The back cover of my edition of Alexander Snegirev’s Вера—the
title is Vera in Russian, Faith in English—describes the book as a “роман-метафора,” literally a “novel-metaphor.” Vera, which won the 2015 Russian Booker
Prize, (when, yes, I really, truly shouted “Snegirev” after I read he’d won…),
is a novel that feels both painfully real and a novel whose metaphors feel
painful as well as surreal, all served up in Snegirev’s story of a young woman’s
life, faith, and attempts at love. I can’t say that Vera’s particularly pleasant to read—there are unsavory characters,
dense language, and painful situations that have the real-but-unreal sense I
mentioned above—but I have tremendous respect for Snegirev for being able to
pull off the novel. I’ve read several of his books now—I thoroughly enjoyed
both Petroleum Venus (previous
post) and Vanity (previous
post)—as well as a number of his stories of varying length. They were all good
but Vera is a big step forward for
him as a writer. Respect is often worth a lot more than likability.
I think the big reason Vera
succeeds is that Snegirev teaches his reader how to read the novel from the
very start, establishing tone and atmosphere. On page three, for example, there’s this: “В начале самой страшной войны в истории
человечества нелюбимого мужа Катерины призвали.” (“At the beginning of
the most dreadful war in the history of mankind, Katerina’s unloved husband was
called up [for military service].”) The characters are Vera’s grandparents and
the war is World War 2. Vera is later referred to as “our heroine” and touches
of conscious storytelling and myth set the book outside what I’d consider a real
reality. Then there’s the matter of the language, language that some reviewers have
compared to Andrei Platonov’s. Certainly the description of pizza (I’ll just
offer a rough translation) as an Italian flour-based round/circle mounded with
vegetables and meat, a concoction that’s quickly confirmed to be pizza, gives a
sense of Snegirev’s play with language, language that’s so dense that I limited
my readings to small chunks and (though I don’t remember her exact words) that one
colleague, a native speaker of Russian, likened reading Vera to slogging through mud or mire. There is, however, a fair bit
of dark humor.
But. But sometimes I like a good slog. And Snegirev’s novel-metaphor-slog
creates a Vera who represents her time, a post-Soviet time in which Vera goes
to political protests in search of men (one of my notes says “gussies self up
for a protest”) and when baseball bats are used as weapons. What’s perhaps most
important, though, is Vera’s body, and here I’m grateful to Sam Sacks’s “Fiction
Chronicle” in the Wall Street Journal
two weeks ago for putting into words something I’d sensed in Vera but hadn’t quite formulated for
myself, despite having noticed it in other novels, too. In discussing Han
Kang’s Human Acts (translated by
Deborah Smith), Sacks refers to fiction that “frames the human body as a site
of political violence and protest,” something Han does to tremendous effect in The Vegetarian, too. (Side note: I
haven’t read Human Acts but I have
read The Vegetarian, a Booker
International winner which, like Vera,
I can’t say I enjoyed but had to finish and have to respect, both as a novel
and for Smith’s translation. Also: I’m reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, where the violence
against the body isn’t exactly political but where the descriptions of pain,
much of it self-inflicted, make me flinch and twinge and gasp. There’s a sense
of concrete/abstract and harsh reality/metaphor there, too, that reminds me of Vera and The Vegetarian, despite how different the books seem.)
In Vera, Vera/Faith
is attacked early on in a church and she attempts to defend (I’ll paraphrase
again) what is usually called [her] honor. Things go from bad to worse over the
years and Vera eventually loses, among other things, the ability to see all of
herself in the mirror. It’s helpful here to remember that Vera isn’t just a novel, it’s a metaphor, too, particularly since
Snegirev carries his metaphors further, to their logical conclusions, so there’s
not much of Vera/Faith left at all, and Vera’s life is closely tied to both
religion and faith, as well as changes in Russia during the post-Soviet era.
When I think back to reading Vera, which I finished some time ago, several things particularly
stick with me: working my way through the dense language, details from Russian
history and life that give Vera that “real”
layer I mentioned at the start, and, more than anything else, Vera’s physical
and psychological pain, which felt both real (that word again!) and
metaphorical, as well as integrally and intensely related to Snegirev’s
language and picture of Russia. I hadn’t read all of Vera when Snegirev won the Booker—I read about 15-20 pages,
electronically, before deciding I needed to read Vera on paper—but now I feel all the happier that I shouted his
name when he won. Not all good books are pleasant or cozy or easy to describe,
but I have tremendous respect (that word again, too) for complex books that
work thanks to consistent poetics. In the end, I find that respect a lot more pleasant
than an easy, cozy book, particularly when it’s such a pleasure to watch
Snegirev’s writing develop.
Also: I was sad
to learn yesterday that actor John
Hurt died. Among his many roles, Hurt played Raskolnikov in the BBC’s 1979
adaptation of Crime and Punishment,
which I watched as a teenager, both
at home and at school, where my English teacher showed it to my class when we
were reading the novel. I still see Hurt’s face as Raskolnikov as I reread the
book now.
Disclaimers: I’ve
known Alexander Snegirev since we met at BookExpo America in 2012; he sent me
an electronic edition of Vera.
Up Next: Paul
Goldberg’s The Yid, covering my
thoughts on the book, which I recommend highly, and his upcoming visit to
Portland for the launch of book’s paperback edition. Sergei Kuznetsov’s Kaleidoscope, which I’m still loving,
more than 500 pages in…
