame” or “border.” In its plural form (which gets a separate entry in Oxford’s Russian dictionary though not in my beloved Russian-only Morkovkin dictionary) the word means “framework” or “limits”; I sometimes think of this as “guidelines.”

Both these books left me with little to say—one because I got so caught up in it, the other because it left me fairly indifferent after a promising start—but both novels’ characters had plenty to say because they’re polyphonic, albeit to varying degrees, allowing characters to tell their own first-person stories, generally in chapters labeled with their names. Medvedev presents seven characters who simply tell about events from their lives in turbulent Tajikistan in the early 1990s. Buksha offers a blend of monologues, dialogues, and description, an approach that often feels like verbatim—it’s almost as if the lines were taken from actual interviews or conversations. Some sections are written without capitalization or punctuation.

Zahhak succeeds beautifully because Medvedev focuses his narrators’ energies primarily on present-day actions, weaving in bits about their pasts. Though a few chapters felt a tiny bit long, the book had more than enough momentum to keep me up at night. Perhaps what’s most interesting is that his seven narrators who tell stories of their lives and what’s around them—teenaged twins Andrei and Zarina; their uncle Jorub; a Russian journalist; the Afghan war veteran Davron, a Sufi scholar, and a local boy from a village who’s a comic-turned-tragic figure—don’t include the title character, Zahhak (named for a figure from Persian mythology), a sort of paramilitary criminal who wants to cultivate poppies in a village. Another element of the book’s drama, though, revolves around Zahhak setting his eye on young Zarina. Medvedev’s ability to play on archetypes, recent and not-so-recent history, as well as the reader’s dread and sense of justice (not to mention indignation: Zarina’s so young!) make Zahhak painfully compelling. The varying voices were a joy to read—and translate, too, when I worked on brief excerpts. Two characters especially stood out for me. Journalist Oleg is a wonderfully useful creation thanks to his Central Asian experience, which lends him the ability to explain, organically, local history to clueless readers like me. And though every figure feels tragic, Davron, who has long been in mourning for his wife, especially interested for me for his complexity, loyalties, and psychic tics brought on by memories.

Buksha’s The Detector starts off well. Ten characters are tossed into a holding cell at a monastery on an island just before the coronation of the tsar; they’re being detained for not passing through a (metal?) detector successfully. It’s unclear what they have in common. The novel takes place in the not-so-distant future and there are futuristic elements like implanted chips (apparently for normalization), a delicious teleported meal (if only!), and the downfall of LiveJournal. The characters are suitably quirky, even somewhat interesting, and I enjoyed their monologic introductions. Among them are a journalist, a bureaucrat, an apologist, a wedding planner/emcee, a woman who understands what her dog says (shades of Gogol?), a foster mother, and a businessman. Shut in their cell, they tell about their lives and gather information from the outside world from the businessman’s family and the dog mom’s dog, all of whom show up just outside the cell window. One character attempts suicide.

Buksha does well combining tragedy and comedy—she incorporates life stories that are pretty naturalistic plus humorous moments like the dog barking in French—but the novel started falling apart for me when dreams took over. (Confession: this meant I skimmed/skipped several of the book’s brief 43 chapters.) Dreams are tricky in fiction and, despite the characters dreaming of one other, I suspect part of the point here is that each person is in his or her own sleepy world—and frame, too—meaning that despite often sympathizing and empathizing with one other during their waking hours, these people just aren’t going to stay up all night to, say, discuss favorite works of literature, play a game, or resolve the slippery and eternal question of how to make the best borsch. As Lev Oborin’s very astute review for Vedemosti points out, these characters are all essentially superfluous people (лишние люди). They’re descendents of good old Oblomov.

I think there’s a technical issue at work here. In my reading experience, novels with hermetically sealed settings seem to click along best when authors keep their characters stuck in their surroundings and maintain emotional tension by not letting the characters’ minds wander from their physical setting too far and/or too long. I came to that realization when The Detector—like Yana Vagner’s Кто не спрятался (The Accomplices), which I recently began but abandoned after 200 pages—mentioned Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (known by other titles through the years).

The Accomplices is about a murder at an iced-in vacation house in the mountains and it works beautifully as long as the Russian characters and their local host are together, whether they’re cooking, arguing, drinking, trying to sleep, or discovering and (heavens!) moving the body. It’s filled with wonderfully unappealing characters but the book lost all its verve and tension for me as soon as flashbacks started taking me out of that damn house with no electricity, cell phone coverage, or hope for a quick visit from the police. Vagner’s Vongozero (previous post) and Truly Human (previous post) work because the characters are so utterly stuck with their immediate problems, whether they’re trapped in cars or a tiny house. The same goes for The Detector, as long as the characters are interacting and awake. Unfortunately, the ending, which takes place during waking hours, offers little in the way of a conclusion, though I agree with Oborin that the clicking of a metronome does not bode well for anyone’s future. (The metronome clicks for you?) So as not to end this mammoth and meandering mess of a post on a complete downer of a note, I’ll add that, despite my misgivings, I’m glad I read The Detector—the characters are generally vivid and Buksha can be very funny—and I’m still looking forward to reading Buksha’s polyphonic Завод “Свобода”, (The Freedom Factory), which won the National Bestseller Award a few years ago and which my colleague and friend Anne Fisher translated into English for Phoneme Media. Anne read some very funny excerpts from her translation at a conference last fall, something that does bode well for enjoying the book.

Up next: A book I just started and am thoroughly enjoying but don’t want to name, lest I jinx anything. Some English-language titles, including Paul Goldberg’s The Château, which includes a fair bit of Russian.

Disclaimers: The usual. As mentioned, I translated excerpts from Zahhak for Medvedev’s literary agency.

Read Russia Translation Prize Shortlists & Women in Translation Month

Shortlists for the 2016 Read Russia Translation Prize (the global prize, for all languages) were announced last week for four categories: nineteenth-century classics (three finalists), twentieth-century literature until 1990 (three finalists), contemporary literature (four finalists), and poetry (three finalists). Since Alexandra Guzeva’s article for Russia Beyond the Headlines covers things so well (and since it’s a beautiful beach day!), I’ll send you to her, right here, for all the details.

I do want to add, though, that I’m very excited that Laurus, my translation of Eugene Vodolazkin’s Лавр for Oneworld Publications, is on the very varied contemporary literature list. There are two other English-language translations that are finalists on, respectively, the nineteenth-century and poetry lists: Michael Pursglove’s translation of Ivan Turgenev’s Smoke and Virgin Soil for Alma Classics, and Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev’s translation of I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center. It makes me very happy to see this recognition for translations of Tarkovsky’s poetry. It also makes me very happy that this is Laurus’s second shortlist: I was pleasantly surprised to find the translation on the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize shortlist earlier this year, along with seven other books, including Stephen Pearl’s translation of Ivan Goncharov’s The Same Old Story, published by Alma Classics. The award was shared by Philip Roughton, who translated Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s The Heart of Man for MacLehose Press, and Paul Vincent and John Irons, who translated 100 Dutch-Language Poems for Holland Park Press.

Since August is Women in Translation Month, I want to note a few bits of news about English-language translations of Russian fiction written by women:

• Melanie Moore’s translation of Tatyana Shcherbina’s Multiple Personalities, published by Glagoslav, was on Read Russia’s contemporary literature longlist. (That longlist, though, is so short it’s short!) Melanie also translated Margarita Khemlin’s The Investigator for Glagoslav; here’s my previous post about The Investigator and here’s a review of Melanie’s translation written by Lori Feathers for World Literature Today.
• The U.S. edition of Catlantis, written by Anna Starobinets, translated by Jane Bugaeva, illustrated by Andrzej Klimowski, and published here by New York Review Books, will be available in mid-September. I loved this fun kids’ book (previous post), which is already out in the U.K. from Pushkin Press. Catlantis is a wonderful gift for cat lovers of all ages; my previous post includes a rare Lizok’s Bookshelf cat photo.
• Yana Vagner’s To the Lake, published by Skyscraper Publications, will be out this fall, too, by an unnamed translator. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, known in Russian as Вонгозеро.
• Looking back at the post I wrote for the very first Women in Translation month, in 2014, at the invitation of Meytal Radzinski, who writes Biblibio, I found a few items to update. I mentioned, above, Melanie’s translation of Margarita Khemlin’s The Investigator, which is already available and want to mention that Margarita’s Klotsvog (previous post) will be on the way in a couple years, too: I’m translating it for the Russian Library series published by Columbia University Press. My translation of Marina Stepnova’s The Women of Lazarus came out last fall from World Editions and is on the list for the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award, along with the aforementioned Laurus plus my translation of Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina, also for Oneworld. And I’m finishing up Marina’s Italian Lessons (known in Russian as Безбожный переулок) for World Editions now (previous post). Some of the other writers I mentioned are already more available in translation now and/or have more books coming soon: Carol Apollonio’s translation of Alisa Ganieva’s The Mountain and the Wall (Праздничная гора) (mentioned here) is already out from Deep Vellum Publishing and Carol’s translation of Alisa’s Bride and Groom (previous post) is on the way. Also: Ludmila Ulitskaya’s The Kukotsky Enigma is out this month from Northwestern University Press, in Diane Nemec Ignashev's translation.
• Finally, on (yet) another personal note, I think I’ve already mentioned somewhere along the way that I’m working on Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes for Oneworld Publications and loving it—one of my favorite aspects of translation is enjoying a book all over again when I translate. Of course there are many phases of “all over again” with all the editing, revising, proofing, correcting, and checking! Which is why I have to love a book (previous post on Zuleikha) to translate it…
• And now, truly finally, since I could go on and on and but have already written enough and, yes, the beach beckons: several of you have mentioned other books written by Russian women that you’re working on, that will be published in English translation within the next year or two, so I know there’s more to come. I’ll be watching for details on those so I can add them to future translation lists!

Up Next: Ludmila Ulitskaya’s family saga Jacob’s Ladder, Alexander Snegirev’s Faith/Vera, Anna Matveeva’s Vera Stenina’s Envy (Matveeva and Stenina are headed to the beach with me…), and Read Russia results, which will be announced on September 10 in Moscow.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Getting Off the Island: Vagner’s Truly Human

Sequels are always tough so I have to admit I began Yana Vagner’s Живые люди—which her agents call Truly Human, rather than the more literal and far more awkward Living People—with a bit of trepidation. I loved Vagner’s Vongozero (previous post) for its road journey: a group of people leaves Moscow for a remote island near the Russian-Finnish border, to escape a killer virus. There’s lots of snow. Most of the genres I mentioned before—psychological thriller, race for survival, and horror story—are still in force for Truly Human, but road story is replaced by a version of hermetic fiction this time. Hermetic seals are, of course, always just waiting to burst…

There’s snow on the island in Truly Human, too, since it’s still winter: Truly Human tells what happens when the road trip ends and the motley group of people settles in. The narrator is again Anya, a thirty-something woman who’s married to Sergei and is mother to teenage Misha. She’s crammed into a tiny house with her overbearing father-in-law, three neighbors from her old life (they’re still annoying), Sergei’s ex-wife and their child, and one other couple. There’s also a dog. Once again, Vagner’s writing is plain and very appropriate to her book’s events. This time she depicts a Spartan lifestyle: not only do the cigarettes run out but there’s lots of ice fishing, sleeping on uncomfortable-sounding beds, and sharing small spaces with people Anya doesn’t like very much.

I think that’s what I enjoyed most about Truly Human: Anya’s honesty about her companions. Some of them are shadowy here, barely described, reflecting their places in her consciousness. Or lack thereof: sometimes it feels like she simply wants to will them out of existence. With its island setting, Truly Human begins as a pretty hermetically sealed book but Vagner works in three new neighbors on the shore; one of them seems especially threatening, which starts building some slow suspense. It’s worth noting that the Chekhovian guns present in Vongozero haven’t exactly been thrown in the lake. Nor have most of the other post-cataclysmic, existential threats one might expect, like hunger, boredom, thin ice, and illness. Vagner covers most of that, too, again starting off slowly but quickening her pace.

Although there’s a distinct sense here of hell being other people (that’s one side of being “truly human” and “living people,” isn’t it?) Vagner also shows the women drinking by a campfire (there’s a nice mess of trout that day) and telling stories about their lives before the virus. And later, when the first of the group dies, everyone mourns not only that person but their other loved ones: to paraphrase, nobody had time to mourn the sharp feelings of loss they’d brought with them to the island. Anya may not always be a sympathetic character or narrator but she’s insightful and very, very real. And human, too, as emotions and plotlines heat up when all sorts of calamities hit. And how could they not? The food’s bound to run out, spring and migrating ducks come late to northern Russia, and the three guys on shore always looked a little sketchy. Even if I didn’t love Truly Human quite as much as Vongozero—which I’d expected after finding Vongozero so oddly magical—I have to admire Vagner’s ability to put her characters in a small house without much food, space, or privacy. And to let them sort things out in ways that felt, well, pretty truly human to me.

Up Next: Year-end summary, Sergei Nosov’s Curly Brackets, and likely Yuri Buida’s Ceylon, which I started yesterday and which feels a little like comfortable old (but not smelly) slippers.

The Road to Somewhere: Vagner’s Vongozero

I’ve always loved genre-bending fiction so it was no surprise to thoroughly enjoy Yana Vagner’s Вонгозеро (Vongozero), a novel about a road trip in a time of virus-based havoc. The combination of road story, psychological thriller, race for survival, horror story, and, yes, winter snow was a perfect antidote to holiday madness for someone (that would be me) who doesn’t much like shopping or Christmas carols.

Vagner’s narrator is Anya, a thirty-something woman who lives in a beautiful-sounding house outside Moscow with her husband, Sergei, and son, Misha. When a virus starts killing so many people—including Anya’s mother—that Moscow is quarantined, they decide to head for an isolated and very small house near the Russian-Finnish border. That decision is largely forced by Anya’s father-in-law, a domineering but inventive type, the sort of guy you want to tell you to get out of town and then want to have along for the journey, too. Over time and miles, their group grows to include Sergei’s ex-wife and their son, two rather annoying neighbors and their daughter, two rather annoying friends, a dog, and a doctor. They make for quite a caravan, particularly with all their supplies. (Of course I wondered from the start when the cigarettes would run out…)

It’s Anya’s narrative voice that made the story work for me: her honest (but not quite whiny) admissions about wanting to ride with her husband, disliking the neighbors, and just wanting to be alone (or not) thoroughly endeared her to me. Even better, Vagner’s writing is nice and plain, the sort of writing that looks easy to craft but just isn’t. Even better again, it’s the sort of writing that lets Vagner and Anya reveal characters’ motivations and tell stories rather than focusing on linguistic pyrotechnics that wouldn’t have fit the cold, snowy environment or the cold paradoxes of survival.

The miles roll out slowly in Vongozero, balancing bursts of excitement and quiet introspection. Some of the obstacles and difficulties are fairly standard—a serious injury that requires amateur medical assistance, some lone helpers who turn up at random, deserted cities, government malfeasance, a glimpse of certain death—but I think part of the fun of genre norms is observing individual writers’ variations on plot twists we’ve all seen many times before. Vagner also makes sure her characters have plenty of firearms from the start, so Chekhov’s gun is along for the ride, too, and Misha, a teenager, seems to become a man almost overnight. And did I mention snow? Winter fits perfectly in Vongozero, both as the season that always seems to symbolize the difficulties of survival (at least in northern climes) and harsh, cold realities, and as a beautiful blank white slate of a setting perfect for people setting off for what they hope will be a new life.

Disclaimers: After liking a Facebook post from Vagner’s literary agency, Banke, Goumen & Smirnova, mentioning that the Slovak translation of Vongozero had hit the e-book bestseller list in Slovakia, I received an electronic copy (Russian, not Slovak!) of Vongozero from BGS. I’d been meaning to ask for the book for several months just because it sounded like my kind of fun reading. One other thing: I didn’t know until I read Vongozero that it started off as an online book that Vagner posted to her Live Journal… it was eventually published by Eksmo, one of Russia’s largest publishing houses, after what BGS’s catalogue (PDF) calls “a heated auction among major Russian publishers.” The real disclaimer: I’ve translated excerpts for BGS and am working on a book by another of their authors.

Up Next: Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina and Denis Gutskov’s Beta Male.