2016 Big Book Winners: Yuzefovich Takes Top Jury Prize

Winners of the 2016 Big Book Award were announced this evening in Moscow. The top jury prize went to Leonid Yuzefovich for his Winter Road, which already won this year’s National Bestseller award as well as a translation grant from the Russian Booker. Evgenii Vodolazkin won second prize for his Aviator (previous post) and Ludmila Ulitskaya took third place for her Yakov’s Ladder (previous post). My summary of all this year’s Big Book finalists is on the blog here. All three of these authors have won the top Big Book prize in the past and all three of these books were published by Elena Shubina’s imprint at AST.

Reader’s choice awards, which were announced last week, went to Ulitskaya’s Yakov’s Ladder, Maria Galina’s Autochthons (previous post), and Vodolazkin’s Aviator. The Big Book site notes that only four votes separated the Galina and Vodolazkin books.

An award for contributions to literature went to Boris Kupriyanov, who is, among other things, a co-founder of the Falanster bookstore in Moscow as well as a key figure for two Moscow book fairs/festivals.

Link(s) with commentary:

-Mikhail Edelshtein’s concise pre-ceremony plus/minus view of all the finalists, on Lenta.ru.
-Maya Kucherskaya's summary on Vedomosti. After mentioning that Aleksei Ivanov didn't win anything for his Nenast'e Kucherskaya suggests that a special prize could be given so that all deserving books win something. I'd expected that Ivanov's book would win something (my prediction was that he, not Ulitskaya, would be in the top three and I wasn't far off, Ivanov's point total was very, very close to Ulitskaya's) but special prizes like that would be impractical for an award like Big Book, where the jury is large and members have the option of voting remotely, making that sort of prize logistically difficult. Not to mention contentious! Beyond that, it seems to me that awarding three jury prizes and three reader's choice prizes is already very generous.
-Anna Narinskaya's commentary on Kommersant is far more interesting. I, too, wish books like Sergei Kuznetsov's and Dmitry Danilov's had been Big Book finalists this year: they're both on my shelf but even without having read them yet, I have a strong suspicion that they would have been far better choices than, for (safe) starters, the book about reptiles, which was very, very weak. I couldn't agree more with Narinskaya that books like Danilov's spice up Big Book shortlists: they help readers discover writers and there's a lot to be said for diluting the mainstream. This is a minor point (and I'm probably splitting hairs here) but I can't say that I fit her perception that members of the jury want to read books that reflect on and connect Russian history and the Russian present: my personal bias is just for books that are interesting/compelling and hold together structurally. This time around--and last year, too, with Guzel Yakhina's Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes--those happened to be books that involved Russian history. And of course I love Laurus and The Women of Lazarus. And lots of other novels that somehow blend history and the present. But I'm open to anything. Like Danilov's books, which are generally very much in the present... and which I always enjoy so much.
-Two pieces by people I know and thus particularly enjoy reading: Mikhail Vizel on the Год литературы site notes, among other things, that Yuzefovich said that Ivanov should have won. (He also notes that only two points separated the Ulitskaya and Ivanov books, almost nothing, given the totals.) Konstantin Milchin, for TASS, places particular focus on the lack of new names.
-Klarisa Pulson for Novaya Gazeta (here), who says the results were too predictable. Something I agree with... but a jury has to vote on a set list of books.

Disclaimers: The usual. I’m a member of the Big Book’s Literary Academy, its jury, and received all the books from the Big Book and, in some cases, the books’ literary agencies. I have translated books by Vodolazkin—I’m currently working on The Aviator—and excerpts from books by Galina.

Up next: Belated autumn travel report. Belated reading roundup. And books: Sukhbat Aflatuni’s The Ant King, which is very suspenseful and oddly absorbing.

Big Book 2016 Finalists: A Summary

This year’s Big Book Award finalists (previous post with the list is here) fit neatly into three categories: three books I praise highly, three books I enjoyed well enough to finish, and five books I couldn’t finish. Five in the “did not finish” category might sound high, but it’s not unusual for me to finish only about half the books I start; one of the reasons I don’t write more posts about books is that I abandon so many without finishing. Big Book winners will be announced on December 6. Here’s a brief summary of my reading:

Those I praise highly. It probably comes as no surprise that Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Авиатор (The Aviator) was my favorite in the bunch (previous post) and is a big favorite for the year, too. The Aviator looks at the nature of time, life, and Soviet history from an angle that I particularly like… but won’t reveal. Translating The Aviator is a treat for the emotions it raises, its simple elegance, and the multiple settings Vodolazkin manages to create. Alexei Ivanov’s Ненастье (Nenast’e) is a treat of an entirely different sort (previous post, which discusses the title) and not just because I’m not translating it: this social novel about Afghan War veterans is suspenseful, dark, and painful, a well-plotted novel about all kinds of relationships. It’s very good and I’ve been pleased to see it garner so much praise among readers. I’m still reading away on Leonid Yuzefovich’s Зимняя дорога, (The Winter Road), one of the most enjoyable works of nonfiction I’ve read in a long time, with Civil War figures and wonderful details about people, places, and politics.

Those I enjoyed well enough to finish. Maria Galina’s Автохтоны (part one/part two) (Autochthons) still mystifies me more than a bit since I’m still not exactly sure what happens (previous post) but Galina’s dark-but-cozy combination of tasty meals, cultural history, and a small city setting on the edge of Europe—not to mention humor and the possibility of a character being a sylph—remain vivid in my memory. And I do want to reread it. Using the book light again. Sasha Filipenko’s Травля (Hounding) (previous post) also stuck with me, though for opposite reasons: there’s only darkness, nothing cozy, in this story of a journalist who’s being hounded for political reasons. And there are certainly no sylphs. I think I appreciated most the account of bitterness after the 1998 default. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Лестница Якова (Yakov’s Ladder or Jacob’s Ladder, though I’ll use Ulitskaya’s agent’s title with “Yakov”) (previous) is a family saga that’s told in story-like episodes and includes letters from Ulitskaya’s own family archives. This isn’t my favorite Ulitskaya novel but the familiarity of Ulitskaya’s style and settings made this rather long book read easily, though I often wanted the balance to tip more toward character development than history.

Those I just couldn’t finish. This is the section that gives me no joy whatsoever. Vladimir Dinets’s Песни драконов (Dragon Songs) wasn’t the fun surprise that Nature Girl here dared to hope for. My parents live in Florida—where there seem to be alligators everywhere—and I’ve been to crocodile country in Australia, so I thought I was off to a decent start but somehow I just couldn’t sink my teeth into things like descriptions of alligators “dancing,” and I just wasn’t interested in Dinets’s personal details. Alexander Ilichevsky’s Справа налево (From Right to Left) book of essays is a mishmash that, I’m sorry to say, didn’t grab me at all. Even sadder, though, I thought all the novels in this category lacked narrative drive, a coherent structure, and/or the sense of a good story. I gave Pyotr Aleshkovsky’s Крепость (The Citadel) 106 pages to show me where it was going and, to borrow from what I wrote on Goodreads, was sorry it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a serious social novel about an honest archaeologist or a melodrama with family hysterics. (The big sign I was done: I kept finding excuses to compare recipes in 660 Curries and think about what I needed to buy at the Indian grocery store…) Anna Matveeva’s Завидное чувство Веры Стениной (Vera Stenina’s Envy; the Russian title is closer to Vera Stenina’s Enviable Sense but that is, indeed, tough to sort...) was equally painful, though I read nearly 200 pages, hoping something might develop beyond a rather utilitarian tale of one woman’s envy (envy is visualized as a bat here) of her friend. I made it through less (about 50 pages) of Sergei Soloukh’s Рассказы о животных (Stories About Animals), the tale of a man who travels a lot for work. I can’t say I much enjoy reading about driving (perhaps because I don’t especially enjoy driving?) so Stories and I didn’t get off to a good start. Though I’d hoped for a compelling novel about what causes people to lose their humanness, particularly in times of social upheaval, alas, Stories was too muddled to tell me much.

Disclaimers: The usual. I received electronic texts of all these books from the Big Book, for which I serve on the Literary Academy, the award’s jury; I received a couple from the authors’ literary agents, too. Among other things: I’m currently translating The Aviator and have translated excerpts of some of Maria Galina’s other books.

Up Next: I think I’ll write more summary posts: travel, books read in Russian, and books read in English. And a full-length post on Boris Minaev’s Soft Fabric, volume one…

Big Book Five: Sasha Filipenko’s Hounding

Sasha Filipenko’s Травля, which I think I’ll call Hounding in English, is one of the shortest Big Book finalists for 2016, but this fast-moving, densely packed novel makes a fairly big impression. Filipenko, who has also written for Russian TV, manages to pack a lot into around 190 pages with a story that involves, among other things, strong themes of socio-economic resentment and politically motivated hounding.

I’ll start by jumping a bit into the book, at the point where one Lev Smyslov (surname rooted in sense/meaning) goes to see his much-younger brother Mark, a cellist who’s in Switzerland for a concert that he’s scheduled to perform in several hours. Lev has told Mark he has to make the visit at that particular time because he’ll be gone the next day. (Of course this raises worries of suicide…) Lev tells first of his shame at their father’s fall from financial grace because of the 1998 default, which forced the family to move to a part of St. Petersburg that Lev doesn’t like: it’s noisy, there’s bullying in the new school, he steals nice clothes from old friends when he goes to visit, and neighbors deal drugs in their kitchen. I’ll fast-forward a few years, to when the ties Lev made in that building bring him back in contact with his neighbor Kalo, who’s from the family that dealt drugs. They work on a project for another former neighbor, Vladimir Slavin (surname rooted in glory/fame), who’s now involved in politics, very rich, and very unhappy with articles by journalist Anton Pyatyi (surname meaning “fifth,” which reminds of “the fifth column”) that have forced Slavin to recall his family from Europe (oh, the shame!). And so Slavin hires Kalo and Lev to hound Pyatyi.

Though Filipenko includes scenes of Slavin’s family members—his son Sasha, who’s a soccer player who happens to be gay, is most memorable—and Pyatyi’s family life, the bulk of the novel covers the hounding itself. I’m not sure if page count would back that up but, for this reader at any rate, most of the novel’s suspense and emotion certainly lie there, as Kalo and Lev gradually ratchet up the pressure on Pyatyi, his wife, and their baby daughter. Sleep deprivation and noise are key early on but Pyatyi doesn’t give, so things inevitably move along to illicit sex.

Lots of Hounding feels familiar, almost as if it might have come from newspaper articles (troll farms, anyone?) and I wondered if Filipenko added in italicized musical terms and explanations that liken the novel to a sonata to try to make it feel artsier. Toward the beginning, for example, there’s a mention that the “hounding” motif will appear in a certain part of the melody. Though the musical notes (oops, sorry for the pun!) added a somewhat irritating instructional quality to the novel while also almost lending the feel of tragic operatic inevitability, I have to admit I didn’t pay much attention, perhaps partly because I found Filipenko’s inclusion of song lyrics from, for example, Zemfira and Nike Borzov far more convincing. In any event, they fell by my mental wayside as I turned pages because of the plot, particularly in the first half, where Lev’s personal resentment builds as public life falls apart after the default. And then there’s poor Pyatyi, who just plain wants to get some sleep.

Above the individual characters’ problems there hangs a roiling dark cloud of accursed questions about truth, media, politics, patriotism, money, access, message, privilege, nastiness, and, yes, hounding. Questions that seem to be popping up everywhere. Though the defined setting and characters in Hounding are uniquely Russian, the themes that underlie them feel depressingly universal, common, and even perhaps Propp-like. I would be thoroughly derelict in my duties if I didn’t mention that Filipenko includes numerous very funny jabs, like Mrs. Slavina founding a foundation to help the victims of plastic surgery or Sasha Slavin mentioning an over-dependence on intonation and diminutives in contemporary Russian. Though I might have appreciated slightly more psychological development of secondary characters—that despite having been informed from the very, very beginning that I was about to read chamber music—I couldn’t put this suspenseful, chatty book down.

Up Next: Booker Prize finalists, to be announced on Wednesday. Moscow trip report. American Literary Translators Association conference trip report. Alexander Snegirev’s Vera/Faith and Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Timosha’s Prose.

Disclaimers: I received an electronic copy of the book from Big Book but read it in print form.

Big Book Four: Ulitskaya’s Yakov’s Ladder

Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Лестница Якова (Yakov’s Ladder or Jacob’s Ladder, though I’ll use Ulitskaya’s agent’s title with “Yakov”) is a family saga of sorts, a novel that solidly covers four generations, with mentions of two others. One is younger and the other is older than the core four. Ulitskaya varies her form—sometimes writing almost story-like episodes about characters, sometimes including letters from her personal family archive—as she jumps back and forth in time, too, stretching from 1907 to 2011. To Ulitskaya’s great credit, she manages to structure the book so it feels like a novel and reinforces one of the book’s recurring themes: the difficulties that separations create for the family in all generations.

The book starts off promisingly, presenting four generations at once: Nora Osetskaya is introduced as the mother of an infant son, Yurik. She soon takes a call from her father, Genrikh, who’s calling to say that his mother, Marusya, has died. When Nora goes to her grandmother’s apartment, she takes a chest of family letters. (This small chest turns out to contain more than letters: there are also bedbugs that bite Nora during that first night. This earned three exclamation marks in the margin.)

There’s far too much plot in this book of more than 700 pages to write anything that resembles a meaningful plot summary but, for this reader, it’s the separations that unify the novel most successfully, thanks to how Ulitskaya incorporates the personal (e.g. the letters) and the historical and political. I should note that the Elkost literary agency’s Web site sums up the book’s examination of freedom very concisely. ***I will now include mild spoilers. The book will be published in English by FSG.*** Marusya and Yakov meet at a Rachmaninov concert—theater, dance, and music twist into a thick, thick thread in the book—and quickly become a couple, though they are separated almost as quickly when Marusya leaves Kiev for Moscow to study dance. I found their generation the most compelling in the book, perhaps because of Yakov’s combination of optimism that his relationship with Marusya can survive multiple terms of exile and the occasionally cranky (rightfully so, really) honesty he expresses in his letters. At one point he writes, “И теперь каждому ясно, кто разрушил мою семью. И таких, как мы, я вижу вокруг себя тысячи.” (Literally: “And it’s now clear to anyone who destroyed my family. And I see thousands like us around me.”) The book contains chunks of Ulitskaya’s grandfather’s personal letters and KGB file. Yakov was, for me, the most fully formed character in the novel, with his study of music, ability to find work wherever he lands, and attempts to hold his family together.

Nora, Yakov’s granddaughter, born in 1943, also gets a fair bit of attention, though I think her chapters lack the spark of Yakov’s. Nora marries her unusual high school boyfriend, Viktor, though they never live together and she has a closer—I’m thinking soulful here, not location, since they often go for months, even years, without any contact—relationship with Tengiz, a Georgian theater colleague she collaborates with. Yurik, too, gets plenty of ink, and he’s perhaps most notable for love of his music, where the Beatles (of course!) play a big role, along with the gift of a guitar from Tengiz. Yurik ends up in New York for part of the book, where Ulitskaya’s writing about his bohemian nineties life leans toward the essayistic and encyclopedic. She includes many details of the time and place, rather than focusing on character development that might have given me more basis for understanding Yurik’s heroin addiction.

All in all, Yakov’s Ladder certainly isn’t my favorite Ulitskaya novel—I think I’ll always prefer her Daniel Stein (previous post) and Sincerely Yours, Shurik—and she hits on many of my personal “please don’t” biases by using a fractured form (less successfully, I think, than in Daniel Stein, where she really made it work, but still effectively enough), including a real-life minor character (Solomon Mikhoels, who is a thoroughly interesting figure but…), and, as I mentioned above, background that felt superfluous. Despite all that—and its 700-plus-page physical heft—Yakov’s Ladder managed to hold my interest enough for me to finish the novel: nothing in the book felt especially new to me but I suspect it’s the familiarity of Ulitskaya’s settings, characters, and conclusions about the legacy of the past that make her books feel so easy—“easy” for me here means to comfortable to read despite some uncomfortable subject matter—to read. It’s no wonder the print run listed in my copy of Yakov’s Ladder is 100,000 copies and a translation is on the way.

Up next: Moscow trip report. Alexander Snegirev’s Faith/Vera and Oleg Zaionchkovsksky’s Timosha’s Prose: I think I’m going to write about these two in one post since there were odd similarities between them… And Sasha Filipenko’s Травля (Persecution, maybe? I’m still undecided), which is (about a quarter in) painful enjoyment, painful because of the characters’ difficulties but enjoyable because it’s strangely suspenseful and pretty lively. Unless it implodes, I suspect I’ll rate it fairly high on my Big Book ballot.

Disclaimers: The usual. I received electronic copies of the book from Ulitskaya’s literary agency, Elkost, whom I’ve known for some years now, and from the Big Book Award, where I’m a member of the jury. But I read the book in a printed edition.

Big Book Three: “The Usual?” and the Unusual in Maria Galina’s Mysterious Autochthons

I have a feeling this may be one of my least informative, least conclusive, and most rambling blog posts ever: I haven’t been kidding when I’ve used the word “mysterious” to describe Maria Galina’s Автохтоны (part one/part two)(Autochthons), a book that was shortlisted for this year’s National Bestseller Award and Big Book Award. Pronouncing the English-language title—which looks mysterious, at least to me—turns out to be easy enough, and I’ve now come to think of the word as meaning “the locals,” in the sense of extraordinarily peculiar long-term, indigenous locals. I have no earthly idea how I can possibly describe the novel after presenting something of a plot summary below. At least I’m not alone: Elena Vasileva, for example, writing on Prochtenie.ru, says the characters’ many unreliable accounts of events can cause schizophrenia (or suspicions of such) among readers.

And so, a bare plot summary. Galina sets Autochthons in an unnamed city on the brink of Europe (reader consensus seems to be that it sounds a lot like Lviv), where an unnamed out-of-town visitor claiming to be a freelancer for the theater journal Teatr settles in at a hostel and gets to work, for an unnamed reason that is revealed later, on research into some local—and very obscure—theater history from the 1920s by interviewing a slew of local experts (ha). Among the juicy and dry details, there’s talk of death on the stage, of philosophy, of one of anonymous man’s interlocutors resembling Yuri Lotman, and even of the use Spanish fly. Or maybe not.

Though I wasn’t quite self-diagnosing schizophrenia, all the details and stories that anonymous man uncovers did make me wonder what was happening to my head: Was my memory failing? Was I just confused? Was I reading too much at a time? Too little? Or was I so caught up in the quirky and oddly, charmingly eerie atmosphere and characters of Autochthons that I was zipping through the more serious and, really, more technical material? I suspect the latter but don’t regret, at all, having reading that way. Even little details like the breakfast spot where the waitress always asks “the usual?” («Как всегда?»)—because that establishes both a past and a future—feel at least as important as anonymous man’s formal research. There are clearly patterns here and the city’s legends (urban legends?) are said to include a little sex, fear, violence, and morality, plus a sad ending. Of course everything ends up blending anyway.

Meanwhile, Galina plays with a pile of cultural references, Russian and otherwise. Every person is said to hide the maniac within and when our unnamed hero confronts someone who’s following him in a wax museum, he steps out from behind a Dracula figure. Jack the Ripper’s there, too, and no, of course, this is not the only mention of vampires. Other variations on the human, hmm, condition and form appear, too, perhaps most notably in someone who purports to be a sylph… he asks unnamed man if he’s ever seen Angel Heart, which shows the hazards of pursuing oneself. I haven’t even mentioned world history, meaning the non-theater part, (then again, all the world’s a stage, right?), which also comes up plenty, perhaps most memorably when one character is accused of having been a Nazi collaborator. In any case, Galina twists and blends detective and fantasy genres with local myth plus a figure who comes to a new place as a seemingly clean slate but turns out to be nothing of the sort.

I mentioned in my “up next” sections of previous posts that Autochthons made me think a lot about my own reading habits. For one thing, this is yet another novel complex and puzzling enough that I’d need to reread to understand because I focused so much on one layer in my first reading. I’m not alone here, either: in her Meduza.io review, critic Galina Yuzefovich also mentions the need for a second, slower reading. I always find it difficult to get to know lots of characters at once, particularly when they’re offering up so much unreliable information; Autochthons is certainly appealing enough to read again.

My second “thing” is odder: I most enjoyed reading Autochthons in the dark, with a new book light. (Side note: it’s the Mighty Bright Recharge, which I love and which is worth the extra money for its dimmer, discrete light, very flexible neck, and easy (re)charging.) It didn’t even feel right to read Autochthons using regular lamp light. Somehow, sitting in the dark with a small pool of light from the Recharge illuminating only two pages of the book felt just right for a novel as slyly occult and metaphysical—not to mention slyly humorous—as Autochthons.

August is Women in Translation Month so I also want to note that Maria Galina’s novel Гиви и Шендерович was translated by Amanda Love Darragh, as Iramifications. Amanda won the 2009 Rossica Prize for the translation.

Up Next: Ludmila Ulitskaya’s family saga Jacob’s Ladder, which I’ve almost finished and will move up since Ulitskaya is another woman who’s been translated. Then Alexander Snegirev’s Vera, which has been waiting so patiently…

Disclaimers: The usual. I’ve translated excerpts from some of Maria Galina’s novels, including her Mole Crickets, which I enjoyed very much four years ago.

Big Book Two: Vodolazkin’s Soaring Aviator

Eugene Vodolazkin’s Авиатор (The Aviator) is the first of this year’s Big Book finalists that I read: though I’d sworn I’d wait to read The Aviator when I could get it in print, I happily accepted the final text of the book from Vodolazkin and read a short passage on my reader each evening. It made for particularly nice spring reading. Though I always prefer print reading over electronic, I have to admit that limiting myself to short sections (to avoid the eye and attention strain I seem to get when reading electronically) was a good way to both extend my enjoyment of the novel and to consider, over time, the ways Vodolazkin develops his story and main character, Innokentii Platonov. I’m sure I would have loved a good binge-read, too, but it wouldn’t have done justice to this meditative (I think that’s the word I’m looking for) novel.

I’m afraid this post won’t do the novel much justice, either. That’s not just because I loved The Aviator so much in ways that I can’t explain, other than by saying that some books just seem to go right to the head and/or the heart, a phenomenon I think most of you understand. Nor do I want to gush. Beyond all that, I’m going very light on details in this post because one of the reasons I enjoyed The Aviator so much is that Vodolazkin didn’t tell me much at all about the novel: I began reading with only one bit of background (which spoiled nothing whatsoever but that I won’t mention because I don’t have context) and I had no expectations whatsoever about plot, character, or anything else. If I’d known more, I wouldn’t have gasped, audibly, when I found out what caused Platonov’s rather unique condition.

On an analytical, big-picture level, I was pleased to see how nicely The Aviator dovetails with Vodolazkin’s Laurus (previous post) and Solovyov and Larionov (brief summary on a previous post), both of which I’ve already translated. What I’d previously called a diptych now feels like a solid triptych. Each book examines—from very different angles—history, events, and time, which has a tendency to spiral in Vodolazkin’s novels. Since I’m translating The Aviator now, it’s easy to remember what details come very early in the book so I don’t spoil anything. Or at least very much. And so, a few things…

The Aviator is written in journal form, beginning with an undated entry by a man who’s quickly identified as Innokentii Petrovich Platonov. He appears to be a hospital patient with amnesia. His doctor, a man named Geiger (whose nose hairs Platonov sees on the third page), suggests the journal as a method for resurrecting his memory. As the days pass, Platonov begins remembering bits of his past and his personal story: he’s fairly quick to remember he’s the same age as his century, which can quickly be identified as the twentieth. And his location quickly sets the book in St. Petersburg, something that feels wholly organic. That’s not just because of mentions of landmarks or of street names that evoke the past, but because there’s a whiff of that old Gogolian feeling (since Gogol’s not mentioned in the novel, perhaps this is ingrained in my thinking? or even somehow idiopathic?) that unusual things can and most likely will happen there. The novel also incorporates Petersburg poet Alexander Blok’s “The Aviator” (here in Russian and here in English).

Vodolazkin works in elements from many genres, including love story and murder mystery, touches of science fiction and history, as well as coming of age, plus the bonus of references to Robinson Crusoe, which I realized I’ve somehow never read (!). There’s a little bit of everything, but all that everything flows together (everything matters here) very, very smoothly, gathering speed as time, history, events, and people, too, in their way, spiral. Of course there’s humor (I can’t imagine Vodolazkin writing without humor) and an almost improbably suspenseful ending. Most of all, though, from the perspective of a translator spiraling through a first draft of The Aviator—each draft and (re)reading of a book and its translation has the feel of spiraling history for me, too—I’m enjoying the book as a portrait of how a person grows and develops, more than once.

Though I have dozens and dozens of electronic notations on my PDF that mark time stamps, telling dreams, bits of history, and curious details about Platonov’s neighbors, not to mention incidences of flying, I’m keeping those to myself, with the hope that you’ll read the book, too, either now in Russian or later, when translations begin coming out. That said, if you’d like more details about The Aviator, visit the Banke, Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency’s page about the novel here; the book’s cover art, by Mikhail Shemyakin, also offers insight into what happens in the book.

Up next: Alexander Snegirev’s Vera and Maria Galina’s ever-mysterious Autochthons, both of which force me to look at my own reading habits and book preferences from new angles, and Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Jacob’s Ladder, a family saga that reads along easily.

Disclaimers: The usual. I am translating The Aviator for Oneworld Publications.

Big Book One: Stormy Weather in Ivanov’s Nenast’e

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.

2016 Big Book Finalists: Lizok’s Summer Reading Plan

Today the Big Book Award announced eleven finalists for its 2016 season. Here’s the list, in Russian alphabetical order, by author surname, followed by a bit of commentary:

• Pyotr Aleshkovsky’s Крепость (The Citadel), which I bought after reading the beginning of the PDF that Aleshkovsky’s literary agency sent me: archaeology and medieval constructions caught me.
• Evgeny (Eugene) Vodolazkin’s Авиатор (The Aviator), which I read recently and loved for its blend of genres, epochs, and themes, some familiar from Laurus and Solovyov and Larionov. I’m translating this book and enjoying it all over again as I see, up-close, how the book works.
• Maria Galina’s Автохтоны (part 1) (part 2) (Autochthons, I guess), which is, I can now confirm, a Galina-esque combination of phantasmagoria, magical realism (though hmm?), history, and a regular-guy (anonymous) hero. I finished Autochthons yesterday and still wonder what I read—not, apparently, an unusual reaction—because the book is (usually) cozily disorienting.
• Vladimir Dinets’s Песни драконов (Dragon Songs) is, according to the full title, about love and adventures in the world of crocodiles and other relatives of dinosaurs. Dinets, who lives in the US, writes in Russian and English, and an English version of the book already exists: Publishers Weekly loved it. This could be a fun surprise. For online animal pictures, check Dinets’s blog.
• Aleksei Ivanov’s Ненастье (Nasty Weather, this title is a toponym, too, so I’m going to rethink it) is about an Afghan War veteran who robs an armored car, betraying his comrades. I enjoyed Ivanov’s Geographer (previous post) and this one, which I began last night, is off to a good start.
• Alexander Ilichevsky’s Справа налево (From Right to Left) contains essays.
• Anna Matveeva’s Завидное чувство Веры Стениной (Vera Stenina’s Envy; the Russian title is closer to Vera Stenina’s Enviable Sense but that is, indeed, tough to sort...) is a novel about two women and their relationship, which, yes, has strong elements of envy.
• Sergei Soloukh’s Рассказы о животных (Stories About Animals) is, contrary to the title, a novel about human beings, concerning a former academic who’s now working in a business. (brief interview + excerpt)
• Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Лестница Якова (Jacob’s Ladder) is a family saga set during 1911-2011; I read the beginning after Ulitskaya’s agent sent me the text. This one’s already on the shelf.
• Sasha Filipenko’s Травля (Persecution, perhaps?) sounds as indescribable as Galina’s book: I find mentions of youth, irony, cynicism, and this time we live in.
• Leonid Yuzefovich’s Зимняя дорога, (The Winter Road) is described as a “documentary novel”: the cover sums up the details with “General A.N. Pepeliaev and anarchist I.Ia. Strod in Yakutia. 1922-1923.” I’ve been reading small chunks of The Winter Road each night and thoroughly enjoying Yuzefovich’s absorbing, masterful characterizations of people and a time. He works wonders with archival material.

As for commentary, there were a few books I was especially sorry didn’t make the list… Vasily Avchenko’s Кристалл в прозрачной оправе (excerpt) (Crystal in a Transparent Frame), with its ocean theme, and Dmitry Danilov’s Есть вещи поважнее футбола (There Are Things A Little More Important Than Football/Soccer) are at the top of my list. Our cats were rooting for Aleksandr Arkhangelsky’s Правило муравчика. Сказка про бога, котов и собак (excerpt) (The Rule of the Purrer/The Right Cat Rule. A Tale About God, Cats, and Dogs), which I’ll have to read if only to figure out what to do with the title. Based on some good reviews, I was a little surprised Sergei Kuznetsov’s Калейдоскоп (excerpt) (Kaleidoscope) didn’t make it, though wonder if the combination of dozens of characters and their stories (including, apparently, sex and vampires, which I wouldn’t think would put people off!) might have, nevertheless, put off the experts. Sasha Okun’s Камов и Каминка (Kamov and Kaminka), which purports to involve art and a detective story, looks so appealing that I may have to read it sooner rather than later. And, finally, as I mentioned in a quick note to Klarisa Pul’son, who wrote this prediction of the finalist list, I was surprised that crocodiles knocked poets out of contention for this year’s award: I was expecting either Zakhar Prilepin’s book on Anatoly Mariengof, Boris Kornilov, and Vladimir Lugovskoi, or Dmitrii Bykov’s book on Vladimir Mayakovsky to make the short list. I thought Klarisa did pretty well by (correctly) predicting six out of eleven books that made the shortlist: even without having read all the books on the long list, I was nearly certain Yuzefovich, Ulitskaya, Ivanov, and Vodolazkin would be finalists; I would have put Aleshkovsky, Avchenko, and Kuznetsov at the top of my “probably” list.

I’ll start posting about finalists soon since I’ve already finished two. All in all, this list looks far more to my taste than last year’s—with some old favorites plus some new names and species—so I’m very much looking forward to reading the finalists as well as the books from the long list that are already on the shelf.

Disclaimers: I’m a member of the Big Book’s jury, the Literary Academy, and will vote on finalists later this year. Authors and literary agents have given me electronic copies of several of these books. I am translating one of the finalists.

Up Next: The National Bestseller Award winner. Then three books, all difficult to write about: Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, which truly does soar, Alexander Snegirev’s Vera, which I do think I’ll call Faith, and Maria Galina’s Autochthons. I’m now reading Aleksei Ivanov’s book, which I’m thinking of as Nasty Weather for now, because of the sound play.

The 2016 Big Book Award Long List

The Big Book Award announced its long list on Wednesday and, yes, I was delusional in thinking I’d blog about it during the week: the most I accomplished before the weekend was placing orders for a few of the books! The list of finalists will be announced by the end of May. Here are some of the books on the long list, in alphabetical order within my categories:

Books I’ve already read:

• Yuri Buida’s Цейлон (Ceylon) (previous post), which combines the personal and the historical in a fairly balanced, disciplined novel about a family.
• Evgeny (Eugene) Vodolazkin’s Авиатор (The Aviator), which I finished the other night and loved for its blend of genres, epochs, and themes, some familiar from Laurus and Solovyov and Larionov.

Books already on the shelf or on order; I’ve read other books by all but one of these authors:

• Vasily Avchenko’s Кристалл в прозрачной оправе (excerpt) (Crystal in a Transparent Frame), which describes itself as “stories about water and rocks” and focuses on Vladivostok. Shortlisted for last year’s NatsBest; quite possibly destined for beach reading, given the coastal theme.
• Pyotr Aleshkovsky’s Крепость The Citadel, which I bought after reading the beginning of the PDF that Aleshkovsky’s literary agency sent me: archaeology and medieval constructions caught me.
• Aleksandr Arkhangelsky’s Правило муравчика. Сказка про бога, котов и собак (excerpt) (The Purrer Rule. A Tale About God, Cats, and Dogs (a terribly troublesome title, thanks to the word I’ve rendered here, for now, as “purrer,” which Arkhangelsky says plays on the Russian term for the right-hand rule, which I didn’t know existed in either language, and “mur,” which is purr.)), which I’m a little skeptical about because I don’t often do well with fables and parables. But Arkhangelsky clearly knows cats.
• Maria Galina’s Автохтоны (part 1) (part 2) (Autochthons, I guess), which sounds like a Galina-esque combination of phantasmagoria, magical realism, history, and a regular-guy hero.
• Dmitry Danilov’s Есть вещи поважнее футбола (There Are Things A Little More Important Than Football/Soccer), which I bet I can read now that I have new glasses! Danilov is one of the only authors I’d trust to keep me reading a book about soccer. (This is already shaping up to be quite a season: ocean, cats, soccer…)
• Aleksei Ivanov’s Ненастье (Foul Weather), which is apparently about an Afghan War veteran who robs an armored car. I enjoyed Ivanov’s Geographer (previous post) and a couple of my Goodreads friends seemed to love this book… (I hope I do, too, since it’s 638 pages!)
• Igor Savyelev’s Вверх на малиновом козле (Upwards, in a Puce Vehicle; the cover illustrates this pretty nicely and you can see the vehicle is a Jeep-like vehicle, one that has all sorts of slangy nicknames, like the goat in the title), involving a young lawyer going to Abkhazia for his wedding. I’ve enjoyed reading Savelyev in the past and, well, another wedding novel set in the Caucasus sounds natural after reading Alisa Ganieva’s Bride and Groom (previous post).
• Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Лестница Якова (Jacob’s Ladder), a family saga set during 1911-2011; I read the beginning after Ulitskaya’s agent sent me the text.
• Leonid Yuzefovich’s Зимняя дорога, (The Winter Road), which is described as a “documentary novel”: the cover sums up the details with “General A.N. Pepeliaev and anarchist I.Ia. Strod in Yakutia. 1922-1923.”

Here are some others that sound especially interesting for various reasons:

• Sergei Kuznetsov’s Калейдоскоп (excerpt) (Kaleidoscope), dozens of characters and their stories, set in the twentieth century; one of my Goodreads friends just started it and said she was enjoying it, noting sex and vampires.
• Boris Minaev’s Мягкая ткань (Soft Fabric; these links only lead to the first book, Batiste, within what must be a planned multiple-volume novel/series…), which I know nothing about other than that it’s set around the beginning of World War 1 and a friend (real-life, this time) absolutely loved it.
• Sasha Okun’s Камов и Каминка (Kamov and Kaminka), which purports to involve art and a detective story; titled for two artists.
• Valerii Khazin’s Прямой эфир (Live Broadcast) is intriguing because the cover makes it look like a romance novel and the description says it’s a detective/adventure novel about a man running from terrorists… but Alexander Gritsman, writing for Interpoezia, focuses largely on its poetic aspects. (I admit I made a very superficial skim of his piece: I don’t want to spoil the book for myself with details.)
• There are also several books about writers that I’ll list without titles: Aleksei Varlamov on Vasily Shukshin; Zakhar Prilepin on Anatoly Mariengof, Boris Kornilov, and Vladimir Lugovskoi; and Dmitrii Bykov on Vladimir Mayakovsky (submitted as a manuscript and listed as such on the Big Book site).

I could go on and on (and on) about the other half of the list but will stop there pending announcement of the finalists next month.

Disclaimers: I’m a member of the Big Book’s jury, the Literary Academy, and will vote on finalists later this year. Authors and literary agents have given me electronic copies of several of these books.

Up Next: The National Bestseller Award’s short list. Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, which truly does soar. Alexander Snegirev’s Vera, which I may yet call Faith. Translations coming out in 2016—send in those entries!