An Inelegant Potpourri: Fun With Genres for the n+1th time

Nancy Drew mysteries – along with A Wrinkle in Time – were some of my favorite books as a kid and I suspect they’re at the root of my continuing love for books that are commonly considered genre fiction. I’ve written before about my enjoyment of detective novels, science fiction, eighteenth-century Russian sentimentalism, and, yes, even socialist realism and am likely to write more on those topics in the coming months. That’s partly because last winter I bought an assortment of Russian genre fiction that, for better or worse, I set aside because of work-related reading. I’m now slowly working my way through that bin of my book cart, where there are, of course, some new additions. Here are some brief notes on a retro detective novel and a work of Soviet science fiction, plus a bonus book that was written in English.

I don’t often use the word “preposterous” to describe anything at all but I’ve found myself saying and writing it recently because it fits Alexander Belyaev’s Продавец воздуха (The Seller/Vendor of Air or The Air Seller in a translation by a certain Maria K.) so perfectly. The brief plot summary: meteorologist Klimenko and a local guide named Nikola are investigating odd changes in the weather in Yakutia but (suddenly!) are held against their will in a strange underground compound where a megalomaniac and proud capitalist named Mr. Bailey is condensing air with the intent to sell. Klimenko is pressed into service in a lab, where he fancies a young Swedish woman whose scientist father is a key part of the operation. Two mild spoilers: Klimenko doesn’t like being held captive and tries to escape and, yes, the Red Army saves the day in this novel from 1929! And the ultracold temperatures needed for the condensed air are put to, hm, interesting use. I had a million questions about practical issues like how this compound could have even been engineered and built (permafrost is only one concern) not to mention the plausibility of this one facility, which doesn’t sound very large, having such an impact on the climate that it affects atmospheric pressure and causes deaths. Maybe all that preposterousness is why I kept reading? That and the fact that there’s an odd genre blend – science fiction with an environmental twist and, in a sense, socialist realism – aptly sums up The Air Seller’s odd effects, though it did require me to suspend a lot of disbelief. Wikipedia has a plot summary with more details, including a big old spoiler on the modes of death for two important characters. I’m sure there will be more Belyaev on the way: I was finally able to find a copy of Amphibian Man.

Anton Chizh’s Опасная фамилия (A Dangerous Family/Surname) is also a peculiar blend of genres: it’s contemporary fiction, a retro detective novel set in 1897, but it’s also an homage, even (almost?) an alternate literary history sequel to none other than Anna Karenina. I bought the book because it was the earliest of Chizh’s Rodion Vanzarov series that I could buy. I didn’t read the description so imagine my surprise when I saw the cover illustration with a locomotive, a woman, and a portrait of Tolstoy... And then opened the book and found Karenins and Stiva Obolonsky in the first pages. The fun here is that Chizh picks up with Tolstoy’s characters twenty years after Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and investigator Vanzarov meets Serge Karenin, a suspect in the murder of his own father. And then Vanzarov starts having doubts about certain aspects of Anna Karenina’s death. Maybe I’m a mean person but I took great glee in finding that Levin’s not very popular. (And oof, poor Dolly and Kitty!) Chizh tosses in many subplots and includes the ballet business, railroad matters (!), country houses, and loads of St. Petersburg sites and atmosphere, adding up to lots of fun.

Since we’re on the topic of Anna Karenina and since there seem to be enough derivatives of the original Anna Karenina to claim there’s a genre of sorts, I’ll also add a quick note on Irina Reyn’s What Happened to Anna K., which I read last year. Reyn transfers the basics of Tolstoy’s plot to modern-day New York City, where Anna K. is married to a Russian-Jewish businessman. An early chapter called “The Great Russian Soul” felt almost eerily familiar and the book feels very much of its time and places thanks to mentions of (random page here) things like Borodinsky bread, Boris Akunin’s mystery novels, and Okudzhava’s music. Somehow – perhaps (maybe even probably) because What Happened looks so much at identity and cross-cultural matters? – Reyn works all sorts of New York and Russian details into the novel without making them feel gratuitous. Even better, though I knew how the book would end, how it had to end, it still got me. Reyn combines comedy and tragedy to good effect throughout.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual.

Up Next: Books by Dmitry Danilov and Kirill Ryabov, which both balance comic relief and serious incidents. And Leonid Yuzefovich’s The Philhellene. And, eventually, more genre fiction, with a historical novel about the Moscow plague riot in 1771.

Mad Scientists & Talking Heads: Belyaev’s Professor Dowell’s Head

Alexander Belyaev’s Голова профессора Доуэля (known as Professor Dowell’s Head in Antonina W. Bouis’s English translation) made for some perfect retro – it was written in 1925 – reading during this bizarre pandemic summer. In my last post, I wrote in my “Up Next” section that my reading preference is “the odder the better right about now” so a book about live, talking heads separated from their bodies was just the thing.

Eek!

And so. Professor Dowell’s Head focuses on two mad scientists. The mad scientist in the title, professor Dowell, is mad because he’s angry at his former colleague, professor Kern. Kern is a mad scientist who fits neatly into this wonderfully concise stock character definition on Wikipedia. Kern’s “unusual or unsettling personality traits” emerge right at the start of the novel, when he hires a young medical professional, Marie Laurent, to work in his Paris lab. He asks her if she can keep quiet. Kern then accuses beautiful women of having double the usual female deficiencies (like, oh, chattiness) and wants to know if Laurent’s nerves are in order.

It’s clear from the start that Marie will need strong nerves to work with Kern: she’s quickly shown a lab where a live human head is installed on a stand. That head belongs to none other than Dowell, who will soon tell Laurent how his head ended up in Kern’s lab. Professional, professorial jealousy, not to mention crime, comes into this, revealing some of Kern’s “unusual or unsettling personality traits” that fit with mad scientistdom. Laurent’s nerves do indeed suffer from what she learns, particularly since she’s far more sympathetic to mad-angry Dowell than mad-insane Kern. Kern will find and install two more heads in his lab, even attaching one to a body he finds at the morgue. Other characters (including professor Dowell’s son and one of his friends) enter the novel, too, though I’ll skip the details to prevent spoilage for future readers.

Professor Dowell’s Head combines science fiction and adventure, and is enough of a classic that it’s noted in A History of Russian Literature, which mentions that the book involves one of Belyaev’s “plots in which the human subject gains immortality and forfeits the body.” I certainly can’t argue with that and shudder a bit on a ninety-degree day as I confess that this is something I think about. Belyaev’s characters and plot turns are straightforward but he sets them up for maximum effect, establishing dualities – two scientists, mind and flesh, ethical and unethical behavior – so his characters can contemplate questions about what it means to be human.

Reading Professor Dowell’s Head during these pandemic months felt particularly striking. That’s likely because I’m so content with home-based social distancing, something some people apparently find about as appealing as preserving severed heads in a lab. I can’t say I’d want that fate myself, but I’m not at all bored at home, though of course all of me is still here. There are books to read, cats and humans to feed, vegetables to harvest, and hundreds of pages to translate. Dowell may not be especially happy in Kern’s lab but he’s far better off than the other two heads, who aren’t nearly as suited as Dowell to an existence that’s completely about the mind, not the body. Professor Dowell’s Head is relatively easy reading with a fairly quick-moving plot that’s appropriately peculiar for our odd times. Professor Dowell’s Head isn’t nearly as masterful as, say, Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, which is also dated 1925, also involves strange medical experimentation, and is (so far) my favorite Bulgakov. Even so, Professor Dowell’s Head is a solid page-turning novel that readers (including young adults) might enjoy discussing during this pandemic summer – both the novel and the pandemic raise plenty of questions about life and science.

Up next: Potpourri! Or maybe something else?

Disclaimers and disclosures: Only that translator Nina Bouis is a wonderful friend and colleague. I didn’t realize until writing this post that she translated the book!

It’s the Pits: Digging Deep In A. Pelevin’s Kalinova Yama

Yes, Alexander Pelevin remains my favorite Pelevin even if his Калинова Яма (Kalinova Yama) doesn’t offer quite the level of cosmic suspense and heady thrills, chills, and excitement of Четверо (The Four) (previous post), which I so enjoyed a couple months ago. In The Four, Pelevin skillfully, even sneakily (I admire “sneakily” in writers), connects three very distinct plotlines, partly aided by, surprise!, a Vvedensky poem. Kalinova Yama feels heavier, weightier, with its twentieth-century history – Spain, Germany, the USSR, wars – and the novel’s storytelling devices feel slightly labored, too, though I enjoyed the tension of the slower pace. All told, Kalinova Yama v. The Four is a case where the comparison sounds far harsher than the reality, at least for me: I finished and enjoyed Kalinova Yama, unlike a friend who picked it up thinking it was by that other Pelevin; alas, she found the book “нудная” (the Oxford Russian Dictionary offers up “tedious” and “boring” – think “nudnik”!), perhaps because she was expecting something completely different. Kalinova Yama did feel a slight bit long, something Dmitry Bykov mentions here, so pruning could have prevented a little skimming, per Elmore Leonard’s tenth rule, here. But I digress.

So, yes, I finished the book, enjoying it and letting it keep me up at night. Describing Kalinova Yama isn’t easy, though. I jotted in the back of my book “blends World War 2, psychology of the 1930s, folk motifs, spy novel.” All basically true. The main character initially seems to be a Soviet journalist, Oleg Safronov, but he turns out to be German, one Helmut Laube, who’s working undercover and receives instructions to travel to Kalinova Yama in June 1941. He tells his editor he wants to go interview a local writer. (Ha!) The catch – the mystery, really, which I’ll be very vague about so as not to spoil things – is that something happens in Kalinova Yama and Laube’s train ride turns out to be extraordinarily, even epically, problematic.

Pelevin writes his novel in several layers. The layer that interested me most was Laube’s activity in June 1941: the runup to his travel and the travel itself, which gets weirder and weirder. And then even weirder. But I like weird. (In fact I’m prizing weird books more and more these days, perhaps because of the state of the world?) I loved the numerous takes on the train station and Laube’s contact in Kalinova Yama, not to mention the conductor in Laube’s train car; the word “проводник” can also mean a sort of guide, which this conductor ends up being, too. Other pluses: interrogation transcripts that are interspersed throughout the novel and some of the texts attributed to the local writer. I was less interested in Laube’s past in Spain and Poland (some passages felt too long) and his future, from which he tells of his post-war fate; I zipped through some of it fairly quickly.

There were other texts tossed in, too, including an article (real or not, I’m not sure) about the psychology of the яма/yama, a word that means, among other things, “pit” or “dip” or “pothole” or even “prison,” and is used in the book’s title, which is a toponym. This, of course, sets up an interesting set of pits: the personal and psychological, as well as the geographical and physical, plus something bigger and more metaphysical, what I came to think of as a sort of meta-pit. Pelevin’s at his best describing what I’ll call Laube’s series of approaches into Kalinova Yama (there’s far more to it!) and all the confusion (so much confusion! so many dreams! so many nationalities! so many names!) that arises around Laube, then tossing in information on how others see Laube. There are also nice touches like a talking duck, a yucky hotel, and a cigarette case that magically doesn’t empty. All in all, my only regret is that I read The Four, Pelevin’s third book, before reading Kalinova Yama, which is his second book: Kalinova Yama has more than enough to offer as an interesting, twisted, and even enigmatic exploration of identity and reality that kept me reading and wondering, but The Four felt much more accomplished, more sparkling, to me, with nothing at all (per Elmore Leonard) that I ever considered skipping or skimming.

Disclaimers and disclosures. The usual.

Up next. Anna Kozlova’s Rurik, Sukhbat Aflatuni’s Big Book finalist Earthly Paradise, and then something else. Two books written in English: Jennifer Croft’s memoir Homesick and Olga Zilberbourg’s Like Water and Other Stories.

Space Oddities: Alexander (“My Favorite Pelevin”) Pelevin’s The Four

Alexander Pelevin’s Четверо (The Four), a finalist for this year’s National Bestseller Award, is something of a wonder. Before I get into the why, I’ll say that I knew next to nothing about the book before reading it and am glad I picked it up with so few preconceived notions. I won’t include big plot spoilers in this post, but I will mention a few of the motifs that I picked up in my one reading. (I realized as I read through my post that I didn’t even get around to one of the big ones. Consolation: that means I won’t spoil it!) Those motifs only partially decoded the novel for me, but even so, I’m glad I didn’t know about them before reading. You have been warned!

So, what makes The Four a wonder? Pelevin writes three story lines from what I consider three distinct genres – futuristic science fiction, retro noirish detective story, and modern-day psychiatric drama – to compose a novel where one of the key glues (and clues) is “Гость на коне” (“Guest on a Horse”), a poem by Alexander Vvedensky. (Four horsemen of the apocalypse, coincidence or not?) The sea is another form of glue, and this sea is often very elemental, even a sort of primeval goo from ages ago, a living being unto itself. I will say no more.

The first chapter opens in 2154, on a space ship hurtling to the planet Proxima Centaur b, located in a solar system that is (of course!) far, far away from ours. Four astronauts have just come out of eighty-seven years of stasis and it’s time to prepare for landing and research on Proxima Centaur b. The spaceship’s operating system, Aurora, is essentially a super-advanced Siri or Alexa: she’s friendly, seems to know everything, and knows Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in many languages; she’ll recite some Gumilev poetry, too. Shortly after the ship’s commander, Lazarev, refuses Aurora’s generous offer to sing “Space Oddity” in English, Pelevin whisks the reader back to 1938, to Crimea, where a certain Vvedensky ((!) I wrote “such a marked name!” in the margin), a Leningrader, has arrived to investigate a murder; strange scenes and grisly situations, including murder victims with metal stars on them, will follow. I particularly liked an unusually worldly character named Kramer, who has lived overseas, shows a scholarly bent, and feeds both Vvedensky and many feral cats. When we’re zapped forward to 2017, a psychiatrist, Khromov, is working with a patient who claims to communicate with a woman from another planet. (Three guesses where it is…) Khromov has his own issues and would love to just spend some quiet time at New Year’s with his wife and daughter, who seem close to perfect.

Twin Peaks was apparently an inspiration for Pelevin and the Twin Peaks connection does fit with certain aspects of the novel: NatsBest jury reviewer Vasily Avchenko notes, for example, the things-aren’t-always-as-the-seem element. As a long-time fan of Twin Peaks who enjoyed The Four, speaking in the broadest terms, it’s safe to say both endeared themselves to me through their oddness, twisted hominess, smartness, and otherworldliness. They’re stylish and easy to take in but filled with layers of meaning and enigmas that take multiple viewings/readings to sort. Of course that’s fun. And of course I’m missing a zillion references, not just from Twin Peaks. There’s lots from 2001 (I’ve never seen it, though I grilled my husband about HAL) and even, apparently, Aelita, which I read in my pre-blog life (there was such a time!) but don’t remember well.

Thinking back to the atmosphere(s) in The Four got me pondering (yet again) (sub)genres like speculative fiction, slipstream fiction, and new weird, largely because they tend to bend. This brought back Dmitry Olshansky’s NatsBest review, which I’ll summarize as calling The Four interesting but unsuccessful; he reads it as a B-movie sort of thriller with some artsy moments thanks to the Vvedensky and Gumilev bits. I would argue (for starters) that Pelevin’s ability to lift his wonderfully pulpy-sounding material by working the poetry – plus references to classic science fiction books and films – into not one but three plotlines goes well beyond the demands of a b thriller. Even better, Pelevin does all that without making me feel manipulated. To the contrary: I found The Four pretty stimulating and am still flipping through it to pick up on humor, ruminate on genre questions, and track motif mentions and starts of idea threads that I missed because I was so caught up in the plots. And then Pelevin’s play with time – the stasis years are an existential time warp unto themselves, plus the three plots link up – reminded me of, among others, Vodolazkin, who also mentions a plethora of cats in Crimea. (Cats!) Finally, I have to agree with another NatsBest reviewer, Natasha Romanova, that The Four’s Crimean detective track recalls Lev Ovalov’s Major Pronin novels, which I enjoyed three of in my pre-blog life.

I’ll close by saying that a kind friend with a big suitcase brought me another Pelevin novel that I’ll read soon. My recent contemplation of how I read has shown me that I’m more oriented on authors’ worldviews than ever before – books and stories by Alexei Salnikov and Evgenia Nekrasova, which are also about weird places and hidden aspects of the universe(s), are exhibits A and B – so I’m planning to read that (and perhaps Pelevin’s debut novel, too) before returning to The Four. Beyond wanting to decipher more of the novel as a whole, I want very much to be in that spaceship again with Lazarev, so far from home and trying not to think about Earth. (Ah, floaty existential moments!) Perhaps that’s why he balks when Aurora goes haywire for a bit and recites “Guest on a Horse,” a poem whose last sentence, in Eugene Ostashevsky’s translation for New York Review Books, is “I forgot about existence,/ I again/ contemplated/ the distance.”

Disclaimers and Disclosures: Huge thanks to the very kind colleague who brought me a copy of Четверо. (He brought me another NatsBest finalist, too, Alexander Etoev’s Я буду всегда с тобой (I’ll Always Be With You), though I’ve set that one aside, at least for now, after seventy-five pages. It just couldn’t hold my attention after The Four.) Thank you to New York Review Books for sending me, several years ago, a copy of An Invitation for Me to Think, a selection of poems by Alexander Vvedensky translated by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich. Ostashevsky’s introduction has been useful since the Vvedensky is clearly a key to The Four. Vvedensky and his бессмыслица (Ostashevsky suggests meaningless, absurdity, and nonsense as translations), which I know so painfully little about, are sucking me in. 

Up Next: Evgenia Nekrasova’s Kalechina-Malechina and stories about more weird worlds.

The Strugatskys’ Doomed City: Not Quite My Kind of Dystopian Town

My best news about reading Град обреченный (available in English as Andrew Bromfield’s The Doomed City, Chicago Review Press), by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, is that I finished it, all 444.25 pages. After attempting at least four or five other Strugatsky books (some of which I nearly finished), this is the first Strugatsky novel I’ve gotten through in Russian. The less good news is that The Doomed City may be a page-turner but I still feel a touch underwhelmed. That said, I found The Doomed City fascinating in certain ways. For starters, a lot of people from various countries and times have been spirited away to a city in an otherworldly place where mysterious mentors occasionally visit. People all somehow even understand each other’s languages. The sun is shut off and turned on. Baboons mysteriously appear. And so on and so forth. The book is loaded with sociopolitical and sociocultural material, and there’s a clear sense of mock(ing) Sovietdom. Scariest: the political experiments feel relevant now, too. Perhaps best of all, the book is far edgier than any other Strugatsky books I’ve tried, without the corny humor (sorry, but I’ve never enjoyed the Brothers’ humor) but with obscenities as well as less of a cookie-cutter science fiction feel. Oddly, I may want to reread it, for details: there’s just far, far too much to sort out in just one reading, making one reading feel like a very rough draft.

The Doomed City focuses on the career(s) of Andrei Voronin, depicting his progression through various professions over the course of the book, beginning as a garbage collector and ending as a presidential advisor and operative. (Changes of profession are forced.) Andrei, who was an astronomer back on Earth, is a pretty unsympathetic character: not only is he a Stalinist but his political gig is under a president who served Nazi Germany; Andrei does a nasty turn to Izya Katzman, the nicest, most thoughtful person in the book, who also happened to work for Joint; and he tends to think of women (who, eek!, barely even appear in The Doomed City—perchance this is a reason it’s doomed?) using terms like “slut” and “whore.” Given that the presence of all these people in the City is an experiment—it’s actually an Experiment and “The Experiment is the Experiment” is repeated over and over again—I think part of the Strugatskys’ point here (put simplistically) is to offer a portrait of a thoroughly unsympathetic (that word again!) person who starts as an astronomer, a scientist who should have distant vision, but is blinded by stubbornness and proximity to power and comfort.

There’s a intriguing sense of camaraderie among these disparate characters from all over the world, particularly when they gather to eat, drink, and even dance. It’s even interesting to watch the progression of the parties along with Andrei’s career: the core of the guest list remains the same but things get fancier and more official. The happiest person in the book, though, seems to be Wang, who risks to remain a garbage collector. Wang knows what he wants and understands himself, something that eludes Andrei, who realizes his thought processes are inconstant and whose mentor tells him, “You’ve just had understanding hammered into you, and it makes you feel sick, you don’t understand what the hell you need it for, you don’t want to know about it…”

In the end, I found The Doomed City more interesting and fun to read—the novel’s suspenseful and the Strugatskys draw Andrei’s psychology and actions pretty clearly—than to reflect on. I admit that’s partly because there were a few bits I didn’t quite get. I’m glad, for example, that Marat Grinberg’s review for Los Angeles Review of Books decodes the novel’s ending, prefaced by, “What transpires is very cryptic; one needs to be a fan of David Lynch to unravel the mystery.” Despite being a Lynch fan who’s seen lots of his films, not to mention all of Twin Peaks at least twice, in Russian (voiced over, mind you!) and in English, I still, dense of head, needed Grinberg’s help. Grinberg sums up the relationship between Andrei and Izya, including how Izya helps Andrei handle understanding better. (Alas, in the novel there’s a meandering three-page paragraph involved.) I realize that I’m more to blame than the Strugatskys for needing remedial assistance from Grinberg—I was caught up in the suspense of the novel and read crucial passages too quickly—but a lot of important material, including that crucial meandering paragraph and Andrei’s speech to statues during an expedition, felt more contrived and tacked on than it could or should have. Of course this is something that bothers me in lots of books: inorganic philosophy. I’d much rather see philosophy through characters’ actions and reactions than through long speeches. A case in point is Wang’s refusal to dump his garbage handling work.

I found a different, far simpler, form of wisdom about the book when I looked up Dmitry Glukhovsky’s introduction to Andrew Bromfield’s translation, which is partially available on Google Books. Glukhovsky thinks the Strugatskys modeled the City on a place where they both lived: Leningrad, which has also been the site of many experiments and whose residents also refer to it as “the City.” Andrei is from Leningrad.

The Grinberg and Glukhovsky angles on The Doomed City feel equally apt to me. Perhaps what feels aptest right now, though, is that despite (no, likely because of) my annoyance with Andrei’s bigotry and his willingness to join Heiger’s unsavory regime, the book feels like an important warning about the ramifications of chaos and lack of knowledge, and the authoritarianism that perpetuates them. I hope Glukhovsky continues to be correct that “In the West there is simply no need for the kind of science fiction that we had: you already have enough space without it to discuss the fate and fortunes of your own countries and your own peoples.” Therein, I suspect, lies the strange pull of The Doomed City.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, Andrei Volos’s Shpakovsky’s Hat, a lovely short story cycle, more books in English, and upcoming award news. The backlog’s handy since I just started a fifth reading of War and Peace and don’t plan to blog about it this time around.

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.

Level for Non-Native Readers of Russian: 2/5 or 2.5/5 for the reading and words themselves: the book reads fairly easily and quickly.

Disclosures: New York Review Books is a publisher with whom I always enjoy discussing translated fiction. Speaking of NYRB, I thought editor Edwin Frank’s comment in the Times article, about politics and choosing titles, was very telling, especially after conversations at the London Book Fair about politics and fiction. (Previous post.)

Up Next: Aleksandr Snegirev’s Тщеславие (Vanity). Then Mikhail Shishkin’s dense Венерин волос (Maidenhair). I’m also looking forward to reading Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless, which I bought at a reading a few days ago. Valente’s site calls it “a bold retelling of a Russian fairy tale about Marya Morevna and Koschei the Deathless set in Stalinist Russia.” Publisher Tor has excerpts here.

Photo credit: Tunguska event site, 1927, photographed by Leonid Kulik’s expedition. I thought the expedition scenes in Bro were a highlight.

Loginov’s Light in the Window

I bought Sviatoslav Loginov’s Свет в окошке (The Light in the Window) solely on the recommendation of friends who’d loved it. I didn’t read a description of the book… so was a little surprised (though I’m not sure why) when an 84-year-old man, Il’ia Il’ich, died in the prologue and then found himself naked, but for a pouch of coins around his neck, in a sort of limbo. He soon wonders what will become of his books.

Loginov creates a vivid picture of the afterlife, where the living dead receive direct deposits into their pouches when people on earth (i.e. those in the first life), remember them. The liveliest people in this limbo reside – somehow, “live” doesn’t feel quite right – in ethnic enclaves that preserve traditions from their home countries; many famous and infamous people, who are remembered constantly, live in a guarded place called The Citadel. Loginov is able to achieve an effect similar to time travel by telling stories of long-term residents; Gogol even makes a cameo appearance.

What I found most interesting in The Light in the Window was Loginov’s exploration of memories of the dead: the reader learns, along with Il’ia Il’ich, how people in this limbo eventually fade away when the earthly people and documents who remember them die out. Loginov sets up interesting situations through Il’ia Il’ich’s relationships with family members who died before him: Il’ia Il’ich never knew his father, his son died young in Angola, and his wife committed suicide. Their interactions with Il’ia Il’ich allow Loginov to elucidate the mechanisms of limbo – such as the eeriness of the ghost phase of existence and the burdens of guarding the Citadel – and emphasize Il’ia Il’ich’s aloneness even before his money wanes. Being undead isn’t easy but Loginov includes some neat tricks that bring in a little fun without feeling too gimmicky: the undead can spend money to fulfill certain wishes, like obtaining the ability to speak other languages.

I can’t recommend The Light in the Window as highly as my friends did because I don’t think Loginov is always successful at combining his fantasy material and his memory material (I can’t quite call it philosophy) into a cohesive novel. But the book is memorable, and I think Loginov does a decent job addressing a dreaded topic without excessive moroseness or sentimentality. I don’t know about you, but I often think about memories and the dead, remembering real people I knew who died and wondering, more abstractly, how long our collective memory of ordinary people lasts. Now, of course, I’ll probably also think of Loginov’s coin-based system – and those automatic deposits into the pouch – when I remember my own friends and relatives who live primarily in the precarious limbo of memories like mine.

Level for Nonnative Readers of Russian: Moderately difficult, 3.5-4/5.

ISBN: 9785699383207

Up Next: Lenoid Iuzefovich’s Казароза (Kazaroza). This must be the first novel I’ve ever read where Esperanto plays a major role.

The End of the World as We Know It?

Like apocalyptic fiction? Oh, do I have books for you… if, that is, novels about Mayan prophesies or post-nuclear-war America are your thing. I’m now realizing I’m much more into dystopias than apocalypse, but I read Sergei Lukyanenko’s Атомный сон (Atomic Dream) and Dmitrii Glukhovskii’s (Dmitry Glukhovsky) Сумерки (edit: literally Dusk or Twilight (oops!), though I’ve seen it called It’s Getting Darker) in preparation for the fantasy/science fiction theme planned for the Books from Russia events at the London Book Fair. Both authors were on the schedule, though Glukhovskii’s name disappeared before Icelandic volcanic ash closed European airspace.

Given the content of It’s Getting Darker – there are devastating natural disasters in various countries – I joked with a friend that Glukhovskii must have known something the rest of us didn’t. The first-person narrator of It’s Getting Darker, a Spanish-Russian translator, describes, sometimes in painfully microscopic detail, his experiences translating a Conquistador’s diary. Earthquakes, a jaguar attack in Moscow, and some other bloody deaths ensue.

I didn’t especially enjoy the first half of It’s Getting Darker: I often wanted out of the narrator’s self-involved head. I thought he was a pretentious nudnik; he makes too much, for example, out of things like my beloved salad Olivier. My utter indifference to Mayan prophesies didn’t warm my feelings for It’s Getting Darker, nor did all-of-a-sudden developments like knocks at the door or an important scrap of paper falling from a pocket. At times It’s Getting Darker felt like parody. Still, I plowed through the first half while walking on the treadmill and, curiously, found myself almost looking forward to reading more when the book’s pace picked up and the narrator got out of the house more.

I don’t agree with the marketing genius who decided to call It’s Getting Darker the first Russian intellectual bestseller. I have no argument with “bestseller,” though “first” feels problematic: I have to think at least one of Boris Akunin’s Fandorin books -- which are, IMHO, far brainier -- hit the bestseller list before It’s Getting Darker. “Intellectual” is an even bigger stretch: I thought It’s Getting Darker was simplistic and formulaic, with a conclusion based in truisms about life and immortality. Maybe a book is considered intellectual these days if its narrator is from the intelligentsia? It’s interesting that the blurbs on the back of my book make comparisons to a diverse bunch: Dan Brown, Nikolai Gogol, and Stephen King. I haven’t read a thing by Dan Brown but Glukhovskii’s references to Gogol in It’s Getting Darker sure don’t make him a new Gogol, and I think Stephen King’s early works (which are all I’ve read) are far more capable of making the logically impossible feel plausible. And interesting.

Lukyanenko’s Atomic Dream, a long story, is also an introspective first-person narrative – broadly speaking, it’s about survival, sacrifice, and being human – but it moves much faster. The narrator, known as Drago, describes his meanderings with a man named Mike and a dog named Prince, years after an atomic bomb attack. I knew there was trouble when a two-meter spider appeared on the first page. There’s also occasional telepathy and cannibalism.

Though Atomic Dream didn’t interest me very much – I just couldn’t identify with it – I give Lukyanenko a lot of credit for writing the story in his early twenties and receiving the 1993 “Start” award, for best debut science fiction book, for his Atomic Dream collection. He’s won numerous other awards and books in his Ночной дозор (Night Watch) series have been translated into English and adapted for film. I read about half of Night Watch a few years ago and thought it was okay; I may yet pick it back up. The "Watch" books have been popular both in Russian and in English translation.

Level for non-native readers of Russian: The language in both It’s Getting Darker and Atomic Dream isn’t especially difficult, about 2.5/5 for each.

Translation Watch: Glukhovskii’s Metro 2033 was released in English translation in March 2010 by British publisher Gollancz.

Photo of stone jaguar: Ben Earwicker, Garrison Photography, (bjearwicke, via sxc.hu.)

Metro 2033 on Amazon.com

Lukyanenko on Amazon.com