Blizzards: Butov’s Freedom

I started writing about Mikhail Butov’s Свобода (Freedom) last weekend, when more than 30 inches of fresh blizzard-begotten snow were still languishing outside my office window. Blizzard memories felt perfect for Freedom, a book that isn’t just a blizzard of words and ideas about aimlessness in the 1990s: Butov includes a set piece about a winter camping trip, complete with a blinding snowstorm, ill-preparedness, and references to Jack London.

Freedom, which is narrated by a nameless (I don’t think I missed a name…) first-person narrator who loses his job early in the book, is filled with metaphors for loss of direction and loss of one’s place in the world. Like several other narrators I’ve met—Makanin’s Petrovich in Underground, which lost the 1999 Russian Booker to Freedom, comes to mind—Butov’s character apartment sits for a friend. The friend has gone off to Antarctica; people go to the ends of the earth in this book. Our narrator doesn’t seem to mind being alone a lot, though he’s not strictly alone: he shares his friend’s apartment with a menagerie of mice, rats, roaches, regular flies, fruit flies (there’s a trash chute problem, something I seem to be finding a lot lately), and spiders. Only the spiders cross the threshold into the room where the narrator sleeps. The narrator feeds and even names one spider. Ursus.

I found myself surprisingly agreeable to reading about Ursus and urban solitude and solitariness: Butov’s descriptions of detachment and emotion can be very striking. In one, the hungover narrator vomits into the sink, after which,

Потом я стоял у окна, очень пустой и очень легкий, и двор, еще безлюдный ранним воскресным утром, видел сквозь сгусток внутренней своей темноты. И вдруг, прямо у меня на глазах, стал падать первый снег. Неуверенный и мелкий, как соль, он таял, едва достигал асфальта, — но брал числом, и площадка для машин перед домом медленно покрывалась белым.

Тогда я заплакал. От полноты переживания.

Then I stood at the window, very empty and very (s)light, and I saw, through a clot of my internal darkness, the yard, which was still unpopulated on an early Sunday morning. And suddenly the first snow began to fall right before my eyes. Uncertain and as fine as salt, it melted as soon as it reached the pavement, but it accumulated and the parking area in front of the building slowly whitened.

Then I began to weep. From the fullness/completeness of the feeling/experience/suffering.

I’ve purposely left the translated paragraph fairly literal, with alternate meanings and favorite Russian tics, like вдруг/suddenly. That last line reminds me of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, particularly after the narrator’s physical emptiness...

Our narrator doesn’t spend the whole book alone, though. There are some brief scenes with an occasional female caller and he visits his mother toward the end of the book. And the anonymous narrator spends lots of time with a college friend, Andriukha, an adventurer whose self-destructive tendencies lead to problems with money, ill-gotten goods, and petty criminals. The lone narrator and Andriukha sometimes feel as antipodal as Freedom’s Antarctica and far north.

The wonder of Freedom is that it works at all: as you can probably tell, it’s lumpy and fairly plotless, and the narrator himself says toward the end that he began by stringing together some funny stories, not thinking they’d turn into an adieu to youth. And Freedom is so dense I reread enough passages that I can practically say I’ve already read the book twice. But the time and effort were more than worth it: for the first snow, for the damn spider, for the narrator’s mother’s clock collection, for a telescope in a kiosk, and for a conversation with Andriukha about death-and-will-it-happen, the conversation we’re supposed to avoid. It’s the combination of Big Things and little things that got to me. And the spontaneous powerful feelings. There’s also a globe factory. Learning about birds from matchboxes. And a reference to railroad stuff and Platonov characters, how could I not appreciate that? Finally, there’s a mention of Tunguska. This is my sixth Tunguska tag, dear readers!

Disclosures: I met Mikhail Butov in Moscow last year through Dmitrii Danilov, who pulled Freedom off a bookstore shelf and recommended it to me as a favorite. I have already thanked him.

Up Next: Grigorii Danilevskii’s Princess Tarakanova, an easy-reading historical novel and Vasily Grossman’s Armenian Sketchbook. Then Ekaterina Sherga’s The Underground Ship, which I’m enjoying. My morbid fascination with Elena Katishonok’s Once There Lived an Old Man and His Wife has come to an end (it feels too goopy and dull, particularly when I have so many other books on the shelves), and I’m reading Mikhail Gigolashvili’s The Capture of Muscovy slowly: his language-based humor can be very, very funny but the book could have used some significant edits.

Two Teas: Dmitry Danilov’s “Black and Green”

I’m glad Zakhar Prilepin’s list of favorite books and stories from the noughties reminded me that I had Dmitry Danilov’s “Чёрный и зелёный” (“Black and Green”) on my e-reader—Danilov’s novella about the wanderings of a tea salesman was fun to read, a lovely example of form and content intertwined. I enjoyed Danilov’s Horizontal Position very much, too (previous post), but “Black and Green” somehow felt even better, more homey… I’d like to think it’s all the tea, though I suspect I just feel even more at home now in Danilov’s world, finding humor and humanness in a place that initially felt bland and sketched but now feels full and almost cozy in its spareness.

Danilov tells “Black and Green” in a first-person voice that resembles the narrative voice of Horizontal Position: the anonymous storyteller of “Black and Green” uses clipped, stripped language, too, offering minute detail about what he sees in his travels and work but saying little about his background or the family he needs to feed. Though the bulk of “Black and Green” describes tea-selling trips to places outside Moscow, Danilov begins his story by describing a dull night job in an office, then an attempt to sell books and postcards to bookstores. It’s futile in the summer. Come back later. Okay.

It’s difficult to convey the strange pleasure of reading “Black and Green.” In terms of detail, the descriptions of tea and towns are wonderful, particularly if you are a tea drinker and/or have been to Russia, but I think this bit, about the narrator’s tea trips with a car owner, Sasha, gets at the essence of what I love so much about how Danilov writes:

Стали ездить с Сашей. Это, конечно, гораздо удобнее и приятнее, чем на электричках, да и вдвоем лучше, хотя последнее и не факт, потому что когда едешь куда-нибудь далеко один, не болтаешь, и больше шансов впасть в полумедитативное остолбенение и заметить вещи, которые в нормальном состоянии заметить трудно.

I began riding with Sasha. Of course this was much nicer and more convenient than taking electrichkas, and, sure, it’s better to work together, though the latter is not a hard-set rule because when you go somewhere far away by yourself, you don’t chat, so there are more chances to fall into a semimeditative stupor and notice things that are difficult to notice in a normal condition.

Kazansky Station, Moscow, with elektrichka trains.
Photo: Dmitry Danilov

In a later section titled “Rage Against the Machine,” the narrator describes his own experiences driving, concluding that driving wears on the nerves, which is hardly interesting or poetic, qualities he implies he found on public transportation. That follows up nicely on the appealing “semimeditative stupor” in the passage above: Danilov’s use of repetition, short sentences, and seemingly irrelevant details all fit beautifully with the paradoxical daze that envelopes his narrators and acts on the reader. He piles on seemingly dull information but stops short of overload, creating unexpectedly nuanced pictures of situations and atmospheres. And what the narrator of “Black and Green” doesn’t say—about his wife, his clients, his aspirations—is at least as important as what he does say, pushing the reader’s imagination to feel the significance of the gaps.

“Black and Green” includes everything from advice on brewing green tea—Maybe I’d like the stuff if I made it properly?— to quietly humorous summaries of towns. The brief entry for the town of Chekhov, for example, ends with this: “Чехов – не очень хороший город. Чехов – очень хороший писатель.” (“Chekhov is not a very good city. Chekhov is a very good writer.”) The novella also includes a passage about a funeral for a friend who committed suicide. Danilov captures drabness before the funeral:

“Серый день и серый дым из огромной серой трубы. Перовская улица, недра неприятного района Перово. Серые пятиэтажные здания и грязно-белые девятиэтажные здания.”   

“Gray day and gray smoke from a huge gray smokestack. Perovskaya Street, the heart of the unpleasant Perovo area. Gray five-storey buildings and dirty-white nine-storey buildings.”

One of Danilov’s best writerly gifts is that he stops when he’s written enough… just as his narrator in “Black and Green” knows when it’s time to leave the tea trade for an office job, before he tires of tea and no longer enjoys his clockwise sweeps through the Moscow region, loaded down with packages of tea.

A Few Notes:

• “Black and Green” mentions the Tunguska Event so, as promised, I’ve initiated a Tunguska Event tag…
• “Black and Green” was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely award in 2010, along with Horizontal Position.
• Литературная газета recently published an interview with Danilov; it’s here.

Level for Non-Native Readers of Russian: 2/5, not especially difficult language; novella length. An especially good choice for readers who’ve visited Russia.

Disclaimers: The usual. I met Dmitrii Danilov at BookExpo America.

Up Next: Dmitrii Lipskerov’s 40 лет Чанчжоэ (The Forty Years of Chanchzhoeh), an odd piece of work about a town invaded by hens. And short stories galore, including St. Petersburg Noir. Then even more stories: Andrei Rubanov’s Стыдные подвиги (Shameful Feats/Exploits… I’m still not sure…), a collection of short stories that I’ve been reading at the beach.

On Edge by the River: Alexander Ilichevsky’s Anarchists

Alexander Ilichevsky’s Анархисты (The Anarchists) was a lovely reading surprise, a novel that blends, fairly successfully, classical and contemporary themes and stylistics. Though I can quote my own post from 2010 about Ilichevsky’s Booker-winning Matisse and say The Anarchists is also “an ambitious, lumpy novel that uses complex, often poetic imagery and language to present social, existential, and metaphysical angles on post-Soviet Russia,” I found in The Anarchists a more even and more satisfying novel than Matisse.

The Anarchists focuses on Petr Solomin, an aspiring artist who left his Moscow life as a businessman to paint on the Oka River, in the Kaluga oblast’. Solomin’s name is rooted in Russian words related to “straw” and he idolizes Isaac Levitan, who died in 1900 but appears in the book as a character. Solomin wants to understand Levitan’s perspectives. Solomin lives with a woman named Katya, whom he meets early in the book, when she gives him a ride in Moscow. And quite a ride it is: Katya, whose beauty is compared to Greta Garbo’s, is a flaky driver. Solomin has to bring her home with him; she turns out to have an addiction. Their acquaintances in the country include two doctors, an Orthodox priest, super-rich newlyweds, and a schoolteacher who’s a specialist in Yevgeny Onegin.

The Anarchists focuses primarily on Solomin’s various sufferings—with himself, with Katya and her addiction, with a Bazarov-like young doctor, and with the rest of the world—and Ilichevsky generally paces the book nicely. The first half of the book is a bit slower and background-heavy than the second, with tangents that take us back in history, telling the story of a local anarchist and natural history expeditions—for those of you keeping track, the Tunguska event gets another mention here and may soon win a tag of its own on the blog. We see the contemporary characters interact with nature, too, particularly the river. There are also heavy, deep, and real conversations among the doctors and the priest: they talk about philosophy and, yes, gossip about Solomin and Katya. Some of this talk feels playful, on the verge of parody.

Ilichevsky folds in lots of literary predecessors, including the afore-mentioned Yevgeny Onegin, Dostoevsky’s Myshkin, a Chekhovesque gun, Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, and the ever-dreaded-but-popular superfluous man. Many of the book’s themes come together when Solomin tells Dr. Dubrovin that all the escapees to the provinces are anarchists because they want autonomy. Solomin also admits to being a superfluous man. We already know his difficulties with Russian society: he loves Eurotravel and fancies the idea of getting lost or disappearing amidst spirits in the woods. Which he does.

How I imagined it: 

Levitan’s Тишина (Silence)

For me, it’s the river that anchors the novel, connecting themes—art, science, nature—and historical eras, and offering landscapes (often with people) for Ilichevsky to describe. And describe he does, beginning the novel with summaries of seasons on the Oka and ending it with the river reflecting a female face. I think the river, both because of its constancy and because of Ilichevsky’s descriptions, contributed most to my rather indescribable enjoyment of The Anarchists.

Rarely do I use words like “beguiling” to describe a novel… but “beguiling” fits my experience with The Anarchists. I loved the book’s contrasts and combinations: the feel of simultaneously reading the present and the past, the feel of rural leisure and urban urgency, and the feel of ancient settings inhabited by contemporary people. Yes, The Anarchists is lumpy, but I think the lumps and tangents give the book much of its organic energy. Ilichevsky pulls so many elements into his novel that it’s tempting to call him an anarchist, too, but he’s careful with his material, which he seems to love very much. Perhaps that gave him the strength to pull back from offering too much about, say, expeditions, anarchists, or Levitan himself. The result is a curiously timeless composite of past and present that mixes post-Soviet alienation with language, straw hats, rural doctors, river banks, bicycles, and literary motifs that took me back to alienated characters from Russian classics, particularly Chekhov and Turgenev.

Disclaimers: I received a copy of The Anarchists from Read Russia, where Ilichevsky was a participant. The usual.

Up Next: Vladimir Makanin’s Two Sisters and Kandinsky, another book that combines classic and contemporary…

Image Credit: Isaac Levitan’s Молчание (Silence), 1898, via levitan-world.ru.

Fly Me to the Moon (Please?): Pelevin’s Omon Ra

Saying that Omon Ra is my favorite Viktor Pelevin novel isn’t exactly the start of a rave review—I’ve never been a Pelevin fan—but I enjoyed Omon Ra enough that I’m not being snarky or damning with faint praise. Omon Ra, a book about one man’s experience with the space program, didn’t convert me into a Pelevin devotee but it did hold my interest for 190 pages of large print. And it did give me a few good laughs. Even better, Omon Ra’s structure is linear and simple, and it lacks the wacky implosions of books like Home Zapiens and Numbers.

Omon Ra chronicles the space adventures of its title character, one Omon Krivomazov, whose policeman father names him for the special forces unit of Russian law and order; Omon’s older brother (deceased from meningitis) was named Ovir, after the group that keeps track of visas and residency registrations. Omon, however, dreams of the freedom of outer space instead of earthly controls: as a child, he lives near the Kosmos movie theater and enjoys films about pilots. He even pretends to be one in the play cottage outside his building, and he makes friends with another boy who wants to fly.

Omon’s glorification of the space program has an almost spiritual feel to it: Omon thinks weightlessness must be the only true freedom and he sees no peace and freedom on earth. Meaning Omon and his friend go to flight school, where (of course!) propaganda and the religion of politics become important aspects of their lives and mission. A lieutenant-colonel speaks to the new cadets, telling them, in Andrew Bromfield’s translation, “…we have to remember the responsibility we bear on our shoulders, don’t we? And make no mistake about it, by the time you get your diplomas and your ranks, you’ll be Real Men with a great big capital M, the kind that exist only in the land of Soviets.” Lenin appears, too, with two “major works on the moon—‘The Moon and Rebellion’ and ‘Advice from an Outsider’.”

Truth is stranger than fiction: 1970 Soviet lunar rover.

Since we’re in the land of Lenin and Soviets—as depicted by Pelevin, who loves to twist what’s already far, far askew—the space program isn’t quite what we might expect. ***Unless we already know the book’s secret! I will now commence including details that might spoil Omon Ra’s plot… That said, I knew the book’s secret but didn’t feel especially sorry I did.*** When Omon and several others begin their training for a moon mission, they’re stationed in an underground compound and told they’ll make the ultimate sacrifice. Just as odd: Omon’s lunar rover is a low-tech piece of equipment with a bicycle frame and “spy-hole lenses” that “distorted everything so badly there was no way I could tell what was outside the thin steel wall of the hull.”

The fact that Omon lives to tell his story means something goes wrong—well, right—and Omon, the guy whose lunar rover isn’t so different from the bike he rode as a kid, doesn’t make it to the moon. But that doesn’t mean he’s cheated out on a journey: he still has a flight of sorts, complete with a supply of тушёнка (canned meat) and radio conversations with his flight colleagues, who apparently die in the early stages of the expedition.

The reason Omon Ra worked for me is that Pelevin manages to combine risky satirical material—shooting down the space program as a propagandistic fake that keeps people underground, in the dark, away from that weightless freedom—with the solid structure I mentioned earlier. Even if some of the book’s motifs, such as certain central Moscow locations, felt a little heavy-handed, Pelevin shows decent self-control with his material, even as he draws in the Tunguska event—how could it not get a mention?—and fake hunting trips for VIPs. And, yes, even Pink Floyd.

Level for Non-Native Speakers of Russian: 2.0 or 2.5/5. The language in Omon Ra wasn’t as difficult as the inherent absurdities and oddities, some of which felt a little inconsistent.

Up Next: That list of translations, which I will have to finish for next week: yesterday I started Dmitrii Bykov’s Ostromov, a big, long book with small print that will take weeks. It hooks in nicely with some of my other Petersburg reading. (Bely’s Petersburg has been set aside, at least for the duration of the semester… it just doesn’t mix with the rather hurried pace of life right now…)

Disclosures: I always enjoy speaking with translator Andrew Bromfield and publisher New Directions.

Photo credit: NASA via Wikipedia. This photo looked eerily similar to what I imagined as I read Omon Ra.

Sorokin’s Ice Prequel: Chillin’ with Bro

Vladimir Sorokin’s Путь Бро (Bro) (sorry, no italicized Cyrillic allowed today on Blogger...), the first novel in Ice Trilogy from New York Review Books, translated by Jamey Gambrell, is a prequel that prehashes much of the core of Sorokin’s Лёд (Ice), a book I read several years ago (previous post). Sorokin wrote Ice first, then backed up to write its back story. Apparently I’m not the only reader (or writer) who wondered, perhaps grudgingly, why all those blue-eyed, light-haired people were knocking each other in the hearts with ice-tipped hammers in an attempt to gather their brethren, 23,000 chosen people, for a special rapture. I haven’t read 23,000, the trilogy’s culmination, but think NYRB’s summary of the trilogy aptly describes the first two books:

Pulp fiction, science fiction, New Ageism, pornography, video-game mayhem, old-time Communist propaganda, and rampant commercial hype all collide, splinter, and splatter in Vladimir Sorokin’s virtuosic Ice Trilogy, a crazed joyride through modern times with the promise of a truly spectacular crash at the end. And the reader, as eager for the redemptive fix of a good story as the Children are for the Primordial Light, has no choice except to go along, caught up in a brilliant illusion from which only illusion escapes intact.

I found in Bro, like Ice, an irritatingly readable book that I didn’t especially like. I couldn’t put either book down (despite repetition), but Sorokin’s abstractions, though effective on one level, make the books feel, to echo what other readers have told me, a little soulless (intentionally?) even when they compel me to keep reading. And both times I had that sinking Peggy Lee feeling of “Is that all there is?” So… In Bro, the title character narrates his life story: born the day the Tunguska meteor hits, goes on Leonid Kulik expedition to site, knocks heart on ice, realizes he’s found his true self. Now he must find 22,999 others like him who are also capable of speaking with their hearts, eating a raw vegetarian diet before it’s trendy, seeing the rest of Earth’s population as meat machines, and being saved during that rapture I mentioned above. Bro begins by finding Fer, Eve to his Adam.

Part of the paradox of Bro and Ice is that they seem silly – the pulpiness NYRB mentions is obvious, with calendar pages tearing off and heart-related passages so cheesy I wrote “oy” in the margins – as they examine the nature of a group that considers itself chosen and allowed to do anything. (I doubt it’s coincidental that Dostoevsky is involved when Bro dreams about a book…) It’s okay to kill, reason is bad, and books are just paper covered with combinations of letters. Bro sees himself as part of a war to free his brothers and sisters, people of light, from the dark, meat machine masses. Bro’s group are higher beings, enlightened, as it were.

It’s notable that Bro’s stylized language changes over the course of the novel. The book’s opening reads like a classic Russian narrative of childhood and youth but Bro’s last quarter contains, for example, a passage about World War Two that mentions the country of Order, the country of Ice, the country of Freedom. Freedom and Ice beat Order. Weapons are metal pipes. Oh, those meat machines! Another passage also uses остранение, defamiliarization, to describe movie screenings in Germany: a box projects shadows onto white material. It reminded me a bit of Natasha Rostova’s trip to the opera in War and Peace.

Bro brings out the hard, cold totalitarianism of Bro and his crew, showing us how they find siblings in the Soviet and Nazi systems and use their infrastructures. In the Soviet Union, they cruise the streets looking for brothers and sisters, arresting them so they can pop them in the hearts and show them their true natures and make them happy, too. And that’s where Bro and Ice are most interesting: showing how the ice people’s activity parallels and intersects with that of real-life totalitarian regimes. Of course Bro’s people are more chosen than the political regimes’ chosen, and their intentions are (even more) purely selfish: their source and inspiration, after all, are celestial, from meteorite ice, a piece of another world.

I could go on and on about Bro and Ice but will just add a few notes: A big caveat: I’ll repeat that I haven’t read 23,000, which apparently Changes Everything. (See Daniel Kalder’s piece on Publishing Perspectives about Sorokin and the trilogy.)… I think New York Review Books did the right thing by placing Bro first in the trilogy book, even though it was written after Ice… According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, Sorokin once said literature was just “paper with typographic signs,” thoughts rather like Bro’s… Do I recommend the Ice books? Sort of. If you enjoy abstract novels of ideas with science fiction elements that read easily and offer plenty of oddity, they may be right up your proverbial alley. It’s taken me a few years and a few books to edge into Sorokin’s world.

Level for Non-Native Readers of Russian: 2/5 or 2.5/5 for the reading and words themselves: the book reads fairly easily and quickly.

Disclosures: New York Review Books is a publisher with whom I always enjoy discussing translated fiction. Speaking of NYRB, I thought editor Edwin Frank’s comment in the Times article, about politics and choosing titles, was very telling, especially after conversations at the London Book Fair about politics and fiction. (Previous post.)

Up Next: Aleksandr Snegirev’s Тщеславие (Vanity). Then Mikhail Shishkin’s dense Венерин волос (Maidenhair). I’m also looking forward to reading Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless, which I bought at a reading a few days ago. Valente’s site calls it “a bold retelling of a Russian fairy tale about Marya Morevna and Koschei the Deathless set in Stalinist Russia.” Publisher Tor has excerpts here.

Photo credit: Tunguska event site, 1927, photographed by Leonid Kulik’s expedition. I thought the expedition scenes in Bro were a highlight.

Vladimir Sorokin's "Ice" Capades

Probably the most famous statement in Russian literature about ice is “Лёд тронулся.” It translates roughly to “the ice is moving” and indicates progress, advancement. Who said it? A conman, Ostap Bender of Il’f and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs. The more I think of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Лёд (Ice), the more I think of Ostap Bender: Sorokin’s Ice is more con than novel.

Ice chronicles the activity of certain blue-eyed, blond-haired people who search for others that look like themselves. When they find them, they bang on their chests with icy hammers. Some hammerees respond by speaking their “true” names through their hearts; they are rehabilitated. The rest, the “empties,” are left to die.

There are many layers to the book that I won’t detail, lest you, too, get sucked into this slippery mess and want to discover its core. Be ready: Ice may max out your capabilities for the willing suspension of disbelief.

Sorokin divides his book into several stylistically dissimilar sections that he links with the ice motif. The first part of Ice takes place in contemporary Russia, and the heart hammerers resemble a Russian criminal group. This part of the book is brutal, at least in the Russian original, with so much gratuitous and graphic violence, swearing, sex, and other ickiness that many readers may want to abandon the novel.

Why did I keep reading? For one, I wanted to finish the book to get a feel for why Sorokin has caused so much controversy. One lesson learned: Sorokin’s love for writing about bathroom-related topics made it obvious why Putin’s youth group Walking Together (Идущие вместе) used a toilet to collect Sorokin books during a protest.

Still, I have to, grudgingly, give Sorokin some credit: he has a decent sense of timing and knows how to manipulate the reader to finish a book. Just as the violence and abuse in Ice became too much, Sorokin shifted his narrative. By this point, it was too late for me to put the book down because my interest was piqued. Would the book get better? Were the hammerers an Aryan cult? What did the heart have to do with everything? Or anything? Would I send my copy of Ice to Russia for a flush?

I finished and kept it. The book calmed down some but didn’t exactly improve, meaning that, unfortunately, the answers to the other questions are murky. In terms of meaning, Ice is as empty as the heartless victims of the hammer, and I won’t consult the other installments of Sorokin’s trilogy for further clarification. Once is enough, thanks.

One positive: as Ice progresses, Sorokin rather cleverly shows the group altering its operations to fit societal changes, operating under KGB cover during the Stalin years and later distributing ice hammers for home use.

The biggest reason I don’t want to finish the trilogy is that there’s nobody to care about in Ice. Whether the hammerers are good or bad forces in the world becomes a moot point because they feel as icy as their hammers, despite allegedly speaking with their hearts.

Although Sorokin has said that this is his first book where content is more important than form and that he believes the book is about the search for a lost spiritual paradise rather than about totalitarianism, I can’t buy his supposed sincerity. Ice is about a utopian abstraction, not real people.

That leads to another problem. Ice also feels, to me, like a confused and ambiguous statement about the Soviet past, where another perverted utopian abstraction took precedence over real people. Like the Soviet regime, the hammerers abuse their power to lead a chosen few toward the promise of a bright future, meanwhile pounding at the chests of the less fortunate masses, whom they condemn to death and ignomy. It’s an odd form of compassion.

Somehow, it seems fitting that my copy of Ice is flawed: the book’s innards are glued upside down inside the cover. Perhaps even the publisher isn’t sure which end is up. Paging Ostap Bender…

Summary: Not particularly recommended except as an insight into what some Russians are reading these days. Ice, a combination of melodramatic kitsch, science fiction, and pop philosophy, is a book that gets under your skin and reads quickly if you get hooked in. Not for the faint of heart (sorry) or those impatient with postmodernist manipulation of genre or readers. The translation looked quite decent in spot checks, though the first section seemed overly colloquial. Jamey Gambrell’s English-language translation of Ice was published by the New York Review of Books in the icy depths of January 2007.

PDF of Ice, Chapter One

Ice (New York Review Books Classics) on Amazon