Yuzefovich Wins Third Big Book Award with The Philhellene

The list of this year’s Big Book Award winners feel like a relief after the strangeness of last year’s results: this year I can understand why each and every one of the winners, in both the jury and public voting, won an award. I’m happiest for Leonid Yuzefovich, who won the top jury award for his third time – he previously won in 2009 and 2016 – for his Филлэлин (The Philhellene). I hope to post about The Philhellene moderately soon (January; I’m way behind on my posts) but for now, here’s my previous description: This novel’s characters converse through journals, letters, and mental conversations. Yuzefovich’s own back-cover description refers to the novel as being closer to “variations on historical themes than a traditional historical novel.”

Second prize went to Maya Kucherskaya’s Лесков. Прозеванный гений (Leskov. The Missed/Overlooked Genius), an extraordinarily detailed biography that’s not the sort of book I’d be likely to sit down and read straight through. It’s something even better, though, a resource. And so Kucherskaya (in book, of course, rather than in person) and I are going to read Leskov together as a winter reading project; I’ve already marked passages. Languagehat will join us, too, since he’s read and written about Leskov. Finally, Viktor Remizov won third prize for his Вечная мерзлота (Permafrost), which I’m very sorry to say did leave me cold, despite my love of historical novels and harsh climates. That said, yes, I understand readers’ appreciation for the novel and its exploration of Stalin-era themes. I may try it again in another year or two since I feel as if translating Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha may have skewed my perceptions of fiction about Siberian exile during the Stalin era.

Reader’s choice awards went to Narine Abgaryan for Симон (Simon), Alexei Polyarinov for Риф (The Reef), and Marina Stepnova for Сад (The Garden). I find it interesting that the jury and public reader winners are so different this year: Polyarinov’s book, for example, came in last in the tally of jury votes, which you can find online here. Most interesting in the jury voting tally: there was only a two-point difference between the top two books by Yuzefovich and Kucherskaya.

I think that covers everything on this dank, dreary December day!

Up Next: A post about recent reading involving orphans, orphanages, and alienation; Dmitry Danilov’s new novel, which I loved; and an end-of-year post with a list of (at least some of!) this year’s new translations.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: I’m a member of the Literary Academy, the Big Book’s large jury, and have translated or spent time with many of this year’s Big Book finalist authors. I’ve translated excerpts from two of this year’s finalists: Stepnova’s The Garden and Vodolazkin’s History of Island, which I’ll translate in full.

Lizok’s Summer Reading Plan: The 2021 Big Book Shortlist

On Wednesday the Big Book Award announced a list of thirteen finalists for the 2021 prize. I’ve read very little from this year’s longlist thus far so can’t decide if I’m surprised that some authors (Vera Bogdanova, for example) didn’t make the list, though I know I’m a little disappointed Bogdanova’s novel – as well as, for various reasons, books by Sergei Nosov, Pavel Krusanov, and Irina Bogatyreva – wasn’t on it. Lots of familiar, perennial nominees and “usual suspects” were left out, too: Ilya Boyashov, Shamil Idiatullin, Zakhar Prilepin, Andrei Rubanov, Sergei Samsonov, and Roman Senchin among them. And Alexander Pelevin’s Pokrov-17, which recently won the National Bestseller Award, isn’t a Big Book finalist either. I’m reading Pokrov-17 now and enjoying it for its suspense and weirdness but haven’t yet read enough to go on record saying more than that.

In any case, the good news is that this year’s books look far more promising than last year’s, though (as my husband likes to say) that sets the bar pretty low. I’m sure some of my positive feelings about the 2021 list involve my familiarity with some of the authors: I’ve translated three of them and know four more. I’ve read and enjoyed (or at least finished!) books by others. And those I haven’t read generally sound interesting. Unfortunately, my biggest regret about the list is that (here I go again!) only four of the thirteen books were written by women, though (as always), I don’t know much about the overall pool of Big Book nominees. I’m happiest because I’m glad this list looks likely to keep me reading.

And so. Here’s the list, in Russian alphabetical order by author surname:

• In Narine Abgaryan’s Симон (Simon), a man’s death brings together his former loves, who tell their stories. I read a large chunk of Simon on my reader but am going to reread (and finish) the novel on paper. (I think I’m getting crankier and crankier about electronic reading! I really need to flip those pages.) 
• Dmitry Bavilsky’s Желание быть городом (The Desire to be a City?) describes itself in the book’s subtitle as “Итальянский травелог эпохи Твиттера в шести частях и тридцати пяти городах” – “A Twitter-era Italian travelogue, in six parts and thirty-five cities.” The publisher’s description uses the terms “documentary novel” and “autofiction.” I’m not much for travelogues but I do like, even relish, the thought of Bavilsky describing works of art he hasn’t seen.
• Yury Buida’s Сады Виверны (The Wyvern’s Gardens, I guess?) sounds difficult to summarize with its three countries and four temporal settings so I’m just going to focus on thinking about the word “wyvern” for now. And buy the book.
• Oksana Vasyakina’s Рана (The Wound) may well be the book on the list that intrigues me the most, with (apparently) an account of the narrator traveling with her mother’s ashes, bringing them to be buried. I read Polina Barskova’s introduction and the beginning of Vasyakina’s text on my reader but am going to order a print copy so I can fully appreciate Vasyakina’s writing.
• Evgeny Vodolazkin’s Оправдание Острова (The History of Island), which I loved on the first reading for its chronicle-like format (sometimes!) and stylization (varying!) and blend of timelines. It’s a very Vodolazkonian novel; he’s exceptionally skilled at writing about favorite themes from new angles that make his material fresh, relevant, and related to his others works without repeating them. I’m working on a short sample translation now and had a good laugh remembering how cats came to be.
• Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Кока (Koka) is a continuation (of sorts?) of The Devil’s Wheel (previous post), which I loved so very much about ten years ago. Two friend who’ve already read Koka enjoyed it. It’s in my reading cart and will probably be the book I choose after I finish Pokrov-17. Like The Devil’s Wheel it’s very long (720 pages) so should keep me busy!
• Andrei Dmitriev’s Этот берег (That Shore) apparently tells the story of a retired schoolteacher who’s been living in Russia then moves to Ukraine, where he finds a new life for himself.
• Maya Kucherskaya’s Лесков. Прозёванный гений (Leskov. The Missed Genius – I almost want to say something like “slept through” or “yawning” here to capture the sense of sleeping!) is a very big book (656 pages, 668 grams) about Nikolai Leskov. My life is embarrassingly under-Leskoved but, inspired by factors including Languagehat’s posts about Leskov and, subsequently, some personalized reading recommendations plus my own impressions after reading “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” back in my first youth, I’m looking forward to letting Kucherskaya, a kind person and a good reader, guide me to and through more Leskov.
• Vladimir Paperny’s Архив Шульца (Shults’s Archive) looks, hm, potentially interesting, if a bit overwhelming at first: a Russian émigré living in Los Angeles receives a package of materials that turn out to form a family archive. A blurb from Alexander Genis uses the word “мозаика” (mosaic), something I confirmed by paging through a PDF of the book. We’ll see how it goes!
• Alexei Polyarinov’s Риф (The Reef): I’ll leave the description to the publisher (here) and add that I’m looking forward to this one after finding Polyarinov’s Center of Gravity (previous post) fairly good.
• Viktor Remizov’s Вечная мерзлота (Permafrost) is another heavyweight, clocking in at 925 grams (over 800 pages of rather small type, yeow) with a story based on actual events, about prisoners laying a railroad line in Siberia during 1949-1953. I enjoyed Remizov’s Ashes and Dust back in 2014 (previous post) and praised Remizov’s storytelling so am looking forward to Permafrost, which comes highly praised by Maya Kucherskaya and Vasily Avchenko.
• I read a large chunk of Marina Stepnova’s Сад (The Garden) on my e-reader and found that it interested me far less for its nineteenth-century plot and characters (which, after translating two twentieth-century Stepnova books, made me feel a bit off-kilter) than for its stylized language. I had fun translating a sample. I’m going to buy a paper copy of The Garden since it’s another book that didn’t feel right to read electronically. (Have I mentioned that I don’t like e-reading?)
• Leonid Yuzefovich’s Филлэлин (The Philhellene) is a novel where characters converse through journals, letters, and mental conversations. Yuzefovich’s own back-cover description refers to the novel as being closer to “variations on historical themes than a traditional historical novel.” This is one of those books where I’ve purposely avoided learning too much before reading.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The Usual. I’ve translated excerpts from two of these books and entire books by three of the finalist authors. I know other authors on the list and have ties to some of the others through publishers and literary agents.

Up Next: Svetlana Kuznetsova’s The Anatomy of the Moon, which I’m translating and enjoying for the third time but still don’t know how to write about. Vodolazkin’s The History of Island, which I’m rereading the way it should be read – slowly; A. Pelevin’s Pokrov-17, and maybe Alexander Belyaev’s The Air Seller, quick reading that I started while waiting for Pokrov-17 to arrive…

Finding Consolation in Russian Literature

It’s been more than a month since I last wrote and I hope that this post finds you well, wherever you might be. Although I’ve known for weeks that I wanted to write about consolation – it was a thread in a talk that I gave at Bowdoin College in late February, even before Covid-19 had been documented in many states – I found it difficult to try to write when I was still trying to figure out how to adjust to

Cutting your own hair is fun!

this new reality. I’m more than happy to stay at home but the barrage of sad news is beyond unnerving (though I don’t loop and reloop it) and the logistics of day-to-day things like buying food and getting paid have changed a lot. I’m still figuring certain things out but chats with friends and colleagues, caring for cats, translation projects, cooking good meals with unusual combinations of available ingredients, and, of course, reading have all helped me find a new rhythm. There’s far too much bad news in the Big World, but I’m more than comfortable at home, love my work, and have even had some good news about two of my translations, as I mention below.

First off, though: Russian classics! Although I decided not to reread War and Peace this spring (I reread a large chunk of W&P a few years ago so it feels too soon), I’ve been enjoying reading about the book thanks to a virtual book club, led by Yiyun Li and hosted by A Public Space. There are many forms of consolation here, from the cycles of life Tolstoy describes in the book to the very fact that people are reading and discussing the novel online. It’s particularly nice and enlightening – as well as touching – to read so many thoughtful tweets (#tolstoytogether) about the characters and Tolstoy’s writing. I’ve been thinking about (re)reading other classics, perhaps Turgenev, though more likely Chekhov, whom I set aside just as I was getting going on My Life, which I’d intended to read before a university visit in mid-March. As Languagehat wrote in a recent post about Sologub’s The Petty Demon, “good writing is never depressing.” Although I’d been admiring and loving Chekhov’s writing – his ability to combine words feels like a miracle whenever I read him – I was feeling a bit too unfocused for subtlety (and, of course the trip was cancelled) so I switched to a detective novel. I’ll be finishing that tonight, though, and am feeling ready for something more complex again so may opt for restarting My Life. Or perhaps I’ll go for a long Sologub story from one of the collections on my shelf? Who knows what will strike me!

And then there’s contemporary Russian fiction, where I seem to gravitate toward translating books that somehow (if only toward the end) end up consoling and soothing. Vodolazkin’s Laurus (previous post), one of my all-time favorite books, certainly does all that, with its variation on the “life of a saint” genre, tracking a life that includes plague, doctoring, holyfooling, and, eventually, of course, death. And then there’s Vodolazkin’s The Aviator (previous post), where the main character focuses a lot on small details that help define a life and time; a brief passage on gargling particularly struck me. (Why do I find it so reassuring to think about the fact that people will always gargle?!)

Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha (previous post), where the title character’s life changes after she’s exiled to Siberia for being a kulak, also reassures. Living in a distant place with a harsh climate is anything but easy but (no spoilers here!) Zuleikha discovers a lot about herself. My first bit of good news is that Guzel, Zuleikha, and I were recently named finalists for the EBRD Literary Prize. I’m excited about being a finalist but also hope that the book will gain some new readers thanks to recognition through the prize: there’s certainly a strong element of isolation in the novel that might feel all the more relevant now. And then there’s my most recent translation, Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell from the Sky (previous post), which Asymptote named as a book club selection a few days ago. Asymptote’s announcement includes Josefina Massot’s wonderful review, which explains (far better than I could) why Three Applies is such perfect reading for this time and this strange form of isolation/quarantine so many of us now find ourselves in. I’ve been thinking back to a lot of favorite books (particularly War and Peace) during recent weeks but my translations become a part of me, internalized, during the many months I spend with them, making me all the more grateful to my authors for writing such beautifully soothing novels.

Here’s wishing everybody good health!

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual.

Up next: Alexei Polyarinov’s Center of Gravity, which is soothing in its own way, too.

August Is Women in Translation Month: Translations of Russian Women

Looking back at my Women in Translation Month post from 2014 was an interesting exercise. For one thing, the blogger known as Biblibio, who started Women in Translation Month back in 2014, now uses her real name, Meytal Radzinski. And she continues to read and write about tons of books (do visit her blog!) and has generated tremendous awareness of and reactions to gender-based disparities in translated literature. According to the Women in Translation site (there’s a site now!), only about 30% of new translations into English are of books written by women. This year’s list of Russian-to-English translations (here) is in that range.

That’s a downer of a datum, but I’m happy there are books—meaning books translated into English—already available or on the way from some of the authors I mentioned in my old post. I’m working on Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog (previous post) for the Russian Library/Columbia University Press and my translation of Marina Stepnova’s Безбожный переулок (Italian Lessons) (previous post) is in process, too, for World Editions. Meanwhile, Carol Apollonio’s translation of Alisa Ganieva’s Bride and Groom (previous post) is coming this year, from Deep Vellum, and Melanie Moore’s translation of Khemlin’s The Investigator (previous post) is already available from Glagoslav. I’m also at various stages with two other books, both for Oneworld, written by women that I didn’t mention in that post because I hadn’t yet read them: Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (previous post) will soon be edited and I’ll be starting on Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell from the Sky (previous post) later this year.

Since I’m one to accentuate the positive—while simultaneously trying to find ways to counter the negative—I want to highlight three of the books on this year’s translation list that are written by women and that (bias warning!) particularly interest me:

• Ksenia Buksha’s The Freedom Factory, translated by Anne Fisher (Phoneme Media). I’m embarrassingly long overdue to read this National Bestseller Award winner, which I’ve heard so many good things about over the years.
• Polina Dashkova’s Madness Treads Lightly, translated by Marian Schwartz (Amazon Crossing). I read lots of Dashkova’s detective novels, including this one, in the early 2000s, when I got myself back into Russian reading: her writing and characters are clear, and she always seems to address social and political issues, too. Quality genre fiction like Dashkova’s deserves to be translated. Publishers Weekly gave Madness, in Marian’s translation, a starred review.
• Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s City Folk and Country Folk, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov (Russian Library/Columbia University Press). It’s great to see a translation of a nineteenth-century novel written by a woman… and this one sounds like particular fun. I’m looking forward to it! This translation also received a star from Publishers Weekly.

This year’s disappointingly all-male Big Book shortlist (the list) made me vow to seek out female authors’ books that made 2017’s Big Book longlist or National Bestseller shortlist. (I’m sure there are plenty of books that will keep me reading far longer than, say, Pelevin’s Big Book finalist Methuselah’s Lamp, or The Last Battle of the Chekists and Masons.) I mentioned a few candidates in my Big Book shortlist post: Anna Starobinets’s Посмотри на него (Look at Him, maybe?), Anna Kozlova’s NatsBest-winning F20, and Elena Dolgopyat’s short stories. Other candidates, whose authors are completely new to me, include Olga Breininger’s There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and Viktoria Lebedeva’s Без труб и барабанов (Without Trumpets and Drums). I’ll be interested to see what hits other award lists later this year—more lists, from the Yasnaya Polyana, Booker, and NOS awards are on the way—and what other books might find their way into English in the coming years.

More literature by women will make its way into translation one poem at a time, one story at a time, one book at a time… so I’m just going to keep on reading. And translating. And recommending good books to publishers. Translator recommendations, after all, are how some of the translations mentioned in this post got signed in the first place. And I know there are more on the way.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: Vladimir Medvedev’s Заххок (Zahhok), which has taken over my reading: this polyphonic novel set in Tadzhikistan is ridiculously suspenseful and absorbing. And more Big Book reading: Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Mysterious Year and Shamil Idiatullin’s Brezhnev City.

A Busy (Yester)Day for Russian Literary Awards: 2016 Yasnaya Polyana Winners & NOSE Finalists

I’m a day late posting about the Yasnaya Polyana Award’s 2016 winners and the NOSE Award’s 2016 shortlist—I got so caught up working on last year’s Yasnaya Polyana winner, Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, that I forgot to write my post!

Yasnaya Polyana first: there’s a Russian summary with juror commentary here and Alexandra Guzeva’s English-language Russia Beyond the Headlines article on Yasnaya Polyana is very complete, too. Best of all, it means I can stop agonizing over how to translate a problematic winning title and expand on summaries of the books I haven’t read, too. So! The two co-winners—this is the first time a Yasnaya Polyana award has been shared—of the “XXI Century” award are Narine Abgaryan’s С неба упали три яблока (Three Apples Fell from the Sky), a novel I liked very much when I read it last summer (previous post), and Aleksandr Grigorenko’s Потерял слепой дуду (A Blind Man Lost his Flute). As I’d expected, Three Apples won reader voting, too. It’s the Grigorenko title that I wasn’t quite sure how to translate when I wrote my post about the shortlist: beyond the possibility of word play, the word “дуду” is “duduk” in English (Wikipedia offers lots of information about it) but this word for a wooden, double-reeded wind instrument feels a bit obscure to me. In any case, I loved Grigorenko’s Mebet (previous post) so am looking forward to reading the novella, as well as his Ilget, which I bought in September.

The winner of the “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” award is Marina Nefedova’s Лесник и его нимфа (The Woodsman and His Nymph; RBTH uses “forester”). I was very, very pleased that Vladimir Makanin won the “Modern Classic” prize for his 1984 novella Где сходилось небо с холмами (Where the Sky Meets the Hills): I’ve enjoyed several of Makanin’s early novels and stories (previous posts involving Makanin) and have long regarded him as a modern classic. Finally, Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind, which Apollinaria Avrutina translated into Russian, won the “Foreign Literature” award. Guzeva’s RBTH article notes that A Strangeness has a Russian basis: “[Avrutina] said that the whole novel is based on the epigraph for the second part of A Hero of Our Time by Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov: ‘Asians... once let them feast and drink their fill of boza at a wedding or a funeral, and out will come their knives.’” How about that!

Moving right along, to the NOSE Award… Finalists were announced at the Krasnoyarsk Book Culture Fair after public debates. The winner will be chosen on January 24, 2017.

• Eugene Vodolazkin’s Авиатор (The Aviator), which is already on the Big Book shortlist and which I’m already translating and loving all over again (previous post). I’m glad to see it made this list.
• Kirill Kobrin’s Шерлок Холмс и рождение современности. Деньги, девушки, денди Викторианской Эпохи (Sherlock Holmes and the Birth of Modernity. Money, Young Women, and Dandies of the Victorian Epoch) is nonfiction that the title and this excerpt explain.
• Sergei Kuznetsov’s Калейдоскоп (excerpt) (Kaleidoscope) involves dozens of characters and their stories, set in the twentieth century; one of my Goodreads friends noted sex and vampires. This one sounded interesting from the start but for some reason hearing it described—in a positive way, mind you—as “Pynchon lite” more than once in Moscow intrigues me all the more.
• Vladimir Martynov’s Книга Перемен (The Book of Changes) is described as more of a palimpsest than a book and as a sort of hypertext for hyperreading that uses zapping and fortune telling practices from The Book of Changes. I was an I Ching fan as a teenager but well, hmm.
• Aleksandra Petrova’s Аппендикс (excerpt) (The Appendix, in a metaphorical sense, it seems) is a novel about Rome. (A review)
• Boris Lego’s Сумеречные рассказы (Dusky Stories) is a collection of nineteen Russian gothic stories; a cover blurb calls it the scariest book of the year…
• Sergei Lebedev’s Люди августа (People of August, click through for synopsis and excerpt) is also on the 2016 Booker shortlist.

Disclaimers & Disclosures: The usual, plus translating that Vodolazkin book, having translated books by two YP jurors, the fact of support for my translation work from Prokhorov Foundation grants, having received the Abgaryan book from her literary agency and translating the very beginning of Three Apples.

Up Next: Trip reports (Moscow and Oakland), Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Timosha’s Prose and Alexander Snegirev’s patient Faith/Vera, books I’ve been reading in English, plus other Big Book finalists, though the second half of the Big Book list brings me little joy and much left unfinished…

2016 Yasnaya Polyana Award Shortlists

I was very sorry to have to leave Moscow before the jury for the Yasnaya Polyana Award announced its 2016 shortlists: six books in the “XXI Century” division and three books in the “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” division. Winners will be announced in late October. Without further ado—other than my usual caveat that many titles and book descriptions are problematic—here’s the list, in Russian alphabetical order by author:

Narine Abgaryan’s С неба упали три яблока (Three Apples Fell from the Sky), the only book on the list that I’ve read in its entirety (previous post). It’s a lovely book and I enjoyed translating excerpts.

Sukhbat Aflatuni’s Поклонение волхвов (Adoration of the Magi), about which I wrote, earlier: “[it] sounds like it captures a lot, from the familiar biblical story in the title to a family story that begins in the middle of the nineteenth century and concludes in the present, with plot lines that involve a secret society, exile, and a romance with the tsar. Aflatuni’s name keeps popping up on award lists.” Though Adoration sounds very good, I bought Aflatuni’s The Ant Tsar/King in Moscow instead, primarily because it came first, is shorter, and sounds a bit simpler, better for easing myself into Aflatuni’s world.

Aleksandr Grigorenko’s Потерял слепой дуду, is a novella with a title I’m not sure how to translate, particularly since a quick look at the text shows play with language. Jury member Vladislav Otroshenko is quoted on the YP site as being especially pleased the novella made the list; it was among the books and stories he recommended to me when I saw him in Moscow. I thoroughly enjoyed Grigorenko’s Mebet (previous post) and bought Ilget in Moscow; I hope this novella comes out in book form, too.

Boris Minaev’s Мягкая ткань (Soft Fabric), a two-book combo: Батист (part 1) (part 2) (Batiste) and Сукно (Broadcloth or something similar, a heavyish fabric, often woolen; textiles were never my forte even when I sewed a lot!). I heard about the first book from a friend who’d loved it months ago so I was very happy when the publisher, Vremya, gave me copies of the first two books. The fabric apparently refers to life’s fabric, and the books are set primarily in the early twentieth century.

Vladimir Eisner’s Гранатовый остров (Garnet Island is my guess, based on a reader review I found), a collection of long and short stories about life in the Russian north. I love northern stories (see above, Mebet) and do appreciate books with polar bears on the cover.

Leonid Yuzefovich’s Зимняя дорога (The Winter Road), which already won the 2016 National Bestseller Award and is already on the Big Book shortlist, too. It’s a very absorbing “documentary novel” whose cover says “General A.N. Pepeliaev and anarchist I.Ia. Strod in Yakutia. 1922-1923.” As I’ve said before, Yuzefovich works wonders with archival materials.

In the children’s literature division:

Marina Moskvina and Yulia Govorova’s Ты, главное, пиши о любви (Write about Love, That’s the Main Thing or thereabout, albeit with a “you” thrown in) is an epistolary novel written by a writing teacher (Moskvina) and her student (Govorova), who moves to Pushkinskie Gory to work in a zoo.

Marina Nefedova’s Лесник и его нимфа (The Woodsman and His Nymph) is apparently about 1980s Moscow hippies—one of whom is a Janis Joplin sort of figure—and choices between art and love.

Yulia Yakovleva’s Дети ворона (The Raven’s Children, though the “raven” referred to here isn’t a bird, it’s what’s often known in English as a Black Maria…) is set in 1938: two children are left without their parents and younger brother. It’s the first in a cycle of stories about Leningrad.

Disclaimers: I am still a bit sleepy and hope this post makes sense (and lacks weird mistakes!). Two of the Yasnaya Polyana Award’s jury members—Eugene Vodolazkin and Vladislav Otroshenko—are authors I’ve translated. Some of these books have come to me from publishers and literary agents; I’ve translated excerpts of Abgaryan’s book.

Up Next: Moscow trip report (including a record heavy homeward haul of books that includes books by Aflatuni, Grigorenko, and Minaev), Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Jacob’s Ladder, Alexander Snegirev’s Vera (Faith), and Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Timosha’s Prose.

Narine Abgaryan’s People Who Are Always With Me

Narine Abgaryan’s Люди, которые всегда со мной (People Who Are Always With Me) is the second book from a fun little “summer surprise” book package I received from Abgaryan’s literary agency, Banke, Goumen & Smirnova. If the first book, Three Apples Fell from the Sky, can be described as magical realism, it might just be possible to describe People as a form of realistic magic: though People contains few touches of magic in its plot, Abgaryan’s warmth in portraying everyday twentieth-century reality, such as it is, in Berd, Armenia, feels like a unique form of writerly magic.

Describing People requires a unique form of bloggerly magic that I don’t think I possess. Given my deficiency, I’ll look at certain aspects of the book that particularly struck me. Abgaryan jumps around in time, and between a close third-person narrator and a little girl, who’s known simply as Devochka, or the Little Girl. (There’s a reason for that; I won’t reveal it.) The novel is told episodically, and it opens (pretty much, more on this below) with the Little Girl and her mother making a trip to a somewhat scary neighbor’s to buy milk. I love the Little Girl’s voice, talking about kasha she thinks tastes disgusting, a cow named Marishka, and how adults are pretty smart but really should haven’t dreamt up that disgusting mannaya kasha, the stuff I grew up calling Cream of Wheat. I loved Cream of Wheat as a child and I love the day-to-day details in People: there’s also a milk mustache, outhouse humor, and family photos. And differences in the smells of old and new buildings…

Maybe I read too much when I was hungry but I came away with particularly vivid pictures of family meals and foods: among other treats, there’s spiced dried meat known as basturma and dried sausage called sudzhuk, a scented bakery, and slices of potato with cheese, which, of course, made me craziest of all. More than anything, though, there’s family: mothers, fathers, siblings, aunts and uncles, aunties, grandparents, and friends who are so close they’re part of the family, too. All these people, of course, are who should remain with us—and, of course with the Little Girl—after their death. I have no idea how Abgaryan somehow manages to avoid sappiness when the Little Girl’s father tells her they will remain behind her, like wings. Somehow the word “lovely” fits the book doubly: not only does it contain beautiful accounts of daily life but it depicts love among family and friends.

People Who Are Always With Me covers multiple generations and Abgaryan includes historical references, some of which relate to the Armenian genocide and ongoing hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Though many of the details in those passages are very good—there’s a pogrom in Baku and suspenseful travel at a dangerous time—and the characters’ experiences feel organic to the story, for my taste, occasional lines felt a bit too expository, too nonfictionish, for the novel, particularly in the very beginning. That’s a very minor complaint, though, given episodes where, for example, a doctor explains his atheism or the Little Girl is said to be too little to grasp the flow of time because each instant is infinity and eternity for her. In many senses, that’s exactly what the book is about: retaining an element of childhood, the part of life when, as the Little Girl’s mother notes, “you love everybody and don’t hold grudges.” I don’t think it’s an accident that Abgaryan gave the Little Girl’s mother the name Vera, which means “faith.”

Disclaimers: The usual. And thank you to BGS for the Abgaryan books, which I truly enjoyed. I should also note that I translated an excerpt from Abgaryan’s Three Apples for BGS.

Up Next: More books. A roundup about the Big Book finalist list, including Boris Yekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e, which I finished but didn’t like very much (at all), and Anna Matveeva’s story collection Девять девяностых (Nine from the Nineties). I also somehow shoehorned in Sergei Nosov’s Curly Brackets, which was a decent travel companion but rather disappointing for a major award winner. And, of course, a trip report about the ALTA conference, which was tons of fun, as usual.

Munching on Abgaryan’s Three Apples

Narine Abgaryan’s С неба упали три яблока (Three Apples Fell from the Sky) was a perfect summer surprise: Abgaryan’s literary agency sent me the book, which quickly won me over with gentle humor, sadness and happiness surrounding births and deaths, and a remote setting in Maran, a village of (mostly!) elderly people in the Armenian mountains. Three Apples is both magical—with mentions of dreams and even a bolded reference to Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—and a bit gritty, thanks to accounts of day-to-day and historical hardships. Beyond all that, any book where characters live right over an abyss gets my attention.

Three Apples begins as Sevoyants Anatolia (we go last name first here) settles in to die a little after noon on a Friday; she’s bleeding heavily. Though Anatolia is so prepared to die that she’s readied clothes, she soon agrees to marry Vasily, a widower and blacksmith who brings her a new scythe, proposes marriage, and quickly moves in. This is all unexpected for Anatolia, a childless widow and former librarian who shelved books by color and loves French and Russian literature, with the notable exception of Tolstoy, whose Anna Karenina thoroughly disgusted her.

Abgaryan tells of the village’s residents through stories of famine—one little boy foresees deaths and the village later receives supplies, including a white peacock that ends up living right at that abyss—and of the plagues of flocks of rats, mice, and flies. The peacock, the dreams, the humor of yeast (much dissed in Maran after having being received from the outside world) thrown into the outhouse (never, ever throw yeast away like that!), and the magical happening that comes toward the end of the book are all wonderful in multiple senses of that word, both for comic relief and because, well, life is magical… but the everyday side of life’s magic, something that sounds pretty cheesy when described in those terms, works simply and beautifully in the book, and appealed to me even more.

I loved, for example, Anatolia and Vasily’s quiet lunch with their neighbors, where there’s little talk beyond asking for salt and clinking of cutlery: “Анатолия впервые ощутила жизнь не как данность, а как дар.” (“For the first time, Anatolia sensed/appreciated life not as a given but as a gift.”) And I loved that a young visitor (an in-law) to the family that lives by the abyss feels “размеренность бытия” (literally a measuredness of existence, a slow sort of rhythm or regularity to things) that comes to her from the nearby forest and the people. Passages like these sum up the book’s charm, particularly when life is busy for the reader: the measured routine of life in Maran, where, hmm, there doesn’t seem to be any Internet, and the quiet company of friends are what hold people together.

On the last page of the novel, there’s a mention of circles of life that resemble ripples from rain drops, where “…every event is a reflection of what came before…” I ripped that from the middle of very, very long sentence that ends with three apples waiting to be dropped to earth from the heavens, as is traditional at the end of Armenian fairytales: “одно тому, кто видел, другое тому, кто рассказал, а третье тому, кто слушал и верил в добро”—“one for the person who saw, another for the person who told the story, and the third for the person who listened and believed in what is good.” It’s a fitting end to a book with so much that is good—both universal and specific to Maran—that’s worth believing in.

Disclosures: The usual. Thank you to Banke, Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency for the book! I’ve heard a lot about Abgaryan’s “Manyuna” books for young adults and was glad to be introduced to her writing through Apples.

Up Next: Guzel’ Iakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, which I also enjoyed tremendously. Zuleikha is the first of the Big Book finalists that I’ll write about; I’ll also write a summary post about three Big Book finalists I just can’t bring myself to finish (!). And then another of Abgaryan’s books, People Who Are Always With Me, which is also very good, and a fifth Big Book finalist, Boris Ekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e.