Ain’t We Got Fun?

I’m starting to think I wasn’t kidding last time when I wrote that I may be reading Maxim Kantor’s Красный свет (Red World/Light/???) until the winners of the Big Book Awards are announced in November: I’m stuck in a World War 2 scene in the middle of a chapter in almost the exact middle of the book. All because sometimes, in the course of human events, even a reader like me, someone who has probably read more chernukha (dark naturalism) over the years than is healthy, needs something a little lighter. Red Whatever isn’t exactly chernukha but it’s fairly heavy stuff: there’s a bit of satire, but that’s outweighed by the war, arrests, a Hitler accomplice, ineptness in today’s political opposition, and a general feeling of rot.

Kantor’s book is my third war-related book of this season and Alexander Ilichevsky’s The Orphics, which I liked quite a bit, isn’t exactly an upper, either, with a dacha romance gone bad that leads to some intense Russian roulette scenes. I like a lot of this dark stuff, particularly when there’s a twist, as there is in Ilichevsky’s book and as there is in the last of my war-oriented books, Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop (nicely translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker), which manages to combine extreme ghoulishness with absurdity. Which is to say my problem isn’t that I want all my reading to be lite or even light… but I’d love to find a little more balance for my poor bookshelves, which sometimes seem too loaded down with darkness and existential dread. I doubt acetaminophen would be of much practical use.

So why am I writing about this? Because I’d love to hear readers’ suggestions about books—particularly contemporary or twentieth-century fiction, though I’m open to anything—that are fun(ny) and smart. I’m not looking for a list of “feel-good” books or books that are mindlessly cheery, just some titles that don’t relentlessly focus on death, doom, destruction, and (here it is again) darkness. I’ve fielded reader questions about this a number of times over the years, too, from various angles, so am sure others will be happy (happy!) for your suggestions.

I realize the hard part is that tastes, perspectives, and perceptions vary: lots (okay, probably millions) of people love Ilf and Petrov, but I’m probably best described as “indifferent,” and I couldn’t stand the Strugatsky Brothers’ Monday Starts on Saturday. On the other hand, I’d put Dmitrii Danilov’s Description of a City on a list of fun books, both for Danilov’s take on language, which sometimes made me laugh out loud, and for being “very touching.” Another one: even with lots of plague, Evgeny Vodolazkin’s Laurus managed to avoid utter darkness, too, through humor and something else that’s probably best described as a form of optimism. Optimism! Danilov’s book has it, too; both these books are also Big Book finalists, something that makes me feel optimistic in other ways.

Others: I’ve enjoyed Gogol’s “Nose” many times, laughed out loud at Alexander Snegirev’s silly but sharp Vanity, and sought respite from Alexander Terekhov’s dreary, overbearing Stone Bridge in Anna Starobinets’s Sanctuary 3/9, where “I found scary fun, a nightmarish, multigenre conglomeration of human fears.” Yes, it was lots more fun reading Starobinets’s take on fears than taking two Tylenol and continuing with Terekhov. There are plenty of other writers—Dovlatov and Iskander some to mind—who also manage to combine humor with the serious stuff. And then there’s Vladimir Voinovich’s Soviet-era satire (especially The Fur Hat and Chonkin). And Valentin Kataev’s A White Sail Gleams and The Embezzlers… Yes, I have more unread Voinovich and Dovlatov and Iskander and Kataev on my shelves, but I’d love to have some new writers to try, too.

For what it’s worth, I’m now reading yet another Big Book finalist, Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina, about a girl from a small city who leaves her family for Leningrad, where she finishes high school then goes to film school and becomes famous. The book has a layer of bleakness but it also has lots of nice detail, plus some stylistic elements that appeal to me. More on that later, of course. FWIW, I resolved my immediate problem (last week) by finally picking up—it took fifteen or twenty years!—Petr Boborykin’s Китай-город, an 1882 novel named for Kitai-gorod, a neighborhood in central Moscow… it’s not exactly funny but it’s oddly lively and entertaining. Boborykin loves description of clothes, food, and, particularly, goods for sale; that’s fun in small doses so I may just read little bits every now and then and continue researching some of the old vocabulary.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: Ilichevsky’s The Orphics and Levental’s Masha Regina…