Happy New Year! & 2018 Highlights

Happy New Year! С Новым годом! Wherever you are, whenever you read this, I hope the holidays have been enjoyable and I wish you lots of good reading in 2019!

Reading in 2018 followed the same pattern as the last several years, with good novels to translate but a dearth of satisfying new books to read. Although I don’t track the numbers, I’m certain I abandoned far more books than I finished. Despite that – and far too many pieces of sad news – there were some nice reading surprises this year, plus great travel and even some positive developments on the translation side of things. Here are some highlights:

Favorite book by a new author: One of my favorite reading highlights this year was Grigory Sluzhitel’s Дни Савелия (literally Savely’s Days) (previous post), which came highly recommended by Eugene Vodolazkin. Savely slinked his way into my heart thanks to his penchant for valerian, love for traipsing around Moscow, and smooth way with words. Savely’s Days would have been a favorite even in a good year but in this lackluster reading year, the book particularly stood out for its observations of people, cats, and Moscow.

Most enjoyable books written by authors I’d already read: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Учитель Дымов (Teacher Dymov), which, oddly enough, I haven’t written about, is a sort of ensemble family saga novel, a book where characters, psychology, and the little things in life are the focus, (generally) leaving historical crises of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras in the background. The book is vivid and detailed as it flows from generation to generation and it kept me up late reading. I also enjoyed Yulia Yakovleva’s Укрощение красного коня (Taming the Red Horse) (previous post), an atmospheric retro detective novel that plays with genre.

An unexpected achievement: I finally read and finished a Strugatsky Brothers novel, Град обреченный (available in English as Andrew Bromfield’s The Doomed City, Chicago Review Press) (previous post) in Russian! There are plenty of thoroughly repellant characters in the novel but it’s, hmm, intriguing in its own odd way so kept me reading and then thinking, too, as did Eduard Verkin’s Остров Сахалин (Sakhalin Island) (previous post), which got under my skin like some sort of stubborn rash or parasite. (Verkin’s Sakhalin still won’t quite let me go so I was glad that a visiting Russian friend had just read it, too, so we could talk.)

Favorite English-language reading: I seem to have read a higher percentage of satisfying books in English this year than in Russian: Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M. is the start of a big, thick novel about a young woman who comes of age at the time of the October Revolution. I also loved Curzio Malaparte’s The Kremlin Ball, translated by Jenny McPhee, a piece of writing (fiction? nonfiction? both? does it matter?) about Moscow in the late 1920s. (previous post on both) Another good one: Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s Городские и деревенские, known in Nora Seligman Favorov’s very pleasant English translation as City Folk and Country Folk. I described the book in a previous post as “a fun, smart nineteenth-century novel.”

Speaking of translations: I was very pleasantly surprised to find that this year’s list of Russian-to-English translations topped sixty entries (previous post). There’s something for everybody – we’ll see if the 2019 list can come close to 2018’s in terms of quality and quantity!

Happiest things while traveling: Despite seeming to have a reputation as a bit of a recluse (I think living in Maine and burning wood for heat gives that sort of impression automatically) I really do love going to translator conferences and book fairs. This year’s trips – to Moscow for a translator conference (previous posts 1 and 2) , Frankfurt for the book fair (previous post), and Boston for a Slavist convention (post coming soon!) – were especially enjoyable not just for my papers and presentations but for having the chance to see colleagues. Though I should really say that a good deal of this “seeing” colleagues is really the chance to “eat with” colleagues. Thanks to them, “the most important meal of the day” takes on new meaning, eating wurst and French fries in Frankfurt becomes something positively lovely especially under a warm (!) October sun, and late dinners are a perfect way to finally sit longer and, yes, eat slower (food) after rushing around all day. It’s the people I see at these events – translators, writers, publishers, literary agents, event organizers, and even a few people from my distant academic past – who make travel so enjoyable despite jetlag and packed schedules. I’m a very, very fortunate person.

Best acquisitions: My newish Kobo Aura One electronic reader makes it almost pleasant to read electronically even if the device doesn’t particularly like PDFs. And A History of Russian Literature by Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler is a great (and gigundo) addition to my library that the good people of Oxford University Press were only too happy for me to take off their hands toward the end of the Slavist conference. It’s already come in handy quite a few times and even the index is fun to page through! Special thanks to the nice Marriott employee who helped me cram it into my luggage for the ride home.

Final goodbyes: Sadly, 2018 brought the deaths of Vladimir Voinovich (previous post), Vladimir Sharov (previous post), and Oleg Pavlov (previous post), all of whom I’ve written about, as well as Andrei Bitov, whom I’ve read so little that I’m not even sure what to say other than something absurdly banal about recognizing his importance. (And that I need to buy a better, newer edition of his Pushkin House – the late Soviet-era edition I have is fuzzily printed on awful paper, making it painfully difficult to read.) The loss of Sharov still gives me no peace.

What’s coming up on the blog: Despite my complaints about 2018’s Big Book finalists (previous post) and the high ratio of “abandons” in my reading for much of the year, things are looking up: I loaded up on books in Moscow and Frankfurt, and have been a much happier reader since my required reading period ended. I’ll also be reading mostly books written by women until mid-March, when I’ll be participating in a panel at the London Book Fair about women in literature and translation. I have quite a shelf of recent Russian books, thanks to my own purchases plus gifts from authors, publishers, and the Russian stand in Frankfurt. My stack of English-language books written by women, many of which are translations from various languages into English, is even larger. Best of all is that I haven’t abandoned a book in weeks: I’m on a roll with Alisa Ganieva, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Yulia Yakovleva, and Olga Stolpovskaya. On the English side, I’ve been reading Lara Vapnyar and just started Anna Burns’s Milkman today (a gift from one of those wonderful meal-time colleagues I mentioned above). I’m reading Milkman on the treadmill, which fits the heroine’s habit of reading while walking, not to mention Burns’s skazzy writing, with its momentum and flow, as well as plenty of sly humor and word play.

On that cheery note: Happy New Year! And happy reading!

Disclaimers: The usual. As noted above, I received copies of some of the books mentioned in this post from publishers, literary agents, and other sources. Thank you to all! And thank you to everyone who helped with my travel in various ways. Also: I’m translating Sergei Kuznetsov’s Kaleidoscope.

Image credit: Fireworks in Bratislava, New Year 2005, from Ondrejk, via Wikipedia.

Happy New Year! & 2017 Highlights

Happy New Year! С Новым годом! I hope you are enjoying the holiday and staying warm, wherever you are!

In terms of the year in books, 2017 seems (logically enough, I suppose) to fit the pattern of the last couple of years: lots of work on translations plus a quality-not-quantity situation with my reading. This year, however, brought some unexpected travel and more books than I ever thought I’d receive in a year. A few highlights… 

Two favorite books by authors new to me: Vladimir Medvedev’s Заххок (Zahhak), which I’ll be writing about soon, is the polyphonic novel set in Tajikistan that I’d been rooting for to win either the Yasnaya Polyana or Booker award. And then there’s Anna Kozlova’s F20 (previous post), which won the National Bestseller Award: F20 is harsh and graphic in depicting mental illness and societal problems. Its feels even more necessary to me a couple months after reading; it has really stuck with me.

Favorite book nobody else seems to like by an author I’d already read: Vladimir Sorokin’s Manaraga (previous post) may not be his best book—it’s tough to beast (ha!) his Oprichnik—but that doesn’t mean it’s not a smart, entertaining book that I loved zipping through. I feel a special gratitude to Sorokin for creating a body of work that lets the reader find common themes (sometimes, admittedly, too familiar) in his books and make connections that enhance the reading.

Favorite book other readers like by an author I’d already read: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Kaleidoscope (previous post), which is my favorite of the year, though I think of it as a 2016 book because that’s when I started it: in fact, I vividly remember reading it as I greeted 2017. Not many 800-page books work for me (see below) but this one’s so nicely structured and rooted in the canon and, hmm, human sentiments and reality, too, that I didn’t want it to end.

Least favorite trend & most favorite way to react: I won’t list titles but I ran across far too many books that felt unjustifiably long because of lack of structure and/or editing. On the positive side, I’ve been reading short stories as an antidote. Sergei Nosov gave me his collection Полтора кролика (A Rabbit and a Half) when I was in St. Petersburg and the first story, “Морозилка” (“The Freezer”), is, appropriately enough, set at New Year’s and involves the retelling of a scary story. It has a nice combination of tenderness, humor, and suspense: I read the beginning in the Metro in Petersburg and was sorry I didn’t have enough time to finish because my ride was too short. Another story from the collection, “Шестое июня” (“The Sixth of June”) was a favorite in the Petersburg Noir collection (previous post). I also got started on Elena Dolgopyat’s Родина (Motherland), which starts off with an updated, transplanted “Overcoat”-themed story… short stories feel like the perfect counterbalance to untrimmed novels that just don’t warrant 500 or more pages.

Favorite unexpected developments: My trips to Frankfurt for the Buchmesse and St. Petersburg, for the Cultural Forum, were both almost painfully wonderful (previous post), for the opportunity to see so many friends and colleagues from all over. And I was thrilled that my translation of Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina, for Oneworld Publications, was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Saddest moment: The death of Vladimir Makanin. I’m not sure I would have started writing this blog if it hadn’t been for the dearth of English-language information about his books. They deserve more attention.

PEN book pile, with cat ear in foreground.

Happiest things: There were some almost transcendental moments during travel—a dance party in a glass cylinder of a club, a wee-small-hours-of-the-morning tour of St. Peterburg thanks to a quirky taxi driver who wanted me to see more—and now there’s the ongoing happiness of reading dozens of books I received over the year. Authors and organizations gave me lots of books in Russian during the year, and, as a judge for the PEN Translation Prize, I received over 125 books in English translation. Reading them is a serious treat, particularly because so many of them are books I might never have heard of or picked up otherwise.

What’s coming up in 2018: There are lots of books on the shelves that I just didn’t get to in 2017: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Учитель Дымов (The Teacher Dymov, I think), Olga Slavnikova’s Прыжок в длину (Long Jump), and Dmitrii Novikov’s Голомяное пламя, the Booker finalist I’m not quite sure what to call, maybe Flame Over the Open Sea. There are also a few books in English I’m hoping/planning to get to sooner rather than later, including Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M., which I haven’t even bought yet, lest it distract me from the rest of my PEN reading; and City Folk and Country Folk, by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov, which Columbia University Press already sent to me. I’m also excited to have some translations coming out in 2018, starting with Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, for Oneworld in May. I’m reading proofs and making final edits now… I can’t think about much beyond that for now!

Thank you! Finally, a very hearty thank you to everybody who visits the blog, whether regularly or occasionally. I’m glad something drew you to Russian literature and brought you here! Special thanks to the numerous organizations and individuals who did so many nice things for me in 2017, whether that was treating me to coffee, borscht, advice, or books, or making my travel possible, as the Institute of Translation and the Yeltsin Center did. Here’s wishing all of you a very happy 2018 filled with fun books (structured to your taste, though emphatically not “taste” in the Manaraga sense…) and good health. Happy New Year!

Up next: Sukhbat Aflatuni’s lovely Tashkent Novel and Vladimir Medvedev’s polyphonic Zahhak…

Disclaimers: The usual, with, as mentioned above, special thanks to many people and organizations for books and travel.

Image credit: Fireworks in Bratislava, New Year 2005, from Ondrejk, via Wikipedia.

Feeling Happily Sentimental about Postmodernism: Sergey Kuznetsov’s Kaleidoscope

Sergey Kuznetsov’s Калейдоскоп (Kaleidoscope) is yet another novel that’s nearly impossible to describe: it’s 850 pages divided into more than 30 loosely-but-closely linked chapters that cover 1885-2013 and involve several dozen characters in many countries. Summarizing by saying that Kaleidoscope is about everything doesn’t say much at all. Irina Prokhorova, founder of the NOSE Award, focused more by calling the novel “новейший сентиментализм,” which might be as good a description as any: in a sense, Kaleidoscope is, to translate Prokhorova’s words literally, “the newest/latest sentimentalism,” what with its accounts of various sorts of political, social, economic, and personal upheaval that involve huge shares of pain and joy. A kaleidoscope, after all, involves reflectors and light to create its patterns.

The joy of Kaleidoscope for a reader like me lies in its structure and composition. As an example, Kuznetsov links a noirish chapter-story (echoes of Dashiel Hammett…) set in 1928 to chapters set in Shanghai during the 1930s. Later in the book and in history, there’s a New York master of the universe type (shades of Tom Wolfe…) who resurfaces in Silicon (oops, no silent “e,” Lizok!) Valley and truly does end up master of his own universe; Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters also get mentions. One generation may die but their children pop up later.

Materials—often pieces of glass—shift inside a toy kaleidoscope, creating changing pictures when the cylinders are twisted; in Kaleidoscope, Kuznetsov twists the cylinder of his novel, shifting plot lines, temporal and geographical settings, and characters to show new aspects of life and history. As I jotted down during my reading, there’s a lot to love here because the shards always come together to form a new picture, even when the world seems to be falling apart morally, politically, and/or socially. I think of the book’s subtitle—расходные материалы—as something like “shifting materials” or even “recurring materials” here, though the Russian term often refers to things that need to be replaced, like batteries, toner cartridges, or razor blades.

Part of the novel’s success lies in Kuznetsov’s recurring use of the kaleidoscope metaphor, presenting a child with a kaleidoscope as a holiday gift in the book’s first chapter and then reinforcing the theme—and teaching the reader to read the book—by noting, for example, shards of history as well a kaleidoscope-like key chain in a Silicon Valley scene where someone notes that, “In a/the postmodern world we learn to find harmony not in order but in chaos.” The chapter-stories in Kaleidoscope don’t look random or chaotic for long even though they differ greatly in terms of form and stylistics.

Another one of my notes says that Kaleidoscope “demands/prefers active reader participation to make connections and consider influences.” I should add that I found that aspect of the reading especially fun: Kuznetsov provides apparatus for the book that includes a list of recurring characters and the chapters in which they appear, plus a list of “literature” that includes books (fiction and nonfiction) and films that provided inspiration in various forms (Kuznetsov mentions phrases and observations). This is a wonderfully mixed lot with dozens of titles, including Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, and of course Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I say “of course” about the Pynchon not because I’ve read it (I haven’t) and found shards in Kaleidoscope (which of course I couldn’t) but because more than one Russian reader recommended Kaleidoscope to me last fall in Moscow, calling it “Pynchon Lite.” Though the Pynchon element may be lost on me, those other titles I listed, plus many others—including Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, which I read a large chunk of years ago before I forgot where I was (I should have read linearly…) and, “of course” again, Ian Fleming’s Bond books—were not.

Reflected glimmers of those books—along with slivers of history, including real-life characters—are part of what underpin the postmodernist feel of Kaleidoscope and the kaleidoscope of our lives. (Speaking of real, true history, I read up on things like the 1910 Great Flood of Paris and Shanghai in the 1930s and even fractals while reading Kaleidoscope…) Bits of those materials shift and recur, forming patterns involving world wars, revolutions of all sorts, utopian ideas, and, of course, love and partings that result from the afore-mentioned wars and revolutions, as well as emigration.

In the end, it’s hard to express or explain why I loved Kaleidoscope so much and didn’t want it to end—I realized in my last days of reading that I’d been waiting until late in the evening to pick it up. I was subconsciously rationing my last pages, postponing the inevitable end. (The end of history is here, too…) The connectedness of Kaleidoscope’s characters and historical threads is somehow comforting, as are the hope and creativity and love that arise during times of upheaval. Beyond that, the book is solidly composed and Kuznetsov finds very admirable balances when drawing his characters and settings: within the limited pages of each chapter-story, he offers just the right amount of detail to create vivid and simulacrumesque atmosphere and characters, link themes and characters in chapters, and address questions about what it means to be a human being living in the twentieth (plus or minus…) century. (I borrowed “simulacrums” from Max Nemtsov’s review of the novel, which also involves a disco ball…) To come back to Irina Prokhorova’s use of “sentimentalism” in describing Kaleidoscope, I can only say that the novel made me feel sentimental about a lot of things. On one level, I realized how much I love postmodern literature that’s this colorful, and beautifully organized and structured, and—corny though it may sound—able to make me feel so sentimental, so emotional, and so curious, about the human experience itself. That, I suppose, is what I meant when I wrote that Kaleidoscope is about everything.

Disclaimers: The usual, including having met Kuznetsov in person (at least once, but maybe twice?) and on the Internet.

Up Next: The Yasnaya Polyana Award longlist plus at least two novel(la)s by Valery Zalotukha.

NOSE Award Goes to Boris Lego, a.k.a. Oleg Zobern

The NOSE Award was presented to Boris Lego on Tuesday for his Сумеречные рассказы (Dusky Stories or Twilight Stories), a book I described in previous posts as “a collection of nineteen Russian Gothic stories; a cover blurb calls it the scariest book of the year…” One NOSE juror apparently called the stories “trash” during (public) deliberations; that cheery note, and others, are here, on the Год литературы site.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this story for those who read Russian literature in English translation is that Boris Lego is a pseudonym for Oleg Zobern, a name I’ve known since his story “Шестая дорожка Бреговича” (“Bregovich’s Sixth Journey” scroll down), appeared in the anthology Rasskazy, in Keith Gessen’s translation. I wrote about Rasskazy here.

The winner of reader voting was Igor Sakhnovsky’s Свобода по умолчанию, (Freedom by Default, I guess?), which was on the NOSE longlist but not the shortlist.

For more on the NOSE Award debates that determined the winner, check out Konstantin Milchin’s article for TASS. Apparently Sergei Kuznetsov’s Kaleidoscope was also a favorite with jurors and the expert panel. I’ve been enjoying Kaleidoscope very much and, given some of the weak finalists I read (or attempted to read) for the Big Book, I’m very surprised (I think even “shocked” would fit) Kaleidoscope didn’t make more shortlists. For more on the NOSE, here’s Elena Rybakova for Colta, in which she praises the shortlisted books by Kobrin, Kuznetsov, and Petrova but doesn’t even mention the winner. 

Up Next: Alexander Snegirev’s Vera.

Disclaimers: The usual plus much of my translation work is funded by grants, including from the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation's Transcript Program. The NOSE Award is also a program of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation.

The 2016 NOSE Award Longlist

Thank goodness for the NOSE Award longlist! I have to admit that a rainy Saturday and a windy, blustery Sunday weren’t very conducive to writing trip reports or book reports… but an award longlist (oops, almost a “lostlist”) feels like just the thing. And the NOSE Award—a program of the Prokhorov Foundation—is always a quirky matter (I still don’t quite understand the NOSE), whether we’re talking about a longlist, shortlist, or award final, and that makes NOSE all the more appealing today. Beyond that, there’s not much time to post the list: the shortlist is apparently on the express, scheduled for debate and arrival on November 2. So here’s the whole longlist, in the order presented on the Prokhorov Foundation site and with my completely inconsistent transliterations of names:

• Yuri Buida’s Цейлон (Ceylon), which has already hit other longlists and which I’ve read (previous post).
• 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).
• Polina Zherebtsova’s Тонкая серебристая нить (Thin Silver Thread) is a collection of stories about civilian life in Grozny during the Chechen Wars. Brief extracts from Zherebtsova’s diary (NB: this is a different book!).
• 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 (appropriately enough, I suppose) fortune telling practices from that other The Book of Changes. I was an I Ching fan as a teenager and don’t want to sound dismissive but, hmm.
• Aleksandra Petrova’s Аппендикс (excerpt) (The Appendix, in a metaphorical sense, it seems) is a novel about Rome. (A review)
• Moshe Shanin’s Левоплоссковские. Правоплоссковские (The title refer to residents of the villages of Levoplosskaya and Pravoplosskaya) is a collection of stories written by a young writer—he was a Debut winner for short fiction in 2014—from Severodvinsk, which interests me from the start because of my many visits to Arkhangelsk.
• Vladimir Voinovich’s Малиновый пеликан (excerpt) (The Raspberry Pelican, perhaps referring to the bird’s color, based on the cover…) is more Voinovich satire with absurdity.
• Dmitrii Lipskerov’s О нем и о бабочках (expert from GQ) (Lipskerov reads from the book on YouTube) (About Him and About Butterflies/Moths/Bow Ties, I’m betting on the lepidoptera, based on a reader review and other factors…) seems to be about a man who loses, ahem, intimate anatomy. The GQ excerpt intro compares it to Gogol’s “The Nose,” one of my all-time favorites, and it’s obvious why, even just skimming the excerpt.
• Igor Sakhnovsky’s Свобода по умолчанию (Freedom by Default) is apparently a novel about love, internal freedom, and political absurdity.
• Vasilii Avchenko’s Кристалл в прозрачной оправе (Crystal in a Transparent Frame) carries the subtitle “lyrical lectures about water and stones,” and Avchenko is said to cover many aspects of life in Vladivostok, including fish(ing), as in this excerpt. Ocean lover that I am, I bought this one after it hit the 2016 NatsBest shortlist.
• Aleksei Zikmund’s Карело-финский дневник (Karelian-Finnish Diary) is a bit of a mystery…
• Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Тимошина проза (Timosha’s Prose), which I read and don’t quite know how to describe… it’s a detached but close narrative about a young man. The novel lacks the, hmm, snap and pop (and crackle, too, I suppose) of Zaionchkovsky’s previous books.
• 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.
• Andrei Shary’s Дунай. Река империй (The Dunai. River of Empires, okay fine, The Danube…) has a lovely cover (I like old maps) and looks at history and the Danube over three millennia.
• Ivan Shipnigov’s Нефть, метель и другие веселые боги (Oil, Blizzard, and Other Cheerful Gods) is a collection of stories in which, according to the publisher, oil is the most cheerful of the Gods or gods, I’m not sure which, particularly since the publisher also compares Shipnigov’s prose to the young Pelevin’s. Here’s a sample story from the collection.

Up Next: Trip reports (Moscow and Oakland), the afore-mentioned Zaionchkovsky book and Alexander Snegirev’s patient Faith/Vera, more award news, and other Big Book finalists, though this second half of the list brings me little joy and much left unfinished…

Disclaimers and disclosures. The usual, plus translating that Vodolazkin book and the fact of support for my translation work from Prokhorov Foundation grants.