Yuri Buida’s Яд и мёд (Poison and Honey)
is a busy novella that left me with the strange feeling I’d just spent years trapped
as a guest after a dark, extended house party: Poison and Honey focuses on a house and a family, the Osorins, covering
lives, ambitions, and deaths, including murder most foul. Buida manages to
weave together what sometimes feels like legions of characters and an entire
history book of world culture, creating a compact, packed story that’s realistic, mythical, and metaphysical. It’s
also strangely enjoyable and even more strangely suspenseful.
Buida’s first-person narrator is Semyon Semyonovich, who’s
not, by blood, an Osorin but who becomes part of the extended family when his grandfather,
a physician’s assistant, brings him to the Osorins’ house as a little boy. The house,
which is set on a hill (of course), is sometimes known as the House of the
Twelve Angels. The house is magnificent (of course), and it contains, among
other things, statues and paintings of naked women, a set of twelve (hmm1) bronze
figures of horsemen, a cat named Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst (hmm2), and a matriarch
known as Tati. Semyon becomes a long-term member of the extended household
after Tati invites him back to play with her nephews: when the book ends,
decades later, Semyon is working with the family’s archives, making him a sort
of inside outsider. Semyon chronicles Osorin family history, too, as the
narrator of Poison and Honey, telling
of overdoses (Quaaludes, which I didn’t realize were known as “disco biscuits”
before Ecstasy, hmm3), affairs, careers in literature and intelligence, and, of
course, numerous enmities.
Everything changes in a very big way at the house on the hill
when Ilya (son of one of Tati’s nephews) slides off an icy road, hits a young
woman named Olga Shvarts, and then brings her home. Olga’s unhurt, at least initially:
she stays at the house until she winds up dead (and naked) a few days later. Olga’s
the (arche)typical outsider in many ways, someone who wants to become part of a
house and family like the Osorins’, with its chiming clocks, heraldry, and old glory.
After Olga’s death, Tati interviews members of the household, and Semyon duly
describes the proceedings… until, that is, his wife gives birth during the night.
Buida references Agatha Christie as well as Dostoevsky as he describes the interviews.
One alibi is a bank robbery.
When Semyon returns the next morning (It’s a boy!), the whodunit
aspect of the story has been resolved, at least on a certain level, though the identity of
the killer isn’t revealed. I loved the breakfast scene. Everyone sits down to a
usual breakfast—salads, sandwiches with ham and cheese, somewhat stale bread,
butter, tea, and coffee—but the family is wearing nice dresses and suits, and
the table is set with a white table cloth, crystal, and silver. There’s even Champagne.
And then the resolution to the murder is announced.
Poison and Honey is
thoroughly lively and oddly lovely, in part because the pace is brisk and Buida
works in so many references to history and culture, much of it Russian, folding
in lots of high society and low doings. Like murder most foul, in its literal
and literary senses. One of the central elements of Poison and Honey is clearly homes, homelessness, and uprootedness: toward
the end of the novella, Tati tells Semyon that Russians are only truly at home in
church and at war, after all, they might lose their homes because of war, arrest,
and fire. Tati, however, wants her family to keep living in her house—where the
clock will continue to chime and people will continue discussing the Russian
idea—for hundreds of years. This, after all, is a house where artists, musicians,
writers, and dissidents discussed everything from the Prague Spring to
Solzhenitsyn.
For all that talk about the family and the house, though, just
about everyone in the Osorin household seems supremely unhappy, though I admit many
of the family members and hangers on glopped together in my mind, perhaps because
all the unhappiness, affairs, and treachery glopped together in my mind, too. That’s
probably as it should be since this family—like the circumstances surrounding Olga’s
murder—feels so hermetically sealed in at The House of Twelve Angels that the issue
of who’s who as an individual feels almost as irrelevant as the issue of who-really-dunit
in an atmosphere where guilt feels collective.
I should note that the book Poison and Honey contains the novella I read plus a clutch of
stories, collectively known as “chronicles,” about the Osorin family. I only
read the novella but want to buy the book, on paper, to revisit the novella and
read the stories. Poison and Honey is
the kind of book I can easily lose myself in if I read electronically but that I
want to reread on paper, to pick up more detail.
Disclaimers: I
received an electronic copy of Poison and
Honey from Elkost, Buida’s literary agency. Thank you, particularly since your timing was perfect! Plus the usual.
Up Next: The Belkin Award, for which Poison and Honey is a finalist, translations coming out in 2014, and whatever I start reading this evening.