The most difficult thing to explain about Aleksei Ivanov’s 630-page
Ненастье (Nenast’e) may very well be the book’s title: Nenast’e is the name
of a small town as well as a word for nasty weather, and Ivanov carries metaphorical
nasty weather into his characters’ inner workings, too. I realize I’m obsessed with
winter, but—whether we’re talking about weather or human interactions—Nenast’e left a distinct impression of something
cold and slushy, despite some key summer scenes.
The basic plot of Nenast’e
is pretty easy to outline: Soviet-Afghan
War veteran German Nevolin, who’s driving an armored car, steals sacks of cash,
hides the loot at his girlfriend’s father’s (former) dacha in Nenast’e, and
hides himself, too. Ivanov alternates this plot layer, which begins on November
14, 2008, with flashbacks to Nevolin’s military service in Afghanistan, where
he becomes buddies with one Sergei Likholetov; and to Afghan War veterans’ rather
spurious activity, initially under Likholetov’s rather spurious leadership, in the
city of Batuev. By beginning Nenast’e with
Nevolin’s heist, Ivanov sets up the book as a whyhedunnit psychological novel, depicting
Nevolin as a “still waters run deep” (sorry for the mashed-up metaphors here!)
sort of guy: a quiet follower of orders who commits his transgression out of
love. Nenast’e feels like the post-Soviet
social novel to end all post-Soviet social novels but it’s also an action novel
(these guys never really come out of military mode) and, at its very core, a low-key
love story.
Ivanov’s depiction of Russia in the 1990s is clear and almost
too obvious for fiction, but his approach works well in Nenast’e because he piles his characters’ actions and motivations on
the framework of dozens of signs of the time, like the GKChP
of August 1991, the October
Events of 1993, mentions of vouchers and new supermarkets, as well as references to popular
songs, like this classic,
Natalia Vetlitskaya’s “Посмотри в глаза,” “Look
Me in the Eye,” which I remember from the early nineties. Ivanov’s characters
are motivated by several things: money is key but a Golden Rule sort of ethos,
that Afghan War veterans must help one another, is even more important,
particularly since it’s paired with a strong sense of entitlement, resulting in
“Afghantsy,” as veterans are known, feeling they should and can take what’s
owed to them because they’ve been wronged.
Nenast’e’s
characters are generally unsympathetic and unpleasant, and they serve up an interesting
combination of passiveness—German’s surname, Nevolin, even indicates a lack of
will, which is fitting because he’s much more an observer than a warrior and it
seems nobody expected him to steal the cash—and aggressiveness that create
serious violent clashes in Batuev, where they battle things out with anyone
they see as competition for turf, whether that turf is living space or commercial opportunity.
These characters’ intellectual growth is stunted so there’s a lot of crudeness
and corruption on all levels in Nenast’e,
from individual mindsets warped by war and a country adrift, to cronyism in local
officialdom. It makes for very sad reading. The female characters’ lives are at
least as sad as the males’: Nevolin’s girlfriend, Tanya, was Likholetov’s
girlfriend at a very tender young age and she’s bullied by her beauty shop co-workers;
and Nevolin’s (ex-)wife, Marina, is brassy and mean. Tanya, by the way, was
conceived in the first place so her parents would have better living space.
I found in Nenast’e
a strange suspense that reminded me most of Roman Senchin’s The Yeltyshevs, (previous
post) which I loved so much back in 2010. Ivanov’s realism feels at least
as dark and hopeless to me as Senchin’s because (oversimplifying here so I can
fit the blog medium!) a toxic combination of social changes and the lack of the
will and/or ability to think and reason have degraded most of both authors’
characters—even when they’ve become successful biznesmeny in Nenast’e—to
either raw, coarse impulses that seem to exist only to gain power even if they have
to kill for it, or to huddling shadows of human beings. There’s not much hope
for the future in either book.
Some sections of Nenast’e,
particularly battle descriptions, ran
a little long for me and I did miss the sense of humor that made Ivanov’s Geographer (previous
post) easier to warm up to as a piece of fiction. Despite those factors and
the obviousness I mentioned earlier, Nenast’e
held my attention for more than 600 pages (with no skimming) because of the train wreck that Ivanov creates: watching Nevolin,
Likholetov, and their comrades battle it out in Afghanistan and Batuev sure doesn’t
make for comfy reading and there’s not much literary beauty here, either, but Ivanov’s huge
cast of characters and intricate story, which I’ve barely touched on, for the sake
of relative brevity, made for a compelling, absorbing, and painful account of something
that went horribly wrong. It suspect it felt particularly vivid to me because I
lived in Russia during the 1990s and remember the era’s violence all too well.
Disclaimers: None,
really, other than that this book is a finalist for the Big
Book Award, for which I serve on the jury, the Literary Academy.
Up Next: Eugene
Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, which I’m still mulling over, trying to figure
out how to write about the book without giving away the whole story; Alexander
Snegirev’s Vera, which I am now officially calling Faith; Maria Galina’s ever-mysterious Autochthons; and
Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Jacob’s Ladder, a
family saga that’s about to go the beach with me for some late-afternoon reading.
The Vodolzakin, Galina, and Ulitskaya books are also Big Book finalists.
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