Bitter Truth or Sweet Lie? Sorokin’s Sugar Kremlin

Which do you prefer: bitter truths or sweet lies? The characters in the stories of Vladimir Sorokin’s Сахарный Кремль (The Sugar Kremlin) have lives with a little bit of sugary sweetness and lots of real-life bitterness. Sugar Kremlin takes place in an authoritarian Russia, circa 2028, and Sorokin links the stories in his book by placing a sugar model of the Kremlin in each sketch.

Like Sorokin’s День опричника (apparently to be translated by FSG as A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik) (previous post), Sugar Kremlin combines futurology with a return to the oprichnina, religious rules and rites, and archaic language. Oprichnik is narrated by an oprichnik who also appears in one story of the newer book, but Sugar Kremlin spreads the action over 15 stories with diverse characters who experience awful things: caning, prostitution, and other indignities. According to Sorokin’s literary agent, Galina Dursthoff, Sorokin calls the characters a “Greek choir.”

Of course so many stories in a 340-page book with large print and lots of white space means there’s not much room to develop the singers’ characters, but that’s not Sorokin’s purpose anyway. The book is concept stuff, and much of it retraces familiar ground from previous Sorokin books: back-to-the-future language, secretions, sex, mind-altering drugs, folk tale motifs, linguistic breakdown, and a story named after a Sorokin novel (Очередь/The Line). There’s even a novel method for prostate massage.

I see the point of most of the stories – young prostitutes serving an oprichnik or a dwarf passing gas in the presence of a certain image seem obvious – but Sorokin’s accounts of bodily functions have lost the ability to shock, surprise, or otherwise make me react beyond a shrug. I’ve only read several of his books – Ice, Oprichnik, The Blizzard, Sugar Kremlin, and a few stories – but Sugar Kremlin felt like another day at the office, a rehashing of old tropes. One reader on ozon.ru wondered (as did I) if Sorokin threw together Sugar Kremlin to fulfill a book contract. Time Out Moscow said the book felt like the outtakes that appear on a director’s cut DVD.

The sweet lie side of the story is, of course, the sugar Kremlins, which first appear as a gift to children at Christmas, given at Red Square in the presence of the sovereign himself. The Kremlins appear in the subsequent stories, often in unusual ways (okay, like during sex), giving the book an adult “Where’s Waldo?” flair. People suck on their sugar Kremlin towers, infusing a few moments of pleasantry into lives filled with rural drudgery, forced labor, and interrogations.

Sugar Kremlin read quickly so I did finish it. I don’t have what I’d call favorite stories but two of the first pieces – about Marfa, a girl who gets sent out on a shopping expedition during the winter holidays, and then an interrogator who tells a story about a (furnace) poker – were among the most interesting, though that may be partly because my patience wore down as I read the book. One other: I thought the story about the dwarf, who performs for high-level officials, had more depth than most. Even taken together, though, Sugar Kremlin felt cursory and reductive, considering the themes Sorokin borrows from other books.

What’s most frustrating is that I liked the sugar Kremlins as a device, but it felt like Sorokin was forcing his Greek chorus to recite his old material again, as a reshuffled reprise. I wish he’d let some of his characters bust out with something newer that would have added more depth to his concepts.

Translation watch: Sugar Kremlin has been translated into German and rights have been acquired for several other languages, though not English.

Level for nonnative readers of Russian: 4/5, quite difficult because of archaisms.

Up next: Two detective novels by Leonid Yuzefovich, and Nikolai Maslov’s graphic novel Siberia. I’ll be starting a Big Book finalist mini-binge (three books) soon. [Edit: Oops, that's two Big Book finalists and one Booker longlister...]

Photo credit: Jade Gordon via sxc.hu.

Grossman’s Mysterious Everything Flows

It’s never easy to write about unfinished books, and the difficulty multiplies when the book is as serious in subject and diverse in form as Vasilii Grossman’s Всё течёт (Everything Flows): Grossman writes about history, freedom, and Soviet prison camps, incorporating a combination of fictional characters and essay-like passages. The main narrative line in Everything Flows concerns Ivan Grigorievich, who is released from prison after 30 years, but Grossman interrupts Ivan’s story many times to describe and illustrate aspects of Soviet totalitarianism.

I admit: I get frustrated when a book moves so much between different types of narration. I admit: I didn’t read all the portions on history very carefully. And I’ll also admit: I’m one of those ridiculously stubborn readers who gets used to a character and then wants to stay with him or her. And Ivan’s story is compelling. Grossman shows us, with heartbreaking details large and small, Ivan’s awkwardness as he returns to “everyday” life outside the camps. He doesn’t fit with the parquet floor and chandeliers at his cousin’s apartment, and he feels that both he and Leningrad have changed. Though life outside the camps is frightening, he prefers freedom.

Grossman also tells of wives imprisoned for refusing to denounce their husbands. And a woman Ivan lives with tells of her experiences during the Ukrainian holodomor. Grossman makes their stories so immediate and poignant that I didn’t want to leave them, either. Robert Chandler, who translated Everything Flows for New York Review Books with Elizabeth Chandler and Anna Aslanyan, says in an interview with Book Serf that there is something distinctive about Grossman’s “vivid” selection of details. Those details – as varied as protruding lower teeth, Ivan’s job in a locksmith workshop, and the whitewashing of walls in houses where people died during the holodomor – result in writing that is both lyrical and documentary.

The long passages about Lenin, Stalin, and freedom, and a sketch composed of dialogue held my interest far less than the purely fictional chapters, despite Grossman’s choice of subjects: informants, Lenin, Stalin, and what they did to the Soviet Union. Toward the end, Grossman stresses that human history is the history of freedom.

The book cohered for me, rather mysteriously, in its last two pages, when Ivan returned to his father’s home. Somehow, all the disparate pieces and figures in Everything Flows ended up melding into something bigger, probably because Grossman’s conclusions about humanity and freedom were so movingly generous in acknowledging human flaws that they left me with a lump in my throat.

Everything Flows is, like Life and Fate, (previous post), not an easy book to read, and it’s probably obvious that I don’t feel very comfortable writing about it, but I think the fictional passages alone make it worth reading. Readers who prefer nonfiction might say the same about the passages about history.

Level for Nonnative Readers of Russian: 3/5, medium difficulty.

For more:

“Anti-Socialist Realism” on TNR.com

A review of Everything Flows from The Guardian

Also: The Road, a collection of Grossman’s fiction and nonfiction, translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Mukovnikova, will be available from New York Review Books in late September 2010.

Next up: Vladimir Sorokin’s Sugar Kremlin, then two detective novels by Leonid Iuzefovich.

Where the Grass Isn’t Greener: Rubanov’s Chlorophyllia

The publisher of Andrei Rubanov’s Хлорофилия (I’ll call it Chlorophyllia) makes a pretty big promise on the novel’s back cover: “Эта книга взорвет ваш мозг” – “This book will blow your mind.” My head is still very much intact, thank you, but Chlorophyllia was an absorbing book, just the thing for hot summer reading.

Chlorophyllia describes 22^nd-century Moscow, where tall plants have taken over patches of free soil. The grass is so tall that people need to live dozens of storeys up to have natural light. Lower floors are dank and mildewy, and their residents eat the pulp of the plants. They don’t need to eat anything else, and not everybody works. China does the labor and even pays to use Russian territory. Most Russians have chip implants so the nanogovernment (so-called for its use of technology) can keep track of people, paying subsidies for behaving, and deducting for misdeeds.

Among citizens, nobody owes anybody anything – this is repeated many times – though there is a barter system among one group of people. Some people, like Savelii, the book’s main character, live on sunny floors and work, but they often (ab)use plant pulp, too, in processed forms that enable them to eat meat and drink alcohol so their addiction goes unnoticed. They often give themselves away, though, by drinking lots of bottled water and hogging sunlight by windows. The plant pulp and pills are illegal but generally regarded as safe (apologies to the FDA).

Savelii and his fiancée are magazine journalists; Savelii is promoted to editor. There are plenty of details about a tabloid culture where everyone’s famous for a few minutes thanks to reality TV, and Rubanov mentions some of our contemporaries. There’s even a street named for Russian TV executive Konstantin Ernst. That humor seems a little too easy.

What’s most important is that things fall apart, as things are wont to do in this type of book. And what type of book is it? I guess I’d call it a dystopian novel with satire and tinges of morality play thrown in. Russian critic Lev Danilkin thinks it might be closest to a dystopia- parody of disaster novels and social novels, among other things, and I can see his point: there is plenty of disaster and plenty of social commentary.

On the social side, the idea of receiving stipends for doing nothing, along with not having to eat, reminds of some familiar slogans (variations are here), from the Bible to TANSTAAFL. Rubanov describes various vegetative states that people live in: a young “grasseater” woman from the 21^st floor that Savelii picks up for a ride (and, predictably, sees again later, for sex) is plant-like in her empty-headedness. That feels cozy for Savelii, the working pill taker.

Some of the novel’s characters and turns of events felt contrived, schematic, genre-driven, and/or undeveloped to me, particularly toward the end, and Rubanov’s conclusions about what it means to be human felt pretty shopworn, too. (This may be another point for Danilkin on parody…) Oddly, those shortcomings weren’t fatal, and I still enjoyed Chlorophyllia.

I guess that’s partly because I almost always like a peculiar dystopia. It’s also because Chlorophyllia addresses the celebrification of just about everything (Lindsay Lohan’s manicure, anyone?) and people begin to resemble, yes, potted plants with limited intellectual needs. Still, there’s an irony at the root of Chlorophyllia that makes me a little uneasy: the novel leaves me with the feeling that I’ve read something entertaining but pretty light, not a pithy future classic that steers the brain away from that dreaded vegetative state... Of course I may just be too serious, too much of a ботаник: botanik, the Russian word for botanist, can be translated as geek, nerd, or dork.

Reading level for nonnative readers of Russian: Not too difficult, 2 or 2.5/5. Reads easily.

Rubanov’s first novel, Сажайте, и вырастет, is available in English as Do Time Get Time. Andrew Bromfield translated the book, an autobiographical novel about white collar crime and punishment.

Illustration credit for cross-section of woody stem: Jeffrey Winterborne's Hydroponics - Indoor Horticulture, via Wikipedia's Plant Morphology page.

The 2010 Russian Booker Long List

It’s July 1, which means we have a Russian Booker Prize long list. The Booker people received 95 nominations and chose 24 for the list; last year they received 82 nominations. The six-book short list will be announced on October 6, and the winner will be named on December 2.

A number of this year’s long listers are already on the 2010 Big Book short list:

• Mikhail Gigolashvili – Чертово колесо (The Devil’s Wheel) (5 глав из романа)
• Oleg Zaionchkovskii – Счастье возможно: Роман нашего времени (Happiness Is Possible: A Novel of Our Time) (excerpts)
• Evgenii Kliuev – Андерманир штук (Something Else for You – Languagehat has a discussion of the name of this book here)
• Pavel Krusanov – Мёртвый язык (A/The Dead Language)
• Oleg Pavlov – Асистолия (Asystole [Flatline]) (начало) (окончание)
• Viktor Pelevin – t
• German Sadulaev – Шалинский рейд (The Raid on Shali) (начало) (окончание)

Other notable books include:

• Mariam Petrosian’s Дом, в котором... (The House in Which…), a 2009 Big Book finalist that won third prize in the readers’ vote
• Andrei Astvatsaturov’s Люди в голом (People in the Nude), a National Bestseller finalist and NOSE finalist. (earlier post with description) Previous writing from Astvatsaturov is on Журнальный зал here.

I’m especially interested in these two books, both of which made the 2010 Big Book long list but not the cut for the short list:

• Bakhyt Kenzheev’s Обрезание пасынков (Pruning the Shoots) because two friends have recommended it and it’s waiting for me on my shelf
• Margarita Khemlin’s Клоцвог (Klotsvog) because I enjoyed her last book so much (previous post)

The only Booker long list book that I’ve already read is Zaionchkovskii’s Happiness Is Possible, which I thought was very good. (previous post)

The full Booker long list is online here. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s read any of the books on the list.

Two Sorokins: An Oprichnik’s Day and a Bad Trip

There’s nothing like a double dose of Vladimir Sorokin – two short novels like, say, День опричника (evidently to be translated by FSG as A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik) and Метель (The Blizzard) – to shake up a head that already feels scrambled by summer weather changes. The two books have some commonalities – both are novellas that combine Russia’s past and future, and both feature episodes with hallucinogens that affect language – but they left me with very different impressions…

Oprichnik is a first-person narrative told by an oprichnik named Komiaga. (Aside: though I initially thought the name was derived from a word like communal, I learned from The Blizzard that it is a hollowed-out log used as a feeding trough or a boat.) Though Oprichnik is set in the near future – cars have some advanced features – the return of the oprichnina, religious codes, and certain turns of phrase, draw on the past. I particularly liked one of the wardrobe touches: the oprichniki wear bell earrings that lack clappers, known in Russian as языки, a word more often used to mean “tongues” and “languages.”

Komiaga describes his day, from a morning dream interrupted by his cell phone (it has a creepy ring tone) to a late-night bedtime when he remembers the white horse in his morning dream. He thanks God that oprichniks keep Russia going. Komiaga takes part in all sorts of activities that I won’t describe in detail, lest I reveal too much of the story. Among them: a violent morning assignment, goldfish-related hallucinations (a nice use of a Russian folk tale theme), cocaine, travel around Russia, and a late-night banquet.

What’s most frightening is that Sorokin makes Komiaga, a top-level, hardcore oprichnik, such an engaging storyteller. He often seems almost normal, providing routine details about his day and his era: menus, Chinese influences, and traffic patterns. He also describes shows on opposition radio stations. Sorokin works in names that resemble those of contemporary figures, though he leaves Derrida intact: I particularly liked the idea of a book called Где обедал Деррида? (Where Did Derrida Eat Lunch?).

Sorokin crammed a lot into a small book without making it feel crowded, and I think he achieved a good balance of everydayness, humor, and, yes, political terror. That, I think, is the scariest of combinations: I came away feeling complicit for having enjoyed my time listening to Komiaga as he sped through Moscow and flew around Russia.

The pace slows in The Blizzard – there’s snow, snow, snow – and I thought the main characters were far less memorable. The Blizzard is a road story chronicling the travels of a doctor, Platon Ilich Garin, and a driver, nicknamed Perkhusha, who agrees to transport Garin during a blizzard. Platon Ilich needs to treat people suffering from an epidemic of a zombifying Bolivian disease known as чернуха.

I’ve used the word чернуха here before: it’s rooted in черный, black, and describes naturalistic books and movies that readers find particularly depressing. Is Sorokin trying to say that people suffer from this stuff, that it’s an epidemic that turns us into zombies? I don’t know, but he certainly draws on the Russian canon, from Pushkin’s Belkin Tales (previous post), where one story is even called “The Blizzard,” to Tolstoy and Chekhov. I had a strange Gogoly “whither Russia” feel as I read, too. With characters of all sizes, there’s also a Gulliver’s Travels feel to the endeavor; one scene, according to Russian critic Viktor Toporov, contains a direct borrowing. Lev Danilkin, though, sees Sorokin’s many-sized figures as references to folklore and the “little man” in Russian literature.

Maybe I’m fixated on the wrong thing, but hallucinogenic pyramids felt especially important, as if they were references to a strange literary (or meteorological?) LSD that creates Sorokin’s twists on literature, reality, and time. And of course the good doctor and his driver were on a pretty bad trip. (Yes, that is a term in Russian.) Unfortunately, despite lots of intriguing elements – the primeval past and throwback future, all that snow, literary references, and an extended play on the phrase “50 horse power” – The Blizzard never fully engaged me.

I don’t think I did The Blizzard any favors by reading it directly after Oprichnik, which had such a quick pace that I found it difficult to slow down for the snowy travel in The Blizzard. Reading order aside, I still think Oprichnik is more my kind of book, whether or not it’s read as political tea leaves. Sorokin himself says he doesn’t mind if people read Oprichnik as political satire; he sees it (Russian interview here) as futurology.

That’s perfectly apt, but I also agree with Toporov’s assertion (which I paraphrase from his review) that Sorokin’s focus with both books is less on ideas than on language and style. That, I think is the root of why I enjoyed Oprichnik more. In Komiaga, Sorokin creates a bad guy storyteller who uses and ends up embodying mixed-up words, styles, and histories. By contrast, the third-person narrator of The Blizzard left me wanting to shrug and say “whatever”: it feels more like a contemporary writer playing with tropes from the classics.

[Edit: So I don't forget: An interesting piece about The Blizzard from OpenSpace.ru that mentions Bulgakov...]

Reading level for nonnative readers of Russian: I thought Oprichnik was fairly difficult, 4/5. The Blizzard was easier, 2/5 or 3/5.

Up next: Moscow Noir, an anthology of very dark stories, then a historical detective novel by Leonid Yuzefovich.

Photo from pukeycow via sxc.hu.