Fun With Genres

I think I’ve mentioned many times that I love literary genres, from eighteenth-century Russian sentimentalism to socialist realism to all sorts of detective and science fiction/fantasy/weird novels. That’s not an exhaustive list; I’m open to any century, old or new. It’s not the labelling I’m enamored with: I love recognizing familiar patterns as I read and I love watching authors play with (perceived) genre norms in their books. I’m sure that’s why I sped through Boris Akunin’s first seven or eight Fandorin novels and why Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn is such a favorite. As are Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” and Pushkin’s Belkin Tales, too. How the Steel Was Tempered and Cement weren’t required socialist realism reading in college but I devoured them anyway. I could list dozens more books but will say instead that I started early, reading lots of science fiction and fantasy chapter books as a kid, and revisiting Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time over and over.

I never stopped reading detective novels or books with varying degrees of fantasy and/or science fiction elements – they’re wonderfully endemic in contemporary literature – but I’ve found myself gravitating to them more than usual during the pandemic. Genres particularly draw me because of their adherence (sometimes loose, sometimes close) to certain strictures, things like pacing standards, typical plot twists, and stock characters. Many of Vladimir Propp’s fairy tale elements apply to contemporary novels, too, and I see genres and archetypes as close, friendly cousins. As I mentioned above, I especially like reading books that blend and twist genre norms: these days, the combination of pattern recognition and unexpected mashups of familiar storylines, characters, and tropes feels more satisfying than ever. I’d even been planning a sort of genrefest for myself: the idea came when I ordered a small heap of socialist realism and fantasy novels. Then the books got set aside when some manuscripts and books for review floated in.

One of the first manuscripts was Eugene Vodolazkin’s Оправдание Острова (which I’ve seen called The History of Island), a fantastic (on all counts) blend of medieval chronicle and what, hm, I might call fantasy, given that certain characters live a very long time. Island tells historical and personal stories of strife, isolation (perfect for a pandemic!), and development. There are two timelines. One follows the chronicle and details centuries of Island history, the other is a more anecdotal and (ha) cinematic account from two centuries-old characters. I’ve long thought of Vodolazkin’s novels, which present spiralized time and wrinkled history, as a personal Vodolazkin genre: I’ve called his Solovyov and Larionov, Laurus, and The Aviator a triptych but have now officially expanded that to a quadriptych, thanks to Island. Island is delicate and detailed so not my ideal book to blog about after electronic reading. Although it’s easy to remember the basics, Island is the sort of book that inspires dozens of notes, exclamation marks (talking animals!), and smiling marginalia on paper I can flip through, to recall and revisit favorite spots. I do see an upside in this: I want/plan to reread Island in print so I can examine the novel’s multiple layers and themes before writing more about it.

Marina and Sergey Dyachenko’s Vita Nostra was in my genrefest pile of printed books, a good thing since I read it in lengthy binges. It’s a page-turner. I’ve seen Vita Nostra described as “urban fantasy” and that does sound about right. Beyond fantasy and the supernatural, though, there’s also a nice coming-of-age story as Sashka Samokhina finds her true powers at the Institute of Special Technologies, a school where (warning: slight spoilers ahead!) student development includes (literal) metamorphoses. And time can go into repeat mode. (Another slight spoiler: at one point, Sashka relives December 16 for many days in a row. Reading that section of the book on the very same date felt a bit creepy.) There was lots more to keep me binging with Vita Nostra: Sashka is a strong young heroine, there’s mental training and discipline, the alternate world/universe is vivid, and there are language-related revelations toward the end that made me want to go right back to the beginning of the novel and read it again. I read Vita Nostra in Russian, but it’s also available in Julia Meitov Hersey’s translation from HarperCollins.

For better or worse, I didn’t go back to reread Vita Nostra. I switched to a retro detective novel instead. Valeria Verbinina’s Театральная площадь (Theater Square), the second in Verbinina’s series starring detective Ivan Opalin, was also in my genre shipment. I didn’t find Theater Square as absorbing as its predecessor, Moscow Time (previous post), but I’m a sucker for Stalin-era settings and the didactic layer of Verbinina’s novels fascinates me. Sometimes it almost feels as if she makes sure to mention things like Stalin portraits hanging in offices and accusations of Trotskyite activity to remind readers (particularly young readers who haven’t heard stories first-hand from relatives?) about Soviet-era history. And communal apartments. Theater Square isn’t just history + detective, though. It also involves the Bolshoy Ballet, making it a ballet novel as well. Both Theater Square and Yulia Yakovleva’s Каннибалы – literally Cannibals but a.k.a. The Dazzlings, a contemporary novel about strange happenings at the Bolshoy (that I didn’t finish) – include strong reminders about the interconnection of politics and theater, too, as well as the building’s looping labyrinths. Among other things, Theater Square includes a cameo with Stalin and there are romantic and even somewhat gothic subplots. Bonus: Krasnaya Moskva (Red Moscow) perfume is mentioned again, earning the novel a tag! On a personal note, I loved the description of the upper tier of Bolshoy seats, where I sat (how strange fate can be!) not long after a murder investigation in my Moscow dorm.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s odd that I’ve focused so much on genres in recent months. But it makes complete sense. Thinking about genres doesn’t just order my reading a bit more than usual, it also helps me make sense of my thoughts and feelings about what’s happening in the world. When there’s instability, I tend to seek resolutions, something detective novels often supply. When there are real-life oddities that I simply can’t fathom, it helps to read about (other) strange physical and psychic places: weird fiction has already saved the day many times! And when I’m looking for something more philosophical about history and the passage of time, novels like Vodolazkin’s – which are so much a part of my thinking anyway, after translating three – feel reassuring and even consoling, particularly given that they include elements of fantasy and mysticism. Perhaps the greatest reassurance and consolation I receive from books – from every book I read, whether I finish or not – is the gift of opportunities to keep thinking about literary strictures, structures, characters, and messages, all of which help me both escape and find perspective on current events that keep proving (cliché alert!) that truth really can be far stranger than fiction.

Up Next: I’m reading away but not quite sure what comes next! (Alienation seems to be a strong theme, though…) A post about NOSE Award winners must be in the cards soon, too.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. Eugene Vodolazkin sent me an electronic copy of Island. Translator Julia Meitov Hersey is an online friend whom I hope to meet (we don’t even live far apart!) once this mess is finally over.

Head-Melting Heat Wave Edition: Short Takes on Short Stories

It seems like it’s getting hotter by the minute here in New England so I’m glad the beach is close, we bought a fairly quiet air conditioner, and I’ve taken a few days off. I think that sets the muddled scene for a post with some (relatively) brief comments about some of the brief stories I’ve read in recent months. Yes, I still prefer novels, preferably long novels with sturdy structures, but I often find there’s nothing better than a good short story for restoring my faith in contemporary literature. My mystical and malleable combination for success is an opening that gives me no choice but to keep reading, brevity, solid internal logic that ties the story’s form to its content, and an emotional kick. On another note, it’s interesting that the two cycles of stories in this post are based on real-life families and I enjoyed them very much, though I often have misgivings about memoirs and, perhaps even more so, fiction that’s obviously based on real lives. That’s because I frequently find that the balance between fact and literary devices (and even thin fictionalization itself for autobiographical fiction) feels uneasy to me, skewing the text’s internal logic. These cycles from Anna Berdichevskaya and Sergei Dovlatov, however, make balance look easy.

Anna Berdichevskaya’s Молёное дитятко (uh-oh, the first word feels like it combines the meanings of “blessed” and “wanted/desired” and the second is a word for “child,” albeit a word that various dictionaries mark as affectionate, regional, and conversational) is a collection of stories about Berdichevskaya’s life, beginning when she’s in utero during the era of the mustached one, continuing to the present, and organized according to the chronological order of her life rather than when they were composed. I only read the first of five sections/cycles in the book—six stories, about ninety pages—because the first story in the second section, set in another phase of life, felt so different to me that I decided to set the book aside to read that cycle separately.

The first cycle carries the collective title “Якубова, на выход!” (fairly literally “Yakubova, to the door!”) and covers notable events like the night of Berdichevskaya’s mother’s arrest—she’s reading Tom Thumb to Berdichevskaya’s brother—as well as her trial, time in the camps, and eventual release, after which Berdichevskaya asks her mother if she’ll always be old now. (Ouch; she feels ashamed for asking.) There’s lots of detail about life as a political prisoner, particularly in one of my favorite stories, “Аккордеон” (“The Accordion”), a love story of sorts that shows female prisoners walking to the men’s part of the “zone” for bath day (every other Sunday), detailing how the women primp by using beets and coal as improvised makeup, and telling how the men watch them even though they aren’t supposed to. I wrote “lovely” (underlined twice) about the story for lots of reasons: the mention of distant mountains and, places that have nothing to do with Leninism, Stalinism, criminalism, or people at all; Berdichevskaya’s ease at slipping in prison camp slang, and the correspondence (via air mail, letters flying over fences) between Berdichevskaya’s mother and a certain Boris. And then there’s the gift of an accordion. I have no idea how much is embroidered or embellished in Berdichevskaya’s stories, though that doesn’t matter to me because I loved reading them for how they feel true in the sense of real, meaning based on events that actually happened and had an impact on Berdichevskaya’s life, as well as true in the sense of artistically right. I got so caught up in them that they inhabited me in a nearly physical way, making them feel more like an experience than simple reading. That doesn’t happen very often. A bonus: one story gets tagged for having “Red Moscow” perfume in its title. It’s popular stuff.

I generally enjoy reading Sergei Dovlatov but his Наши (Ours: A Russian Family Album, in Anne Frydman’s translation) was a pleasant surprise even so. I read it for voice reasons (related to my work translating Sergei Kuznetsov’s Kaleidoscope), choosing this particular collection simply because it was the next set of unread stories in one of my Dovlatov volumes. Ours begins with a great-grandfather in the Russian Far East and ends with Dovlatov’s eventual emigration to the United States, serving up portraits of all kinds of other family members in between. My favorite may well be Aunt Mara, who becomes an editor; Tynyanov, Zoshchenko, Forsh, and Alexei Tolstoy (whom she once inadvertently headbutted in the stomach) were among her authors and Dovlatov includes some little literary anecdotes. I also couldn’t resist the stories about a dog named Glasha, a cousin with theater and criminal careers who only functions well in borderline situations, or the story of how Dovlatov meets his wife, Elena, whom he finds in his apartment the morning after a party because the man she’d arrived with got drunk and left her there. Best of all, though, was reading about the birth of their daughter, Katya, whom I know slightly from literary events, on her actual birthday. Ours contains everything I enjoy about Dovlatov: lots of humor (many pages warranted “ha ha” in the margins), plenty of absurd and tragic tinges, and a distinctive easy rhythm in the writing. I highly recommend Dovlatov to non-native readers of Russian since his language is relatively simple in a way that maximizes the meaning and impact of recognizable words, and he creates an intimate, chatty voice that doesn’t talk down to the reader.

Finally, I also enjoyed Sergei Nosov’s “Белые ленточки” (“White Ribbons”), which starts off with a tick bite during a camping trip—“Ксюшу укусил клещ,” a very k-sounding “A tick bit Ksyusha”—and, thanks to Ksyusha’s concern about encephalitis (who could blame her?), evolves into a story about a trip to find medical help in a not-exactly-nearby town where Ksyusha and her companion learn about mysterious white ribbons that have nothing to do with real-life political demonstrations that came up after the story was written. I find the oddities of Nosov’s stories especially interesting, even charming, because he somehow manages to stay in control (just barely!) of his material even when he wanders a fair bit, sometimes veering into slightly occult—in the “hidden” sense for medicine or metaphor—regions. Given the growth of the tick population in my own sweltering Maine and the existence of a tick jar in our house (it even came in handy for a recent dinner guest who wasn’t sure she’d seen a tick), there’s a lot to be said for a wandering story where a tick bite triggers so much action.

Disclaimers: The usual. I received a copy of the Berdichevskaya book from the organizers of the Russian stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair, thank you! Sergei Nosov gave me a copy of the story collection with the tick story, thank you again!

Up Next: More from the heavy “write about” shelf: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M. (I’m still waiting for the sequel!), and Vladimir Sharov’s The Rehearsals in Oliver Ready’s translation. And then there’s a Vladimir Makanin novella, a long story by Elizaveta Alexandrova-Zorina, and Vladimir Danikhnov’s weird Lullaby, a Booker finalist about serial killings that has shades of Platonov.

Reflecting on the Past with Beatrice’s Reflection

Irina Muravyova’s Отражение Беатриче (Beatrice’s Reflection) is a nice example of a book I don’t think of as “my type”—it’s a little crowded and, perhaps paradoxically, leans a bit more toward character study than I usually prefer—but still keeps me reading. Beyond that, the plot itself isn’t particularly unusual: Anna, a lovely music student, marries enigmatic diplomat Sergei after a love-at-first-sight incident in the Moscow Metro. They have some difficult times, there’s an affair with a foreigner, and then a kinda-sorta happy ending from the “deal-with-it” category.

I think it was the temporal setting—the late Stalin era—that made Beatrice’s Reflection work for me. There’s not a lot there that’s particularly unusual, either, like Sergei’s cloudy past and a big holiday bash at the Kremlin that features Stalin himself, but I guess I’m something of a sucker for books (Russian or not) that focus a lot on (dis)trust and suspicion. There’s plenty of those in Beatrice’s Reflection, both positive, through Anna’s close ties with her family, which includes three female cousins, and negative, through distrust of foreigners and, really, just about anyone outside one’s usual circles. Muravyova works in an illegal abortion, what I think I’d call a symbolic heart condition, and a mysterious long trip abroad, too. I should also mention that Beatrice’s Reflection is yet another book featuring Krasnaya Moskva (Red Moscow) perfume… that new tag I added earlier this year continues to come in handy.

My thoughts on Beatrice’s Reflection feel pretty skewed and confused because I read the book earlier this fall, a time when I didn’t finish many books because not much appealed to me. I don’t like writing much here about my personal life but want to say this was a difficult autumn: beyond lots of work, our very beloved elderly cat was very sick. She’s no longer with us but things are returning to normal here at the Bookshelf and the rest of our house, thanks in part to two new adolescent cats who—What a relief!—seem to enjoy translating, blogging, and reading. Or at least lying on the laps of humans who are attempting to translate, blog, or read.

Disclosures: I met Irina Muravyova at Book Expo America in 2012 and enjoyed talking with her so much that I bought several of her books. I’m looking forward to reading more of them now that my head is a little steadier.

Up Next: Favorites from 2012 [oops!] 2013, a year that was all about quality, not quantity. Masha Regina. Really! And Yana Vagner’s Vongozero, a novel about people traveling to the sticks after a nasty virus has wiped out entire cities: sometimes a measured, well-composed disaster novel is the most soothing sort of book.

Rotten Romance & Russian Roulette: Ilichevsky’s The Orphics

Every now and again I like to wait before I write about a book because I want to see if the book holds its power and keeps eating at me. In the case of Alexander Ilichevsky’s Орфики, (The Orphics), which I finished two months ago—I vividly remember reading tense Russian roulette scenes toward the end of the novel, as half my town was shooting off fireworks on the night of July 3—the answer is Yes. Sure, some of the details have faded but the jarring effects of the second half of the book feel almost as strong now as they did when the literal and literary fireworks were going off in mid-summer.

The Orphics begins with a dacha romance narrated by a hopeful young man, Petr, about to go to the United States to study in 1991… the romance, though, is doomed from the start. (In the back of my book, I scribbled “dacha romance turned rotten by the ‘90s and the ghost of Dostoevsky.”) I’ll admit the beginning of the book was a bit of a slog for me until I had a better feel for what Ilichevsky was doing. The romance felt groundless, unlikely—young Petr falls for a general’s daughter, Vera (Faith), who’s married to an officer—and there’s a lot of talk about politics and whither Russia. And I don’t often have much patience for seemingly ungrounded romances or fiction with long swathes of talk about politics.

The back of Pashkov House

What makes all this work is that Ilichevsky sets The Orphics in a way-off-kilter world that plays on the way-off-kilter world of the real, true carnivalesque Moscow I knew in the early nineties. I think the element of extreme carnival is what I found so satisfyingly (dis)orienting about the book: I wouldn’t be too surprised, for example, if someone told me there really were Russian roulette sessions, with betting, going on in Pashkov House during the time I lived in Moscow. About the only other detail I should add to complete a basic plot summary is that our narrator plays Russian roulette to raise money for his beloved, so she can help her father after he’s accused of financial improprieties. The Orphics is, as you’ve probably already figured out, heavy on fate: there’s even a gun early on in the book, fitting since it drops strong hints about shooting and foregone conclusions.

What makes it even more absolutely clear the book shouldn’t be taken as straightforward realism is that it contains a strong mystical element—critic Nikolai Aleksandrov handily divides the book into three ingredients: ideological, mystical, and love story—that’s linked to a form of self-sacrifice that carries absurdly huge stakes. I don’t want to reveal more specifics about this piece of things because I think the mystical, occult aspect of The Orphics is the element of the book that’s most fun for the reader to tease out of Ilichevsky’s amalgam of melodrama and psychological thriller… all of which is augmented by a sleazy, noirish feeling that life is cheap. The combination worked beautifully for me—I also noted “not for the faint of heart” in the back of my book—though I have to admit the fireworks probably heightened the tension of the final Russian roulette scenes. I never knew when something would blow.

Part of what I’ve come to appreciate about Ilichevsky is his use of allusions, which saturate The Orphics, from the title to the stanzas from a poem by Alexander Blok that appear on the last page, with lots of Pashkov House (a meeting pace for Voland in Master and Margarita), plus references to Dostoevsky, Camus, bees of ancient myth, rebirth, Red Moscow perfume (again!), and lots more. Aleksandrov seems to feel put off that The Orphics feels artificial but I can’t imagine the book feeling otherwise: I can’t imagine much of anyone would or could believe what holds the world together in The Orphics if it were described in straight-up realistic fiction. (Not that I think it actually could be...) Besides, Ilichevsky’s able to place a wonderfully diabolical overlay onto the usual sociopolitical tragedies, comedies, and triumphs that came with the breakup of the Soviet Union. Another besides: what I love about fiction is that it can be easy to believe it without believing a thing.

Up Next: Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina, which I’m about to finish. (And about to translate some brief excerpts!)

Photo: Pashkov House, photo by Alvesgaspar, via Wikipedia/Creative Commons.

Buida’s Thief, Spy, and Murderer

Iurii Buida’s Вор, шпион и убийца (Thief, Spy, and Murderer) feels like multiple books, in multiple ways. The description the literary journal Znamya gave the book—автобиографическая фантазия, an autobiographical fantasy—sums up a lot: over all, Thief, Spy, and Murderer sure feels like an autobiography but some passages sure feel embellished. Thief, Spy, and Murderer read so much like a fiction-nonfiction hybrid to me that I can’t quite bring myself to refer to it as a novel, as Eksmo, its publisher, does. At least neither the journal nor the book publisher labelled it a “documentary novel,” a term I’ve always found annoyingly opaque.

At least the basics are fairly easy to list. Thief, Spy, and Murder is a first-person narrative told by a male who is identified (all of once) as Buida: he’s a boy when the book begins, an adult writer when it ends. I don’t seem to remember Buida having a first name, and a search of the online version (I read the book on paper) turned up no “юр” for Юрий, Iurii, though I admit I’m extraordinarily adept at forgetting character names. Details may vary significantly but much of what happens to meta-Buida (as I’ll call the Buida in the book) echoes circumstances and events in the life of the writer named Iurii Buida, including being from the Kaliningrad area, practicing journalism, and becoming a writer.
I’m not much interested in which bits of Thief, Spy, and Murderer are autobiographical and which are invented, though: as usual, I’m just looking for a book that has a functional internal logic, is written with some semblance of style, and offers enough “new information” (to borrow a term from a bass player I once knew) to keep me interested. No, I’m not sure what most of that means, in empirical and definable terms. In practical terms, though, I can say that Thief, Spy, and Murderer was a mixed reading experience, probably because of what I perceive as its mixed genre: the first half, which read more like fiction, made for easy, fairly interesting reading during a lazy, hot, and extra-long Fourth of July weekend, though the second half, which read more like autobiography, was less interesting, reading rather like a rushed summary of meta-Buida’s adult life and career. I’ll focus on the first half, which I thought was far stronger.

Thief, Spy, and Murderer begins with meta-Buida’s family getting up in the morning and preparing to go out for a Revolution Day demonstration. The narrator first describes the order in which the family uses the slop pail, then shows us his mother in curlers and his father shaving and putting on his medals. We’re in the post-War years. As neighbors begin to appear, so do stories, like the woman whose daughters came “from the elder bushes” that grow in the ruins of buildings. And then banners and a smell (Red Moscow perfume makes yet another literary appearance) and toasts... There’s an earthiness, a bit of an edge, and a real sense of seaminess.

There are lots of other promising bits in the beginning of the book: railroad tracks that raised my expectations for a Don Domino-esque book, some sordid and lonely crime, and the narrator’s father preventing a group of men from hurting a gypsy child. I think my favorite passage involved a trip to the paper mill where meta-Buida’s father works: they look inside a train car loaded with books by Stalin, all waiting to be pulped. There are sixteen tons of Stalin in each car; hundreds of cars are lined up, if only in the distance. The father gives permission to begin work on the books, allowing them to be unloaded, pitchforked into the pulper, and then piped to a cardboard-making machine. Yikes. Vodka is consumed. Then a bit later: “Когда зачистили четвертый вагон, отец взял меня за руку, и мы пошли домой.” (“After they’d cleared out the fourth car, my father took me by the hand and we went home.”)

On the next page, meta-Buida says his first experience with the writings of Solzhenitsyn is through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which fails to make much of an impression because “Когда я его читал, мне все-все казалось знакомым—не в деталях, конечно, а сама атмосфера, воздух.” (“Everything, everything, felt familiar to me when I read it: not the details, of course, but the very atmosphere, the air.”) It’s the life and the worst aspects of everydayness that feel familiar to him—and scarier than the statistics of the Gulag—and it is all steeped in Stalin.

That mention of Solzhenitsyn is key to the book, I think because, for my taste, anyway, Buida is at his best in Thief, Spy, and Murderer when he addresses those everyday horrors: the book feels most elemental and smartest then, too, particularly because many of these scenes have the surreal or mythical touches I enjoyed so much in Don Domino and Blue Blood. As for the second half. I didn’t consider abandoning the book but, with its descriptions of early writing, marriage, a journalism career, and then becoming a Communist Party worker, this chunk of the book felt more like it could be, well, safe, straightforward autobiography. Of course this stage of life is different but I missed the energy and vivid imagination that Buida drew on in the first half of the book. (Again, I don’t know what’s “true” and what’s not.) In summary: Despite enjoying much of Thief, Spy, and Murderer, I was disappointed that the book doesn’t feel quite as seamless as it might have.

I should mention that Thief, Spy, and Murderer is a finalist for the 2013 Big Book Award. And that all the finalists for the Big Book are online, free for the reading on BookMate, here. The current reader leaders for Facebook “likes” are, as of August 9: Maya Kucherskaya’s Auntie Motya/Minna, Sergei Belyakov’s Gumilev, Son of Gumilev, and Maxim Kantor’s Red Light/World (it may all be red but I haven’t yet decided). I’m reading Kantor’s book now—and though I’m enjoying it, often very much, it’s big enough and bumpy enough that I may be reading it until the award is made in November—and intend to give Belyakov’s book a try soon, too. Alas, I couldn’t quite get into Kucherskaya’s.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: Alexander Ilichevsky’s The Orphics, which still gives me shivers more than a month later and not just because of the Red Moscow perfume... and, one of these days, Kantor.

Busybody: Khemlin’s Investigator

Where to start? A murder. A stabbing that hits the heart. May 18, 1952. Klara Tsetkin Street, Chernigov, Ukraine. The victim is Lilia Vorobeichik. The man sent to investigate the case is Mikhail Tsupkoi. Case closed early, murder solved, pinned on Roman Moiseenko, who’d been romantically involved with Vorobeichik. Moiseenko is dead, suicide.

The book is Margarita Khemlin’s Дознаватель (The Investigator), and Tsupkoi, a decorated World War 2 veteran is the title figure and first-person narrator. I should note that Tsupkoi says he’s a дознаватель, an investigator who doesn’t normally handle serious crimes. But he’s sent to handle the Vorobeichik case on his own because the department’s so busy.

Tsupkoi stays busy, too, continuing to investigate the Vorobeichik case after it’s closed. According to seamstress Polina Laevskaya, Vorobeichik’s friend, there are rumors going around town. People don’t believe Moiseenko did it, and Tsupkoi is accused of trying to keep the story quiet because Vorobeichik was Jewish. And so Tsupkoi spends the rest of the book questioning and requestioning Vorobeichik’s friends, neighbors, and family, including her twin sister Eva. As Khemlin said on Echo of Moscow’s “Book Casino,” Tsupkoi thinks everything can be figured out, calculated (рассчитать is her verb) but this is a story about “безумная любовь,” we’ll call that “crazy love.” And crazy is impossible to calculate. Other factors in this dense, crowded book: more death, a resurrection, births, betrayals and infidelity, theft, matzo, adoption, tailored clothing, knives, and gold.

The Investigator is one of the most complex, absurd-at-the-very-core, and bizarrely rewarding books I’ve read in ages: though I kept reading and reading, hypnotized as Tsupkoi zigged, zagged, clomped, and tromped his way around Chernigov, Oster, and the last decade or so to question and listen, it took more than half the book to realize what Khemlin was up to. I knew all along that the novel was literary fiction with elements of detective novel, soap opera, Jewish history, Ukrainian history, Soviet history, World War 2 history, and more...

But then the book spirals more sharply, drawing Tsupkoi closer and closer to the essence of what went wrong for Lilia Vorobeichik, the other characters, and society. I’ll attempt to explain… Though it’s often difficult to keep track of who’s who in The Investigator—there must be dozens of characters of various ages and importance—the book simultaneously chronicles family life and creates a protocol of an unofficial investigation. The ever-present Big Picture in the background is unrelenting: as Khemlin noted on Echo, the post-war atmosphere in the Soviet Union wasn’t easy. She mentions the doctors’ plot, Zionist conspiracy theories, and the interconnectedness of everyday people. That interconnectedness and the misunderstandings it can create are crucial in The Investigator: everybody knows everybody’s business, yards and houses are close, and Tsupkoi, investigator, is the novel’s chief busybody, reaching, always, for the most personal, hidden truths, which he finally finds at the end of the book. Most important, most of those truths reach, somehow, back to World War 2. One character was a partisan. Another’s children burned. Tsupkoi’s war buddy, Evsei, is in the book, too, and there’s even a bag of gold that includes some fillings. The stories build and build, generating pain and tension that become unbearable by the end of the book. There is a confession. Of sorts. As a review in НГ-Ex Libris notes, given Khemlin’s balance of good and bad, every reader will have an opinion about the punishment side of things; Ex Libris put The Investigator on their list of 25 best fiction and poetry books of 2012.

What fascinated me most about The Investigator was how and how much people talk. Tsupkoi questions and questions and people talk and talk, creating some paradoxes: Tsupkoi is an investigator and the novel’s narrator, but huge swaths are told by other characters, who describe their lives and relationships. They tell stories within stories. But is Tsupkoi a faithful protocol writer and narrator? Who knows? Either way, the book is, as Vladimir Guga’s excellent piece for Peremeny.ru notes, polyphonic, because Khemlin offers up varied voices, including one that’s not audible because its owner can’t speak. (I should also note that Guga thinks Khemlin does well writing the book from a man’s perspective.) No matter how varied the voices, though, the war keeps coming back. As Khemlin said on Echo about Tsupkoi, “Выиграть войну можно. Но как жить потом, не знает никто.” – “It’s possible to win the war. But nobody knows how to live after that.”

I’ve read all Khemlin’s books and translated two of her stories plus an excerpt from Klotsvog so it’s interesting for me to watch how she addresses the war, over and over again, in her fiction. I remember her saying (though I don’t remember where) that she grew up living among the aftereffects of the war and that compels her to write. When I read her collection The Living Line, I wrote that the book’s unconnected novellas seemed to meld into “a mural that feels like a small world: Jewish heritage, settings in Ukraine, and the feel that someone is sitting with you, telling tales.” Now, after four books, I feel as if all Khemlin’s books meld into an even bigger mural that blends the personal and the public, the Jewish and the non-Jewish, telling stories that are individual but universal, where characters often speak in Soviet-era clichés, use dark, dark humor, and describe things nobody should ever experience.

I think what I find most mysterious and, thus, appealing about Khemlin’s writing is that, whether I’m reading or translating, nearly everything (except, perhaps, the occasional “суржик,” a blend of Russian and Ukrainian) feels relatively simple at first, as if I’m reading the barest, most factual of fiction… but then her writing evolves into something more complex as I realize how much history and emotion she packs into her words.

Disclaimers: The usual. Margarita gave me my copy of The Investigator.

Up Next: 2012 year-end post. Then Olga Lukas and Andrei Stepanov’s Prince Sobakin’s Elixir and, most likely, Aleksei Slapovskii’s День денег (Money’s Day)… I started reading Slapovskii, which I liked, but then got sick (again! or relapsed?) so went for the extreme lightness of the Lukas/Stepanov book, a perfect accompaniment to lots of coughing and snow.

Marina Stepnova’s Lazar Lindt and All His Women

Marina Stepnova’s Женщины Лазаря (Lazar’s Women) is one of “those” books: in this case, “those” books are the ones that compel me just a touch more than they repel me. Oddly, for this reader, “those” books have a tendency to be novels where form and content are absolutely inseparable (a big plus) and books that inexplicably leave me with painfully unforgettable scenes and atmospheres (an even bigger plus).

Moving on to the specifics…

Lazar’s Women, which is billed as a family saga, begins in the early twentieth century and continues to the present. And, yes, it truly is a family saga: each of the women—Marusya, Galina Petrovna, and Lidochka—that the title encompasses occupies, with some overlap, a specific historical period, and each (sort of) has her own place in the life of one Lazar Lindt. In my reading, Lindt is almost an incidental character, first feeling unrequited love for Marusya (his mentor’s wife) because of her welcoming home, then marrying the all-too-young Galina Petrovna and cosseting her in Soviet-era ways, and finally serving as a mythical figure in the life of his granddaughter, Lidochka, whose mother drowns in the book’s first chapter, leaving her to be raised by Galina Petrovna, now a rather cold widow.

The plot summary sounds pretty typical and trite, even (or particularly?) when you add in Lazar’s role as a mathematician who works on a bomb—Lazar is a creator and a destroyer all rolled into one, living in a remote scientist city with the mathematical-sounding name Ensk—so it’s Stepnova’s treatment of her material that gives the book its interest. I read the first hundred or so pages of Lazar’s Women thinking (as I still do) the novel is overwritten, overloaded, and overwrought… but then I grasped the book’s logic and began reading it as an allegorical, abstract representation of history, love, nonlove, and the effects of Soviet life on the psyche that demands all Stepnova’s literary “stuff.”

In her review for Izvestia, Liza Novikova likened Lazar’s Women to books by Liudmila Ulitskaya and Dina Rubina—and I completely agree with Novikova, who cites themes and devices that Stepnova handles differently, almost rebuking her schoolmarmish elders—but I found myself thinking even more of Vasily Aksyonov’s trilogy that’s known as Generations of Winter in English and Московская сага (Moscow Saga) in Russian. I disliked, almost intensely, the trilogy but couldn’t put it down. And I still can’t forget Aksyonov’s portrayals of the Soviet era’s perversion of life and love. Lazar’s Women had a similar effect on me, partly because it also dissects various types of perversion, but I think Stepnova’s book is better composed—compiled might be an even better word—than Aksyonov’s. For one thing, Stepnova uses her magpie techniques to offer all manner of tchotchkes, emotions, and accessories but Aksyonov uses his in what I consider a cheaper way, stuffing in cameo roles for historical figures, including Stalin. Stepnova’s book is also far more affecting in its affectedness: the book is even something of a tearjerker in spots. I fogged up more than once, and one male reader told me he cried.

I think critic Viktor Toporov’s description of Lazar’s Women as “высокое чтиво” is perfect: my English-language version of that would be “high-class pulp” because I read Lazar’s Women as a piece of very readable postmodernism that offers traditional alongside trashy. Stepnova combines elements and specifics like high class Soviet-era privileges, low-class words related to the body, a bathroom scene involving a smoking ballerina, the flexible saga genre, and a first-person narrator with an identity and a very distinctive voice but only (apparently) a cryptically tangential presence to the actual story.

Early in the book, though, that narrator tells doubting readers to check Yandex, a Russian search engine, if s/he doesn’t believe the facts in one part of the novel. Zakhar Prilepin criticizes the mention of Yandex in his review (which I read in Prilepin’s Книгочет), but I think he’s reading too literally and missing the point. Prilepin says (in my translation), “People write books about what Yandex doesn’t know and will never know,” adding that it doesn’t matter if we believe (my italics) what’s in a book or not. Okay, sure, fiction addresses mysteries of life that a search engine’s algorithms can’t grasp. I found the Yandex advice a bit puzzling at first but the further I read Lazar’s Women, the more I read the mention of Yandex as a a mysterious narrator’s reminder of the hierarchies and interdependencies of fact and fiction… that isn’t so far off from the novel’s portrayals of hierarchies within Soviet and post-Soviet society, which Stepnova inserts into a work of fiction that manages to feel simultaneously historical and anti-historical.

So, yes, Lazar’s Women irritated the hell out of me with its diminutives, barfing, and ballet. And, no, it’s not a gentle or genteel family saga. But that’s probably why the book works so well, why it feels a little unusual and important, and why it’s been shortlisted for this year’s NatsBest, Yasnaya Polyana, Big Book, and Russian Booker awards. It didn’t win the first two, and I haven’t read all the Big Book and Booker finalists, but Lazar’s Women is a very good book, a book I can’t help but respect—IMHO, respect > liking, when it comes to books—so I’d be more than happy if Stepnova won either award.

Up Next: Trip report from the American Literary Translators Association conference, Serhij Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad, and Andrei Dmitriev’s The Peasant and the Teenager, which I’m enjoying very much, though it’s a bit of a shock to the system after the historical abstraction and brutal dreaminess of, respectively, Lazar and Voroshilovgrad.

Disclaimers: The usual.