It gives me no joy whatsoever to report that the first two
Big Book finalists I’m done with
weren’t very satisfying. It gives me even less joy to say that this pair left
me so indifferent that I couldn’t bring myself to finish either one. I read most of Aleksei Slapovsky’s Неизвестность,
which I guess I’ll continue calling Uncertainty,
but could only get to page 41 of Viktor Pelevin’s Лампа Мафусаила, или Крайняя битва чекистов с масонами (Methuselah’s
Lamp, or The Last Battle of the Chekists and Masons) before throwing in a frayed old
towel. I know it’s time to quit a book when I don’t want to sit down to read.
So. Slapovsky’s
Uncertainty
was a mixed experience; this is the book that bills itself as “
роман века,” which in this case means it’s a
novel covering the all-important century of 1917-2017. As I mentioned in my
Big
Book descriptions,
Uncertainty is
told through diaries, poetry, and other written materials, including a letter, a court’s death
sentence, and interview transcripts. The Russian word for “datafiction” has
been used to describe the genre; it’s not inappropriate.
My primary problem with Uncertainty
is its tremendous unevenness. The novel is a family saga of sorts—its
contributors from a family of Smirnovs span six (or so—I’ll admit I don’t want
to go back to count) generations over the course of a century—and the
contributors’ contributions vary tremendously in quality, length, and interest.
The first chunk, Nikolai Smirnov’s diary (1917-1937), looks at the period
immediately after the 1917 coup, examining political and personal (dis)loyalties
with varying levels of detail; Volga Germans, the Cheka, and Nikolai’s relationships
with women enter into the diary. There is also folk wisdom, such as a mention
that the primary fight isn’t between socialism and capitalism or various social
classes but between smart and foolish people.
I found the next chunk, a diary written by Vladimir
(1936-1941), the most interesting: Vladimir is a teenager who’s very taken with
Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel
Was Tempered and he addresses many of his entries to Pavka, its hero.
Vladimir faces difficulties from being critical in school, troubles with
girlfriends, and problems being taken into the armed forces. An eye chart thus makes
its way into his diary. So do Stalin’s famous words that a son doesn’t answer
for his father. The interview transcripts, recorded in 2016 by Anya Smirnova
with her grandmother, father, and mother, follow Vladimir’s diary… and this is
where the book began flailing for me. There’s some moderately lively and funny material—asides,
one-sided conversations because someone’s out of the recorder’s range—and some
contemporary material about teenage Anya’s friendship (or more?) with a
much-older man who’s not Russian. But the transcripts are often fluffy and contrived, so I
skimmed a bit to get to the grandmother, Ekaterina, who’s one of the book’s most
interesting characters: she discusses relationships, abortion, and the family
curse, which she says is wanting to please everybody in order to be praised. Toward
the end of the last tape, she orders vodka in a café. It’s an understatement to
say I think Uncertainty could have
benefited from more female perspectives. A fairly brief death sentence for
Anton, dated 1954-1962, follows the transcripts.
Skimming changed to skipping when I reached a bulky swath of
stories, otherwise unpublished, written by Viktor, an illustrator, dated 1965-2016.
I read a bit more than half and couldn’t go on: the stories describe childhood
and adulthood, and probably the most affecting involve Viktor’s alcoholism. Not
much in the stories felt original enough to keep me reading, though. The novel’s
final piece, a 2017 letter by Gleb Smirnov, addresses a familiar topic by
focusing largely on Gleb’s relationship with his girlfriend. In some senses it
brings the reader back to Nikolai’s diary: for very different reasons, neither
of them spells well.
Uncertainty is
unsatisfying not so much because it’s so fractured—Ludmila Ulitskaya’s
Jacob’s Ladder (
previous post) is fractured, too, reflecting fractured times and fractured families, and Ulitskaya
makes better use of form than does Slapovsky—but because, perhaps paradoxically,
there aren’t enough motifs to reinforce the family ties and breaks that connect
and disconnect the various generations, and, most crucially, keep the reader
engaged with the drama and tragedy of problems that face the Smirnovs over the century.
All that damage and brokenness may be the point here but—and this felt even worse—I
also constantly had the sense I wasn’t receiving any new information from the
book, that I was reading familiar, recycled material from other novels. It seems as if I read a mishmash of material that started off with some moderately interesting
stories about family and history… but then the book became so thoroughly dull
and muddled in the middle that I lost interest. I do wonder if Viktor’s stories
clarify anything about previous narrators, though I don’t wonder nearly enough to
go back and continue reading. There’s a lot of uncertainty about fates in
Uncertainty and the long section of
Viktor’s stories created a brutal break in momentum. (
Critic
Vladislav Tolstov called those stories “
графоманские тексты,” a graphomaniac’s texts; Tolstov’s final paragraph on
Uncertainty, which I read as I was
finalizing this post, beautifully sums up my thoughts on
the book.) Although I give Slapovsky credit for even attempting to
address Big Questions in Russian history,
Uncertainty’s
inability to hold my attention—I love reading about the human side of history
in fiction—is frustrating.
I suppose it’s something of a plus that I was done with Methuselah’s Lamp so quickly that I wasn’t bored for long. That reading followed my familiar Pelevin pattern: after
reading a not-so-satisfying book (Uncertainty),
Pelevin pulled me in with his narrator’s voice. But it didn’t take many pages for our
narrator Creampie’s tale to lose its oomph. The connection of Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Gold-Bug” with Creampie’s prattling about investments and gold didn’t seem
clever for long. That, combined with a near-death experience, signaled the beginning
of the end of my reading.
Disclaimers: I’m
a member of the Literary Academy, the Big Book Award’s jury, and received
electronic copies of all the Big Book finalists. You, too, can read most of the
Big Book finalists for free on Bookmate,
here: nine of the ten
finalists, all but Pelevin, are available and the Bookmate platform is easy to
use and synch between devices. I’m using it myself for a lot of my Big Book reading.
Up next: I’m
still chipping away at Gigolashvili’s Mysterious
Year, which looks brillianter and brillianter after these two books. I’m
also working on Andrei Rubanov’s The
Patriot, which captures a time and place even if it’s not my book. I’m most
enjoying Vladimir Medvedev’s Заххок (Zahhok), which I just started.
