I confess that this year’s Big Book reading has been something of a slog. A bit harsh as a lede, I suppose, but there you have it. On the positive side, my reading did start on a good note, with Eugene Vodolazkin’s Оправдание Острова – often known in English as The History of Island, though more literally it would be something like Justification of the Island – in 2020. Thank goodness for Island! It’s a very good book, funny and wise, where form and content complement each other in very Vodolazkonian ways (previous post). I’m looking forward to translating it in full.
But then. Well. The first books I started after the shortlist was announced in June (previous post) brought little enjoyment. Gigolashvili’s Koka lacks the edgy tension and drive of his wonderful Devil’s Wheel (previous post) and felt like a string of pun-driven gags (“gags” in the joking sense). I read 170 pages. I also read nearly 60 pages (which would probably have been at least 80 with a more rational type and page size) of Remizov’s Permafrost, which also lacks momentum. It feels a bit overly familiar, too, since certain aspects of the distant setting and Stalin-era situations reminded a bit too much of Yakhina’s Zuleikha. (I translated Zuleikha; these sorts of situations are occupational hazards.) Permafrost was a disappointment after enjoying Remizov’s Ashes and Dust (previous post) some years ago. In any case, despite the small print and many pages in these two books, fairness says I’ll attempt returns to both, just to be sure I wasn’t too cranky in the summer heat, something that’s wholly possible. Both books have their fans and though I understand why, when the thought of reading a book makes me not want to read, I take that as a sign and set the book aside. Unfortunately, I had even more difficulty with Buida’s The Wyvern’s Gardens and Dmitriev’s That Shore.
Fortunately, however, my fall reading brought two Big Book finalists that I did enjoy: Oksana Vasyakina’s The Wound and Aleksei Polyarinov’s The Reef. They make an interesting pair since both are suspenseful in their own ways: Vasyakina’s because I wondered how her trip would go, carrying the baggage of memories and, literally, her mother’s ashes, and Polyarinov’s because he wrote a three-thread book that braids together plotlines that all lead to a charismatic professor who founds a cult that’s just begging to be cracked. These two books also make an interesting pair because The Wound is such personal autofiction and The Reef feels very research-driven. And so…
In The Wound Vasyakina offers memories of her mother
(her mother’s beautiful hands, her mother’s formal kisses, her last days spent
with her mother, among other things); her memories of childhood and
adolescence, situations like, say, watching The Wall over and over at age
five, when she was often left unattended; and her sexuality and relationships.
Polina Barskova’s foreword to The Wound discusses the directness of
Vasyakina’s writing; I think Vasyakina’s directness is especially piercing
because it’s so precise and detailed, so heartfelt and reasoned. There’s
existential dread on the airplane. There are her months spent with her mother’s
urn, talking with her mother’s remains… Although Vasyakina herself wonders if
she’s done too little to structure The Wound, my answer is a questioning
“maybe it’s fine” since this is a book where everything fits together, even the
essayistic parts (which made me glad to have finished that final volume of
Proust!). That’s because, well, yes, Vasyakina knows her material and writes so
simply and, yes, so directly and so precisely about things that are hard to
talk about. The Wound is heartbreaking, from the tacky cheap flower on her
mother’s urn to feelings of loss, some temporary, others more permanent, but
Vasyakina’s hope is that writing the book will heal a wound that felt (still
feels?) very raw. (I have to wonder if she might think she will write
another one in a few years.) Despite the book’s very clear language and
direction, I read The Wound fairly slowly: it was as if the simplicity
of Vasyakina’s language poured her stories and memories directly into my head
and thoughts, encouraging me to consider them, feel them, and experience them,
if only as a thought experiment. Inviting and compelling the reader to do all
that – and identify with the author, too – is what makes The Wound feel
like such successful autofiction.
Polyarinov’s Reef, on the other hand, made me read
faster. As I mentioned, three plot threads converge when (I’ll simplify and
shorten a lot here since there are many plot turns; watch out for spoilers) two
characters (one American, the other Russian) go to a cult’s compound outside
Moscow to track down the third and fourth characters (one a member, the other
the cult’s leader and, formerly, the American’s anthropology professor, when
she was in a U.S. grad school). I read quickly because I genuinely found the
novel suspenseful – what will happen when the first two characters I mentioned find
the third and the fourth? – but also because, alas, some passages felt
unnecessary and/or too long. My back-of-the-book notes include “the book tries
too hard” and I think a big part of that angle on my reading is that it felt
like Polyarinov wanted to make use of his study of cults (the back of the book
lists lots of sources) while sticking too much background and backstory into
the novel, violating Elmore Leonard’s rule about omitting the
parts people skip. I also had (smaller) trouble with Lily Smith, the American
who studied with the professor, whose name happens to be Garin (a surname that constantly,
perhaps purposely, reminded me of Alexei Tolstoy and hyperboloids/death
rays). Lily seems a little gullible (or naïve?), particularly when she up
and decides to fly off to Moscow and then has a meltdown when someone at a
pharmacy near her hotel doesn’t speak English. To his credit, Polyarinov still
kept me interested by including some eerie rituals, an occasional Heart of
Darkness feel, and difficult familial relations. I thought The Reef felt
most believable in the tiny splinter of the Venn diagram showing its overlap
with The Wound: fraught mother-daughter relationships and the
non-choices they bring since we don’t chose our birthplaces or birthparents. In
the end, the contrast in The Reef – the almost mechanistic, constructed feel
that comes from all the background and the inevitability of certain plot turns
versus the human understanding that went into describing some of the characters’
relationships, emotions, and vulnerabilities – made for one of the most
interesting aspects of the reading, despite an ending that’s also a little deterministic
and involves both self-forgiveness and a mother-daughter discussion where empathy
is mentioned. Then again, if I think more anthropologically, I could make a very
strong case that even though those contemporary therapeutic rituals and
conclusions might initially feel cliched and cloying to some readers, under
closer inspection, they seem utterly realistic, not to mention fitting and
appropriate alongside other human patterns (like cult behaviors and ancient
rituals) that Polyarinov presents to the reader.
Up Next: A new novel by Dimitry Danilov.
Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. My work translating Vodolazkin. I received all the Big Book finalists in PDF form because I’m a member of the Big Book Award’s Literary Academy but I read printed books that I purchased myself.
