Better Late Than Never: The 2015 Russian Booker Prize Longlist

Hmm, I just realized, yesterday, that I missed the Russian Booker Award’s longlist announcement on July 9. Here, then, are a few belated notes on the 24-book list. The six finalists will be named on October 9 so time’s running short for the longlist! Or even for a short version of the longlist.

There are lots of books—a third, if I’ve caught everything—that are already finalists for or winners of other awards this year:

• Aleksei Varlamov’s Мысленный волк (The Imagined Wolf, perhaps?). A novel set in the 1910s that involves some real-life figures, including our old friend Grigory Rasputin. Big Book Award finalist. I’ll be reading this one very soon so hope to figure out the title.
• Danila Zaitsev’s Повесть и житие Данилы Терентьевича Зайцева (The Life and Tale of Danila Terentyevich Zaitsev). In which a Russian Old Believer born in China and living in Argentina tells his story. Already a Yasnaya Polyana Award finalist.
• Tatyana Moskvina’s Жизнь советской девушки (Life of a Soviet Girl): Apparently a memoir about life in Leningrad during the 1960s through 1980s, with lots of detail. National Bestseller Award finalist.
• Sergei Nosov’s Фигурные скобки (Curly Brackets): Described by fellow finalist Anna Matveeva as magical realism about a mathematician who goes from Moscow to Saint Petersburg for a conference of микромаг-s. Big winner at the 2015 NatsBest Award; I already bought this one for when I finish all the Big Book Award finalists. It looks fun.
• Dina Rubina’s Русская канарейка ((The?) Russian Canary). Trilogy, a family saga set in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A Big Book finalist; Rubina’s canary and I did not get along.
• Roman Senchin’s Зона затопления (Flood Zone). A 2015 Big Book Award and Yasnaya Polyana Award finalist; a new take on themes from Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora: a village is about to be flooded for a hydroelectric plant. Not my favorite Senchin.
• Alexander Snegirev’s Вера (Vera, a name and noun that translates as Faith): A short novel about a forty-year-old woman who is unmarried. Snegirev’s Facebook description, posted at the time of the NatsBest long list, includes words like dramatic, comic, erotic (a bit), and political (a little). NatsBest finalist. I read the beginning and enjoyed it but want to read the book on paper.
• Guzel’ Yakhina’s Зулейха открывает глаза (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes). Another Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana finalist (previous post); I’m now enjoying it even more as I work on excerpts. A historical novel in which a kulak woman is exiled.

There are several other writers I’ve read before:

• Alisa Ganieva is on the list for Жених и невестa (Bride and Groom), which you can read about here. I’m looking forward to this one. Edit: an English translation, by Carol Apollonio, will be on the way next winter, from Deep Vellum.
• Andrei Gelasimov’s Холод (Cold), the name of which makes me want to wait to read this book in winter, even without knowing what it’s about. (I love winter.)
• Anna Matveeva made the list for a novel, Завидное чувство Веры Стениной (Vera Stenina’s Enviable Feeling, I think?); Enviable Feeling is apparently about female envy. (Here’s chapter one.)

And then there’s a whole pile of books—I’ll list a few already published in book form—I know nothing or very little about:

• Platon Besedin’s Учитель (The Teacher), which was nominated twice for the NatsBest but not shortlisted, is apparently a novel about a Ukrainian boy, the first book in a tetralogy (!). (Mitya Samoilov’s Big Jury review)
• Unsurprisingly, Vasilii Golovanov’s Каспийская книга (The/A Caspian Book) discusses all sorts of aspects of travel around/near the Caspian Sea. Golovanov won the 2009 Yasnaya Polyana Award for Island, which I’ve had on the shelf for three years but not yet read.
• Oleg Radzinskii’s Агафонкин и время (Agafonkin and Time) is about a time-traveling courier. Hmm.

Bonus Links on a Translated Book! Since Alisa Ganieva’s latest book is on the Booker longlist… and since I spent the fateful Russian Booker date, July 9, with old friends visiting Maine… and since we talked about the situation in the Caucasus, including Dagestan, which Alisa writes about... and since I mentioned Alisa’s books to them, this seems like the perfect time to mention The Mountain and the Wall, Carol Apollonio’s translation of Праздничная гора. The translation was published by Deep Vellum, with an introduction by Ronald Meyer. Though I felt a bit ill-prepared for The Mountain and the Wall—I’m not nearly as informed about Dagestani political and religious issues as I should be—I still enjoyed reading about reactions and unrest that follow rumors of being walled off from Russia. Various forms of chaos struck me and stuck with me the most, whether Alisa was describing personal relationships, skipping through a book (something that always reminds me of good old Pierre Bezukhov!), a visit to a club, or street demonstrations. I haven’t read the Russian original and was grateful that Carol sorted out the Avar and other languages that make appearances in the novel. I also enjoyed Carol’s enjoyment of Alisa’s humor. I’m looking forward to Bride and Groom, which sounds more personal and more “my” book, though I would certainly recommend The Mountain and the Wall to anyone interested in Dagestan or the Caucasus. Links: excerpts on Body, reviews on The Rumpus and Tony’s Reading List.

Disclaimers: The usual. Thank you to Deep Vellum for the copy of The Mountain and the Wall. (I know everyone whose names I listed for this book and would have just kept quiet if I hadn’t liked it!)

Up Next: Lots of books! More books from the Big Book finalist list, including Boris Yekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e, which I finished but didn’t like very much (at all), and Anna Matveeva’s story collection Девять девяностых (Nine from the Nineties). Also: Narine Abgaryan’s People Who Are Always With Me.

Big Book 1: Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes

My reading of 2015 Big Book Award finalists started off on a high note, with Guzel Yakhina’s Зулейха открывает глаза (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes), a debut novel that begins in 1930 in a Tatar village, from which a kulak woman—Zuleikha, she of the title—is quickly sent into exile after her husband is killed during dekulakization.

Incongruous though it may sound, Zuleikha is an enjoyable and smooth novel, unpretentious mainstream historical fiction that I realized, upon reflection, covers more cultural, ethnic, religious, and sociopolitical issues than I’d noticed (consciously, anyway) during my reading. As I write, I realize, too, that this is probably the most crucial element of good mainstream fiction for me: it should be so absorbing that I want to keep turning pages, no matter what crazy plot the author is putting forth, but I should want to turn the pages back when I finish. Put another way, I think “mainstream fiction,” can occupy most any genre, so what makes me want to call a book “good” is its ability to hold my attention both as I read and after I’ve read, compelling me to return to my notes and various passages in the book to consider depths I didn’t want to dwell on too much because I was enjoying the author’s storytelling. More on Yakhina’s storytelling below…

Though Zuleikha lives in relative material comfort, in the women’s half of a large house, she’d been married off early (and can’t calculate whether she’s been with Murtaza for half her thirty years or not) and her mother-in-law, who’s deaf and blind, demands chamber pot emptying services first thing every the morning. Zuleikha has lots of other chores, like clearing snow, tending animals, and serving Murtaza, plus she takes lots of abuse from her mother-in-law for her children’s deaths early in their lives.

Zuleikha’s own life—after seeing her husband killed, after a horrendous train trip to a spot on the Angara River where her group of exiles will settle, and after a difficult first winter that kills many—settles into a new routine with characters nothing like her neighbors in Yulbash. The characters are many but distinct, and they include a rather dotty doctor, an artist who paints on the sly, and urbane city dwellers who remember past European travels, as well as Ignatov, Zuleikha’s husband’s killer. Ignatov is persuaded to remain in the settlement, as its commandant, and he stays because of his own political issues back in Kazan. Most important, there is Zuleikha’s son Yuzuf, born in the settlement, who develops an interest for art and learns to paint.

Yakhina’s writing is simple, albeit sprinkled with Tatar words (there’s a glossary), and I particularly like the grace with which she handles her setting in the settlement on the Angara. One of the excerpts from the book that I’m translating for Elkost describes one of Zuleikha’s workdays, beginning with an early wakeup and showing Zuleikha making the rounds of her hunting grounds. I write “hunting grounds” in the literal sense: during a chance encounter with Ignatov and a bear, Zuleikha learns she’s a crack shot, so she’s entrusted with a rifle to hunt for food for the settlement’s kitchen. On the day in the passage, she’s bringing home a hare and some fowl, and is met by Yuzuf near the settlement: he asks her to tell his favorite story, about a mountain-dwelling mystical bird, known in Tatar as Semrug and in Wikipedia as Simurgh. (Edit: And here, thanks to my colleague Liza Prudovskaya, is a Wikipedia version of the story Zuleikha tells Yuzuf.) This day-in-the-life passage does everything, with lovely descriptions of nature that integrate Zuleikha into her surroundings without getting flowery (why can’t more writers do this!?), sweet banter between Zuleikha and Yuzuf, and, yes, oral storytelling that fits the scene plus the novel’s main story, too, because it looks at finding one’s strengths.

I’m not quite sure how Yakhina makes that feel fresh—she herself has said the novel is about how Zuleikha wakes up, opens her eyes to the world, and finds happiness, albeit bitter happiness—but I wonder if details from handed-down family stories about her grandmother’s experiences during dekulakization might be one reason. Another is, again, Yakhina’s ability to use a simple structure and language to tell her story, all as she plants details that will have meaning later in the book. (Side note: one of the most fun aspects of translating after reading an entire book is seeing storytelling motifs early on, the second time around.)

I’m glad to see lots of appreciation for Yakhina, Zuleikha, and, really, good ol’ storytelling: beyond being a Big Book finalist, Zuleikha made the Yasnaya Polyana Award shortlist. The novel has also won the Prose of the Year award and the Ticket to the Stars award.

Bonus Links! This year’s PEN Center USA translation award goes to Ainsley Morse and Peter Golub for Andrei Sen-Senkov’s Anatomical Theater, poetry published in a bilingual edition by Zephyr Press.

Disclaimers: The usual plus my work on excerpts from Zuleikha. Thank you, too, to Elkost for sending me an advance electronic edition of Zuleikha after telling me about the book!

Up Next: More books from the Big Book finalist list, including Boris Yekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e, which I finished but didn’t like very much (at all), and Anna Matveeva’s story collection Девять девяностых (Nine from the Nineties), which was also shortlisted for this year’s NatsBest, and gets off to a great start.

The 2015 Yasnaya Polyana Award Shortlists

I’m very grateful to the Yasnaya Polyana Award organizers for posting shortlists for the “XXI Century” and “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” awards so promptly today: it’s Labor Day and it’s hot, so I’m looking forward to going to the beach. With a book.

I’m forgoing links to online journals for the “XXI Century” list since all these books are available until late October, free of charge, on theBookmate site, which works very nicely. I’ve included some links for “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” finalists, though. So, without further ado (but with apologies for the oddities in spacing)…

There are six “XXI Century” finalists, listed here in Russian alphabetical order, by author.

• Aleksandr Grigorenko’s Мэбэт (Mebet). Mebet was a Big Book finalist in 2012 and I’ve had the book on my shelf, unread, ever since, though I’ve been meaning to give it a try. A novel set in the taiga.
• Boris Yevseev’s Офирский скворец (The Ophir Starling). A historical novel in which a man teaches a starling to speak.
• Danila Zaitsev’s Повесть и житие Данилы Терентьевича Зайцева (The Life and Tale of Danila Terentyevich Zaitsev). In which a Russian Old Believer born in China and living in Argentina tells his story.
• Elena Radetskaia’s Нет имени тебе... (There Is No Name for You… (? Borrowing a Blok poem’s title? I feel like I’m missing something here…)) . Apparently a novel about three women, love, restlessness, and the search for happiness.
• Roman Senchin’s Зона затопления (Flood Zone). A 2015 Big Book Award finalist; a new take on themes from Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora: a village is about to be flooded for a hydroelectric plant. Not my favorite Senchin.
• Guzel’ Yakhina’s Зулейха открывает глаза (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes). Another Big Book finalist, the only one so far that I’ve enjoyed... I’m now enjoying it even more as I work on excerpts. A historical novel in which a kulak woman is exiled.

There are five books on the “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” list:

• Valerii Bylinski’s Риф (Reef). A collection of stories and a novella.
• Olga Gromova’s Сахарный ребенок (The Sugar Kid). About growing up during the Stalin era. Olga Bukhina’s description of the book is here. I’ve heard lots of good things about this book from Olga and another friend. An excerpt on Snob.
• Vecheslav Kazakevich’s Охота на майских жуков (Hunting for May Bugs, though I’m thoroughly confused about differences between May bugs and June bugs… a topic for another day!) About village life in the 1970s.
• Yevgenii Mamontov’s Приключения Славки Щукина, или 33 рассказа про вранье (The Adventures of Slavka Shchukin, or 33 Stories about Lying). Some of the 33 stories are online here; the first is called “My Friend Dracula,” which is my kind of title.
• Boris Minaev’s Мужской день (Men’s Day? A Day for Men?). A collection that brings all Minaev’s stories about a boy called Lyova, some never published before, into one book. I’ve read and enjoyed some of the stories. (A sample.)

Happy Labor Day to those who celebrate it! In haste...

Bonus links to an interview, in which I answer questions about my interest in Russian literature, markets for translation, and other related burning issues. You can read it in my Russian original (here on the Год литературы site) or in my English version (here on the Russia Beyond the Headlines site). Thanks to everyone who made this happen!

Disclaimers: The usual, including work on excerpts from Yakhina’s Zuleikha, translating two of the Yasnaya Polyana judges, etc.

Up Next: The afore-mentioned Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, then other books from the Big Book Award list of finalists, including Boris Yekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e.

Munching on Abgaryan’s Three Apples

Narine Abgaryan’s С неба упали три яблока (Three Apples Fell from the Sky) was a perfect summer surprise: Abgaryan’s literary agency sent me the book, which quickly won me over with gentle humor, sadness and happiness surrounding births and deaths, and a remote setting in Maran, a village of (mostly!) elderly people in the Armenian mountains. Three Apples is both magical—with mentions of dreams and even a bolded reference to Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—and a bit gritty, thanks to accounts of day-to-day and historical hardships. Beyond all that, any book where characters live right over an abyss gets my attention.

Three Apples begins as Sevoyants Anatolia (we go last name first here) settles in to die a little after noon on a Friday; she’s bleeding heavily. Though Anatolia is so prepared to die that she’s readied clothes, she soon agrees to marry Vasily, a widower and blacksmith who brings her a new scythe, proposes marriage, and quickly moves in. This is all unexpected for Anatolia, a childless widow and former librarian who shelved books by color and loves French and Russian literature, with the notable exception of Tolstoy, whose Anna Karenina thoroughly disgusted her.

Abgaryan tells of the village’s residents through stories of famine—one little boy foresees deaths and the village later receives supplies, including a white peacock that ends up living right at that abyss—and of the plagues of flocks of rats, mice, and flies. The peacock, the dreams, the humor of yeast (much dissed in Maran after having being received from the outside world) thrown into the outhouse (never, ever throw yeast away like that!), and the magical happening that comes toward the end of the book are all wonderful in multiple senses of that word, both for comic relief and because, well, life is magical… but the everyday side of life’s magic, something that sounds pretty cheesy when described in those terms, works simply and beautifully in the book, and appealed to me even more.

I loved, for example, Anatolia and Vasily’s quiet lunch with their neighbors, where there’s little talk beyond asking for salt and clinking of cutlery: “Анатолия впервые ощутила жизнь не как данность, а как дар.” (“For the first time, Anatolia sensed/appreciated life not as a given but as a gift.”) And I loved that a young visitor (an in-law) to the family that lives by the abyss feels “размеренность бытия” (literally a measuredness of existence, a slow sort of rhythm or regularity to things) that comes to her from the nearby forest and the people. Passages like these sum up the book’s charm, particularly when life is busy for the reader: the measured routine of life in Maran, where, hmm, there doesn’t seem to be any Internet, and the quiet company of friends are what hold people together.

On the last page of the novel, there’s a mention of circles of life that resemble ripples from rain drops, where “…every event is a reflection of what came before…” I ripped that from the middle of very, very long sentence that ends with three apples waiting to be dropped to earth from the heavens, as is traditional at the end of Armenian fairytales: “одно тому, кто видел, другое тому, кто рассказал, а третье тому, кто слушал и верил в добро”—“one for the person who saw, another for the person who told the story, and the third for the person who listened and believed in what is good.” It’s a fitting end to a book with so much that is good—both universal and specific to Maran—that’s worth believing in.

Disclosures: The usual. Thank you to Banke, Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency for the book! I’ve heard a lot about Abgaryan’s “Manyuna” books for young adults and was glad to be introduced to her writing through Apples.

Up Next: Guzel’ Iakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, which I also enjoyed tremendously. Zuleikha is the first of the Big Book finalists that I’ll write about; I’ll also write a summary post about three Big Book finalists I just can’t bring myself to finish (!). And then another of Abgaryan’s books, People Who Are Always With Me, which is also very good, and a fifth Big Book finalist, Boris Ekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e.

A Lazy Summer Post: Elena Minkina-Taycher’s The Rebinder Effect

I didn’t expect to take such a long break from blogging during (and even after) my last month of translating Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina (previous post), which I turned in at the end of July to Oneworld Publications. Masha Regina, though, wormed its/her way even further into my head than I’d expected (a very good thing), brain fatigue set in (not such a good thing), and one evening a bat even settled, albeit very temporarily, in a flower pot on top of the office module of Lizok’s Bookshelf (not a good thing at all). Sometimes taking naps, feeding cats (not always as easy as it sounds), pulling weeds, and staring into space is about all I can handle during my time off. I did keep reading—slower than usual—but feel like a happier person now that I’m back to my usual pace. And back to blogging. At least until I finish the next book, Eugene Vodolazkin’s Solovyov and Larionov, which is due, also to Oneworld, at the end of February 2016.

When I was reading Elena Minkina-Taycher’s Эффект Ребиндера (The Rebinder Effect) earlier this summer, I often found myself describing the reading as “pleasant”: the book reads smoothly and easily, which is just the thing for busy times, and it left me with a peculiarly homier, fuzzier, and vaguer impression than most books. Rebinder is a novel told in episodic chapters, each of which is titled by a line from Pushkin’s poetry. Minkina-Taycher’s literary agency is not, of course, wrong in using the term “family saga” to describe the book, though it covers multiple, intertwining families whose members include a doctor, a musician, scientists, well-to-do people, a boy from an orphanage, and people with ties to far-away France. (The agency’s description also nicely summarizes the Rebinder Effect; a big thank you to them for taking care of that!) In some senses, The Rebinder Effect feels more like a saga of the entire human family than a saga of one family with a common name. I suppose that’s probably why it left me with that slightly fuzzy, vague sense.

I’ll ‘fess up: books with lots of characters often create problems for me because I have trouble keeping track of who’s who, but that mattered less than usual with Rebinder. I didn’t always remember each figure by name, even when I was reading, but everybody felt clear enough at the time, based on context. The book’s strong sense of family—in that sense of “humanity” or “mankind”—felt more important anyway, even as Minkina-Taycher’s characters were affected by historical events including dekulakization, the doctors’ plot, and the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. Despite important historical events, it always felt that what mattered most were personal relationships and histories, and doing normal human things like dancing a crazed twist, discussing opinions of poets in the sixties, and taking camping trips. Characters love, characters live, characters die. And they’re resilient, as per the Effect.

I think Rebinder has its strongest effect in its first half, where the tones feel almost like sepia and the real-life past has had a chance to settle into history. (Or should that be vice versa?) In earlier chapters, characters love, live, and die as, for example, residents of communal living spaces, as classmates at school after one girl’s mother is targeted by the state, and as people caring for one another during difficult times. Those chapters felt more self-assured to me than some later chapters: it seemed as if the balance between historical events and characters shifted a little and Minkina-Taycher’s hand grew heavier. The Chernobyl chapter, for example, felt particularly contrived because a character happened to be nearby when the accident began; the outcome was obvious. Despite those misgivings, The Rebinder Effect is very decent mainstream fiction—something I don’t write to damn with faint praise—that makes for good, personable, low-key company thanks to Minkina-Taycher’s focus on characters primarily as people. People who need to be people.

Since there’s been previous discussion of electronic reading on the blog, I’ll also note that I read The Rebinder Effect on a new device. First off, my demands for a device on which to read. Since I seem to do best reading electronically when I have a PDF that shows a book’s layout, I wanted a reader with a screen large enough to display an entire PDF page. This creates the illusion (*sigh*) that I’m reading an old-fashioned book printed on paper. I wanted a reader with a matte screen. I wanted a reader that didn’t cost much. Okay, I wanted it to be very, very cheap. I wanted a reader that wouldn’t be cumbersome to hold or carry. I wanted a reader that wouldn’t advertise anything. My dream reader might well be the PocketBook InkPad, which gets fantastic reviews but is expensive and not readily available in the US. After a lot of Internet research and some spins around local stores with very limited options, imagine my surprise when I ended up with something that’s super-cheap and readily available, but gets not-so-great reviews: a Nextbook Ares 8 tablet from Walmart! So far, after more than two months of solid reading on the Ares 8, I’m very happy with it after slapping on a nonglare screen protector. The Ares 8 is the perfect size, pretty much the same as a typical book page, and it’s easy to hold, too. Equally important: I found a PDF app, also rather obscure, that works very well for my needs. Xodo SmartQ crops PDFs easily, turns pages nicely, and offers good annotation features. Not all PDF apps generate lists of annotations but XodoSmartQ’s lists are always accessible. (Foxit, my second-favorite PDF reader, only generates lists on demand, which is ridiculously cumbersome.) I don’t think I’d recommend the Ares 8 for much other than unusual uses like mine: it’s an easy-to-use Android device and seems sturdier than average, but Internet searches are pretty slow in either Chrome or Firefox. Finally, for the record, despite being happy with the Nextbook—and enjoying electronic reading more than I ever have—I’d still much, much rather read books on paper than electronic files.

Up next: Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell From the Sky and Guzel’ Iakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, both of which I enjoyed tremendously. Zuleikha is the first of the Big Book finalists that I’ll write about; Roman Senchin’s Flood Zone, which I’m reading now and seems only so-so after about 100 pages, will be the second.

Disclaimers: The usual. I received an electronic copy of The Rebinder Effect from Banke, Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency. Thank you!