2019 NOS(E) Award Finalists

The NOS(E) Award announced a ten-book short list on November 1 in Krasnoyarsk during public debates at the annual Krasnoyarsk Book Culture Fair. This year’s list seems a bit unusual. For one thing (I’ll go for the personal first!), it’s unusual that five of the books are already on my shelves. And then seven of them (!) were written by women. Beyond that, it’s particularly unusual that almost all these books sound interesting, stylistically and/or thematically, and that I’ve read and heard so many very complimentary comments about the majority of them. Winners will be announced in late January or early February 2019.

Here are the ten finalists in the order they’re listed on the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund site:

• Denis Gorelov’s Родина слоников (Motherland of Little Elephants) is a nonfiction collection about Soviet cinema and the Soviet Union itself.
• Yury Leiderman’s Моабитские хроники (Moabit Chronicles) is set in Moabit, the region of Berlin where Leiderman has his art studio.
• Natalya Meshchaninova’s Рассказы (Stories) is a familiar title: it was a 2018 NatsBest nominee and is on one of critic Galina Yuzefovich’s lists of books she recommended at the September translator Kongress in Moscow. (a story)
• Anna Nemzer’s Раунд (Round, probably like a “round” of talks or negotiations, though we’ll see) is described as an “optical novel” (different points of view?) that’s based on conversations. Publisher Elena Shubina especially recommended it to me; it’s on my shelf. Galina Yuzefovich added this one to her list of recommended books for a Frankfurt Book Fair presentation. (a sample)
• Maria Stepanova’s Памяти памяти (In Memory of Memory) is already a finalist for the Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana awards. I’ll be starting this one any day now. (An interview.) (A description.)
• Ksenia Buksha’s Открывается внутрь (Opens In) also comes recommended by Galina Yuzefovich. Linked stories. (A story)
• Yevgenia Nekrasova’s Калечина-Малечина (Kalechina-Malechina, referring to a game) is yet another Yuzefovich pick. Shubina suggested this one to me, too; it’s on my shelf. (A sample)
• Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Нас украли. История преступлений (Kidnapped. The History of Crimes) is set in the 1980s and 1990s; click on the English language title link for a full summary from Petrushevskaya’s literary agency. Also on my shelf.
• Alla Gorbunova’s Вещи и ущи (hmm, this is kind of like Thing Things and Idea Things but even the author seems to prefer leaving that a mystery…) is a collection of stories. (One story) (Another story)
• Viktor Pelevin’s iPhuck 10 is a nice way to finish the list, given that it’s the only title that needs no translation. No matter what it’s about.

Edit, March 5, 2019! Hilah Kohen translated Galina Yuzefovich’s reviews of Round, Kalchina-Malechina, and Opens In for this post on Meduza. I later wrote a full post about Round, which is here. Though I wasn’t keen enough on the other two books to finish them -- they simply weren’t my books -- I do understand their appeal.

Disclaimers: The usual. I know and/or collaborate with some of the people and entities mentioned in the post. I have received some of these books from various parties. The Mikhail Prokhorov Fund’s grant program – Transcript – for translations from the Russian helps pay my fees. And, thus, my bills.

Up Next: English-language reading roundup, a brief Russian-language reading roundup, and Big Book finalists, most of which I’m finding very (okay, extraordinarily!) difficult to read in full, thanks to structural problems, lack of editing, and mission drift. Those problems frequently pile up, creating amorphous, bloated texts. There are far too many books these days (not just written in Russian) that seem to require readers to edit the books in their heads as they attempt to read. It’s especially hard to stick with some of big books of the Big Book when I have so much on my shelves that I can’t wait to try, particularly the Nekrasova and Nemzer titles on this list!

Big Books 1 & 2: Slapovsky and Pelevin

It gives me no joy whatsoever to report that the first two Big Book finalists I’m done with weren’t very satisfying. It gives me even less joy to say that this pair left me so indifferent that I couldn’t bring myself to finish either one. I read most of Aleksei Slapovsky’s Неизвестность, which I guess I’ll continue calling Uncertainty, but could only get to page 41 of Viktor Pelevin’s Лампа Мафусаила, или Крайняя битва чекистов с масонами (Methuselah’s Lamp, or The Last Battle of the Chekists and Masons) before throwing in a frayed old towel. I know it’s time to quit a book when I don’t want to sit down to read.

So. Slapovsky’s Uncertainty was a mixed experience; this is the book that bills itself as “роман века,” which in this case means it’s a novel covering the all-important century of 1917-2017. As I mentioned in my Big Book descriptions, Uncertainty is told through diaries, poetry, and other written materials, including a letter, a court’s death sentence, and interview transcripts. The Russian word for “datafiction” has been used to describe the genre; it’s not inappropriate.

My primary problem with Uncertainty is its tremendous unevenness. The novel is a family saga of sorts—its contributors from a family of Smirnovs span six (or so—I’ll admit I don’t want to go back to count) generations over the course of a century—and the contributors’ contributions vary tremendously in quality, length, and interest. The first chunk, Nikolai Smirnov’s diary (1917-1937), looks at the period immediately after the 1917 coup, examining political and personal (dis)loyalties with varying levels of detail; Volga Germans, the Cheka, and Nikolai’s relationships with women enter into the diary. There is also folk wisdom, such as a mention that the primary fight isn’t between socialism and capitalism or various social classes but between smart and foolish people.

I found the next chunk, a diary written by Vladimir (1936-1941), the most interesting: Vladimir is a teenager who’s very taken with Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered and he addresses many of his entries to Pavka, its hero. Vladimir faces difficulties from being critical in school, troubles with girlfriends, and problems being taken into the armed forces. An eye chart thus makes its way into his diary. So do Stalin’s famous words that a son doesn’t answer for his father. The interview transcripts, recorded in 2016 by Anya Smirnova with her grandmother, father, and mother, follow Vladimir’s diary… and this is where the book began flailing for me. There’s some moderately lively and funny material—asides, one-sided conversations because someone’s out of the recorder’s range—and some contemporary material about teenage Anya’s friendship (or more?) with a much-older man who’s not Russian. But the transcripts are often fluffy and contrived, so I skimmed a bit to get to the grandmother, Ekaterina, who’s one of the book’s most interesting characters: she discusses relationships, abortion, and the family curse, which she says is wanting to please everybody in order to be praised. Toward the end of the last tape, she orders vodka in a café. It’s an understatement to say I think Uncertainty could have benefited from more female perspectives. A fairly brief death sentence for Anton, dated 1954-1962, follows the transcripts.

Skimming changed to skipping when I reached a bulky swath of stories, otherwise unpublished, written by Viktor, an illustrator, dated 1965-2016. I read a bit more than half and couldn’t go on: the stories describe childhood and adulthood, and probably the most affecting involve Viktor’s alcoholism. Not much in the stories felt original enough to keep me reading, though. The novel’s final piece, a 2017 letter by Gleb Smirnov, addresses a familiar topic by focusing largely on Gleb’s relationship with his girlfriend. In some senses it brings the reader back to Nikolai’s diary: for very different reasons, neither of them spells well.

Uncertainty is unsatisfying not so much because it’s so fractured—Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Jacob’s Ladder (previous post) is fractured, too, reflecting fractured times and fractured families, and Ulitskaya makes better use of form than does Slapovsky—but because, perhaps paradoxically, there aren’t enough motifs to reinforce the family ties and breaks that connect and disconnect the various generations, and, most crucially, keep the reader engaged with the drama and tragedy of problems that face the Smirnovs over the century. All that damage and brokenness may be the point here but—and this felt even worse—I also constantly had the sense I wasn’t receiving any new information from the book, that I was reading familiar, recycled material from other novels. It seems as if I read a mishmash of material that started off with some moderately interesting stories about family and history… but then the book became so thoroughly dull and muddled in the middle that I lost interest. I do wonder if Viktor’s stories clarify anything about previous narrators, though I don’t wonder nearly enough to go back and continue reading. There’s a lot of uncertainty about fates in Uncertainty and the long section of Viktor’s stories created a brutal break in momentum. (Critic Vladislav Tolstov called those stories “графоманские тексты,” a graphomaniac’s texts; Tolstov’s final paragraph on Uncertainty, which I read as I was finalizing this post, beautifully sums up my thoughts on the book.) Although I give Slapovsky credit for even attempting to address Big Questions in Russian history, Uncertainty’s inability to hold my attention—I love reading about the human side of history in fiction—is frustrating.

I suppose it’s something of a plus that I was done with Methuselah’s Lamp so quickly that I wasn’t bored for long. That reading followed my familiar Pelevin pattern: after reading a not-so-satisfying book (Uncertainty), Pelevin pulled me in with his narrator’s voice. But it didn’t take many pages for our narrator Creampie’s tale to lose its oomph. The connection of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” with Creampie’s prattling about investments and gold didn’t seem clever for long. That, combined with a near-death experience, signaled the beginning of the end of my reading.

Disclaimers: I’m a member of the Literary Academy, the Big Book Award’s jury, and received electronic copies of all the Big Book finalists. You, too, can read most of the Big Book finalists for free on Bookmate, here: nine of the ten finalists, all but Pelevin, are available and the Bookmate platform is easy to use and synch between devices. I’m using it myself for a lot of my Big Book reading.

Up next: I’m still chipping away at Gigolashvili’s Mysterious Year, which looks brillianter and brillianter after these two books. I’m also working on Andrei Rubanov’s The Patriot, which captures a time and place even if it’s not my book. I’m most enjoying Vladimir Medvedev’s Заххок (Zahhok), which I just started.

Lizok’s Summer 2017 Reading Plan: Ten Big Book Award Finalists

The Big Book Award announced its shortlist last Monday, making this post yet another better-late-than-never production. (It’s deadline time again, what can I say?!) As far as commentary goes, there are a few books I was surprised and sorry missed the list, among them Vladimir Sorokin’s Manaraga (previous post), Anna Starobinets’s Посмотри на него (something like Look at Him, perhaps?), and Anna Kozlova’s F20, which just won the National Bestseller Award. As always, Klarisa Pul’son’s guess list and pre-announcement analysis (here) is informative and fun. Beyond that, for now—since I haven’t yet read any of the finalists, the Starobinets book, or the Kozlova book, or much of anything else from the longlist—I’ll just add that I’m very sorry and disappointed not to see any (any!) female authors on the list, particularly after Kozlova won the NatsBest (where 3/7 of the finalists were women, the other two being Figl’-Migl’ and Elena Dolgopyat, neither of whom made the Big Book longlist) over the weekend. 

In any case, here’s the list of ten finalists for 2017, in the (random?) order they’re listed on the Big Book site, with descriptions. Winners will be announced in early winter and I’ll be posting about my reading before then. There’s a preponderance of long books on the list: at least five are 700 pages or longer. I love a good (good!) long book so am hoping for the best. Although I don’t know much about the books on the list, I’ve already read books by six of these authors.

• Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Тайный год (The Secret/Mysterious Year). I already started this book about the strange time when Ivan the Terrible left both the throne and Moscow for a while... the novel’s cover description mentions psychodrama with an element of phantasmagoria and that seems about right. Gigolashvili’s language is, as always, colorful and playful, this time with lots of medieval touches. This is a long (700+ pages) book with small print and it takes a fair bit of concentration so my guess is I’ll be reading it for a while yet. This book already won the 2017 Russian Prize.  

• Aleksei Sal’nikov’s Петровы в гриппе и вокруг него(Severe tricky title alert! The Petrovs in Various States of the Flu might capture things; this is literally something like “The Petrovs in and around the flu” though I could be completely missing the point since I haven’t read the book.). A novel about a contemporary and allegedly unusual family (aren’t they all?) set in Yekaterinburg. Based on the online version, it’s safe to say that people do have the flu. I don’t like the flu but this one looks interesting.

• Lev Danilkin’s Ленин. Пантократор солнечных пылинок (Lenin. Pantocrator of Dust Motes, I believe, since Lenin refers to dust motes in Aristotle’s De Anima). A biography of V.I. Lenin, né Ulyanov. A heavyweight checking in at 784 pages. 

• Igor Malyshev’s Номах (Nomakh). A novel about the Civil War and Russian anarchist Nestor Makhno, a.k.a. Nomakh, whom Sergei Yesenin immortalized, too.

• Andrei Rubanov’s Патриот (The Patriot). The Patriot, about businessman Sergei Znaev, already made the 2017 NatsBest shortlist. Rubanov’s literary agency, BGS, has a full description. (Only 512 pages!)

• Aleksei Slapovsky’s Неизвестность (Uncertainty? I’m uncertain because I haven’t read the book, though this seems to fit descriptions…). A book covering 1917-2017—the cover says “роман века,” “novel of the/a century”—told through diaries, poetry, and other, well, stuff; Klarisa says “datafiction” is already a term for describing this genre… (Also 512 pages!)

• Shamil Idiatullin’s Город Брежнев (Brezhnev City, at least sort of: Naberezhnye Chelny was called “Brezhnev” during 1982-1988). Childhood in the late Soviet period… I keep reading good things about this book and am looking forward to it very much. Another 700 pages or so…

• Viktor Pelevin’s Лампа Мафусаила, или Крайняя битва чекистов с масонами (Methuselah’s Lamp, or The Last Battle of the Chekists and Masons). Could there have been a Big Book shortlist without a Pelevin book? I’m still waiting for a Pelevin novel to enjoy from start to finish, so who knows, maybe this is my year. In any case, another book covering multiple centuries; I’m betting the title sums it all up well. (A meager 416 pages!)

• Sergei Samsonov’s Соколиный рубеж(The Falcon’s Line/Position? But perhaps not: thanks to a reader review on Ozon.ru, it sounds like this refers to limits and extremes…). Another 700-page novel: this one’s about World War 2 air battles… This book—in manuscript form and under the pseudonym Gorshkovozov—won Samsonov a 2015 Debut Prize for full-length prose.  

• Sergei Shargunov’s Катаев: «Погоня за вечной весной» (Kataev: “The Pursuit of Eternal Spring”). About author Valentin Kataev. (704 pages!)

Disclaimers: I’m a member of the Big Book Award’s jury, the Literary Academy.

Up Next: The Yasnaya Polyana Award longlist. Futurism, finally. I think…

2015 Big Book Award Roundup

Now that my Big Book Award ballot has been scanned and sent in for counting, it’s time for a Big Book Award blog post. Jury prize winners will be announced on December 10; I think reader voting results are usually announced a little earlier. A reminder: you can vote (or check current reader voting) online with either Bookmate, ReadRate, or ЛитРес.

There were nine Big Book finalists this year, and my ratings fall, all too easily, into three categories. This year’s finalists were so weak for my taste that I didn’t finish many: active avoidance of reading is a sure sign to move on. I should mention: Big Book sent me books in electronic form, which is how I did most of my reading. Please see my “2015 Big Book Award Finalists” post for links and Russian titles.

The Top Three. My favorite book of the nine is Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (previous post), a book that strikes me as “big” in lots of ways because Yakhina is so successful in writing a wonderfully readable (debut!) historical novel about a kulak woman who’s exiled. Zuleikha has already won the 2015 Prose of the Year and Yasnaya Polyana awards but, given this year’s Big Book field, I have to think she’ll win something at Big Book, too, even if it’s not a first prize. (She’s leading very handily in reader votes on all three sites.) My second-place book is Valerii Zalotukha’s The Candle. The Candle is so long—around 1,850 pages of small print in two volumes—that I haven’t yet finished it but have no qualms about that, in terms of voting. On the one hand, I’d have placed it a touch lower than Zuleikha anyway, due to occasional wordiness, particularly in the stream-of-consciousness passages. On the other hand, the first 500-600 pages were so enjoyable and interesting that the book could implode totally and I wouldn’t lower its rating: I’ve already read the equivalent of a typical medium-to-long novel! How could I go wrong with a novel set in Moscow in the nineties? With a main character who loves War and Peace? Beyond that, Zalotukha has a great sense of humor and really brings back the feel of the era. I bought a hard copy of The Candle last week and am looking forward to finishing it. It may take some time because there’s just so much book and it’s been especially fun to read it in chunks. It’s the rare book I don’t want to finish too fast. My third-place book is Anna Matveeva’s Nine from the Nineties, a short story collection that I thought was very decent… until I got to the final piece, a novella. Like Zalotukha, Matveeva examines the nineties, primarily in her native Urals, but I thought the book faltered when she brought one of her characters to Paris for the novella. That said, Matveeva does beautifully with topics like class differences, leaving Russia, crime, inflation (there’s even a gym bag/wallet), and school situations, and her characterizations are good, too. Her stories are tidy and I finished all but one, probably a personal record.

The Muddle in the Middle. The three middle books are a real mixed bunch. I finished, grudgingly, Boris Ekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e: it’s relatively short and I have to give Ekimov credit, again grudgingly, for giving the book a measure of narrative drive. That said, I thought this short novel about a family of Cossack descent that goes back to its roots and wide open spaces by the Don River was most notable for remaking village prose in an odd way, featuring an annoyingly precocious child and overlaying patriotism with xenophobic tinges on the story. It felt uncomfortable in all the wrong ways. And then there’s Roman Senchin’s Flood Zone, another book about rural life, or, really, the death of rural life, since the book’s about a village that’s evacuated for a dam. I’ve liked several of Senchin’s books very much but Flood Zone felt horribly flat and predictable to me—bureaucrats against villagers, thin-walled apartments against wood-heated houses, etc.—all with the dam looming in the background. I read more than two-thirds of the book before I just couldn’t go on. Then comes Aleksei Varlamov’s The Imagined Wolf, which is set in the Silver Age but felt flat, too, though Varlamov’s writing is far denser than Senchin’s, resulting in an effect that a friend calls поток слов, which for my purposes, was more a flood (apologies to Senchin) of words than just a flow. I read and read and read (150 pages or more) but always came away wondering what I’d read, despite the fact that everything seemed to make sense to me. Even reading this one on paper didn’t help, which was disappointing because the metaphor of the imagined wolf and the fear that accompanies it sound so intriguing.

The Laggards. My favorite of the bottom three is Igor Virabov’s Andrei Voznesensky, which I enjoyed at times, though primarily for inserted documentary material (dialogue between Voznesensky and Khrushchev was a highlight) or passages more about Pasternak than Voznesensky. Certain things, like descriptions of Peredelkino, where I saw Voznesensky once or twice at annual events marking Pasternak’s death, made the book feel familiar, which probably helped, too, and Virabov does make the book lively. Sometimes so lively that it feels excessively, even embarrassingly, gossipy and kitschy, almost like a dishy 700-page blog post. I read, sometimes skimming, 250 crammed pages. I did learn from it and may scavenge for more interesting material. Next is Dina Rubina’s trilogy, Russian Canary: I read more than 200 pages of the first volume (a Russian friend called me a hero for that) before I succumbed to TMI syndrome—for excessive detail, floweriness, and Rubina’s attempt to shoehorn too many genres into one book—and had to set it aside. I don’t mean to sound snarky particularly since I have to admit I understand why Rubina’s chatty, friendly tone makes this family saga with pet canaries, Odessa, and adventure so popular with many readers. It just isn’t my book at all. Finally, we have Viktor Pelevin’s Love for Three Zuckerbrins, which did me in at about 50 pages. I’ve never been a Pelevin fan—though I’m still hoping to find something I can truly enjoy—but the best thing I can say for this one is that it forced me to take Pushkin off the shelf, for his “Пророк” (“The Prophet”). As usual with Pelevin, there’s something going on in the book about the nature of reality and I have electronic margin comments like “god as jokester” but, as I mentioned to another friend, reading Pelevin reminds me of late nights in college when everybody’s imbibed in too much of something: conversations about philosophy and are-we-real-or-are-we-imaging-this feel brilliant at the time but all you’re left with in the morning is a hangover and the sense that you talked about something really cool. Oh well!

Disclaimers. I’m a member of the Big Book jury, the Literary Academy, and received electronic versions of all the finalist books. Thank you to Big Book for the books and for inviting me to serve on the Literary Academy! I’ve translated excerpts of Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes for Elkost International Literary Agency.

Up Next. Russian Booker winners and Big Book winners. Sergei Nosov’s Curly Brackets, which was a decent travel companion but rather disappointing for a NatsBest winner. A trip report about the ALTA conference, which was tons of fun, as usual; a trip report about Read Russia’s Russian Literature Week, where, among other things, I’ll be speaking with Eugene Vodolazkin at a Bridge Series event at BookCourt in Brooklyn and moderating a Russian-language roundtable at the Brooklyn Public Library with Vodolazkin, Vladimir Sharov, and Dmitry Petrov. A full RLW schedule is online here. Please come if you’ll be in New York during the week of December 7!

The Doors of Deception: Pelevin’s Burning Bush

In a recent email conversation, a colleague and I talked about Viktor Pelevin not being my cup of tea, coffee, or cocoa… that was before I read Операция «Burning Bush» (Operation “Burning Bush”), the first piece in Pelevin’s Ананасная вода для прекрасной дамы (Pineapple Water for the Fair Lady). Burning Bush, like Omon Ra before it (previous post), didn’t turn me into a Pelevin fanatic, but the novella does—continuing with the drink theme—serve up some interesting glasses of kvass.

Kvass tank, 1997.

I don’t like kvass in real life, but I can’t help but appreciate the literary kvass served up in Burning Bush because Pelevin slips in an acid mickey: our first-person narrator, Semyon Levitan, is recruited for a special FSB project that requires training time—lots of training time—spent in a sensory deprivation chamber. While tripping on acid his FSB master puts in his kvass. Part of what makes this novella fun is that it involves none other than George W. Bush: Levitan’s initial mission is to speak, as God, with Bush through an implant in Bush’s tooth. Don’t worry, Levitan is an English teacher who’s more than capable of chatting with Bush.

I haven’t read a lot of Pelevin but I certainly recognized elements that felt like spillovers from Omon Ra: strange secret government programs that require strange secret training and result in strange secret deceptions. There’s also a spiritual element that plays off Daniil Andreyev’s Роза мира (The Rose of the World), a book I’ve never read. Someone once gave it to me as a gift but it got lost in transit somewhere between Moscow and Maine, in an ill-fated box that also contained Lolita, The Brothers Karamazov, and materials about evaluating NGO projects. I hope everyone’s coexisting somewhere in peace. The important thing here is that the references to Andreyev involve Stalin and Satan.

Pelevin generally tends to lose me somewhere, to some degree, and Burning Bush is no exception: I thought the novella worked best before Pelevin began referencing The Rose of the World. The problem isn’t so much that I hadn’t read Andreyev—there’s a chunk of text in Burning Bush, I’d already heard about The Rose of the World, and it’s easy to find background online—but that Pelevin’s use of Andreyev felt a little too heavy-handed to me as a part of the story, even though the Satan element itself fits just fine. I generally seem to think Pelevin’s satire and descriptions of twisted but almost realistic contemporary situations and characters are the best aspects of his books, so I was pleased Burning Bush is a more restrained piece than some others I’ve read—Numbers comes to mind—and doesn’t implode by getting too outlandish too fast.

Which is to say it was the light, fun stuff that made Burning Bush good evening reading material after some long work days. There was plenty to enjoy: Levitan’s ability to imitate voices, the very thought of someone chatting with Bush through Bush’s tooth, fun references to Russian poetry, Tony Blair, and American political and pop culture, including Pulp Fiction, which is wildly popular in Russia. Speaking of “light,” I’ve purposely gone light on some of the details in Burning Bush in case the novella is ever translated into English.

A Note on the NatsBest: The National Bestseller award is back, with new sponsorship from film company United Partnership and the television channel 2x2. The seven-member jury that will choose the winner includes two representatives from the new sponsors and two writers: Sergei Zhadan, whose Voroshilovgrad (previous post) I read in Zaven Babloyan’s Ukrainian-to-Russian translation, and Aleksandr Terekhov, who won last year’s NatsBest for Germans. This year’s winner will be announced on June 2.

Level for Nonnative Readers of Russian: 2.0 out of 5.0, though the book may have felt easier than it is because of the humor.

Russian Name: Виктор Пелевин

Up Next: I’m not sure! NatsBest, perhaps a mishmash of short stories or Leonid Iuzefovich’s Prince of the Wind… or letter S favorite writers…

Image Credit: Kvas vendor, 1997, in Kaliningrad/Königsberg/Koenigsberg, from MicHael Galkovsky, via Wikipedia. I remember seeing these kvass tanks on the street!

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.

2010 Big Book Award to Basinskii

Pavel Basinskii won the 2010 Big Book award for Лев Толстой: Бегство из рая (Lev Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise/Heaven). The publisher’s blurb on ozon.ru describes the book as a reconstruction of what happened between the time Tolstoy left home and his death not long after; the book evidently also describes Tolstoy’s "family drama." The award feels unusually timely because Tolstoy died almost exactly 100 years ago, on November 20, 1910. The book has been quite popular: comments on ozon are very positive, and Escape was no. 6 on today’s pro-books.ru bestseller list. An excerpt is available on Прочтение.

Second prize went to Aleksandr Ilichevskii’s Перс (The Persian), a rather thick novel about a Russian émigré who returns to the Former Soviet Union after a difficult divorce. I tried starting The Persian a month or so ago but couldn’t get into it; I’ll have to give it another go soon, particularly because I’m interested in the Caspian location. An excerpt is available on Прочтение.

Finally, Viktor Pelevin took third prize – after winning the readers’ choice award yesterday, too – for t. Pelevin’s books are always difficult to describe, so I’ll leave plot summary to this article. I’ve never been a big Pelevin fan but t sounds more interesting to me than most of his previous books, in part because he sets part of t in the early 20^th century. Ozon has the first pages online.

I haven’t been tracking Big Book opinion enough to have a good feel for favorites, but I will say that, statistically speaking, I was a real failure this year: I read five of the 14 finalists and none of them won any prizes! At least I tried The Persian and (twice!) almost bought t.

Edit: Photos of the ceremony are online here.

Edit: Thank you to The Literary Saloon for mentioning that a (fairly brief) excerpt of the book is available online here, thanks to Rossiyskaya gazeta and The Telegraph. The piece mentions that the book is being translated into English.

Tolstoy death mask image from author Daniel Hass and user Unklscrufy, via Wikipedia.

The Literary Express, Pelevin, and Russian History

1. My favorite Russian news item for today is about a train, not financial markets or politics. The “Литературный экспресс” (“Literary Express”) train set off from Moscow for Vladivostok today carrying a bunch of writers. Forty writers will travel in groups of 10, covering four itineraries and holding over 200 meetings. Writers include Zakhar Prilepin, Aleksei Varlamov, Viktor Erofeev, Polina Dashkova, and Sergei Luk’ianenko of Night Watch fame.

The goal of “Literary Express” is, in my translation, “propaganda and promotion of contemporary domestic literature and popularization of reading in the Russian regions.”

2. Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review included “Demonic Muse,” Liesl Schillinger’s enthusiastic assessment The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Andrew Bromfield’s translation of Victor Pelevin's Священная книга оборотня. Pelevin isn’t a favorite of mine but, as my father might say, those who like him speak highly of him.

3. I’m a little late posting about this article from The New Republic… Leon Aron’s “The Problematic Pages” describes the context of and some of the material in a new Russian teacher’s handbook called Новейшая история России, 1945-2006 (The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006) by A.V. Filippov. I’d already read this Russian article about the book, which quotes passages that rationalize Stalin’s great terror. The fact that the book exists is not surprising, considering Vladimir Putin’s policies and statements about history. Even knowing that, these articles make for very bleak reading.

Pelevin's The Sacred Book of the Werewolf: A Novel on Amazon

Russian "Big Book" Award 2007 Internet Voting Winners

"The most popular Russian writers are Liudmilla Ulitskaya, Dina Rubina, Viktor Pelevin"
-Большая книга (Big Book Award) site

Okay, I know I'm picky, but a more truthful subheadline would refer to this troika as the most popular Russian literary fiction writers. Big Book's system neatly combines critical views with popularity: literary critics nominate finalists, then readers vote for their favorites over the Internet and a jury determines who wins prizes.

Although 2007's Internet vote winners for audience favorites haven't yet been translated into English, all three authors have written books that are available in translation.

Liudmila Ulitskaya's Даниэль Штайн, переводчик (Daniel Stein, Translator) took first place among readers. Ulitskaya wrote the book because she wanted to tell the story of Brother Daniel, a monk who converted from Judaisim during World War 2, in her own way. I'm looking forward to reading it: Ulitskaya is a rare post-Soviet writer who has achieved critical and commercial success by filling her books with vivid characters and situations that make reading feel easy. They also have enough depth to encourage rereading.

Three Ulitskaya books are available in English: two collections of novellas and stories, Весёлые похороны (The Funeral Party) and Сонечка (Sonechka); and the novel Медея и её дети (Medea and Her Children). The Funeral Party, about people who gather to witness a friend's last days, and Medea, a portrait of an extended family, both feel like collections of quirky characters linked by common situations. I don't particularly like that type of construction, though Ulitskaya's people and places in these works often have enough charm to keep me interested. If you're not as tied to plot movement and linear stories as I am, you may enjoy them quite a bit.

Sonechka, about a woman who might be said to prefer reading fiction to facing life, is more realized as a story, though it veers away from Sonechka for some time, to describe another character who will change Sonechka's life. I think the most intriguing aspect of Sonechka for American readers will be Ulitskaya's descriptions of relationships, aging, and how women see themselves. Sonechka's choices (which I won't reveal) toward the end of the story may come as a surprise or shock to Americans, but a friend from the Former Soviet Union reminded me that Russian women perceive themselves differently as they age.

I hope that more of Ulitskaya's books will be translated into English soon. My two current favorite Ulitskaya novels -- Казус Кукоцкого (The Kukotskii Case) and Искренне ваш Шурик (Sincerely Yours, Shurik) -- have yet to appear in English. Kukotskii, about a doctor and his family, won the 2001 Russian Booker prize, and Shurik looks at a young man who tries to please everyone. Both books already exist in many languages other than English.

Dina Rubina won second place among readers with На солнечной стороне улицы (On the Sunny Side of the Street), which was also nominated for the 2006 Russian Booker. I haven't read it yet: I'm still working on her Вот идёт Мессия! (Here Comes the Messiah), a postmodern novel that mixes plot lines as it shows emigre life in Israel. Many of the vignettes are very nicely written and quite humorous, but I don't like the constant shifts between sets of characters. Only Rubina's Messiah has been translated into English, though other books are available in other languages.

Several books by Viktor Pelevin, who won third place with Ампир В ("Ampir V," get it?), have already been translated into English, though it's tough for me to understand why he fascinates American publishers. Then again, I may have started with the wrong book: Generation П, which was inexplicably "translated" into English as Homo Zapiens. I enjoyed the beginning of the book, with certain pop (literally) culture references and a post-perestroika combination of drear and hope, but the whole thing rapidly degenerates into a messy mass that involves channeling Che Guevara through a Ouija board, advertising, and mushroom-induced strolls. I might have enjoyed Generation П more if its characters felt more like people than props for Pelevin to express ideas. My Russian reader friends don't like Pelevin much, but some Russian readers' comments on online forums seem to recommend Чапаев и пустота (Chapaev and Emptiness, in the Buddha's Little Finger collection) and Оман Ра (Omon Ra) as favorites.

Edit: Post corrected on November 22, 2007.

Books mentioned in this post:
Books by Ulitskaya on Amazon
Dina Rubina's Here Comes the Messiah!
Books by Pelevin on Amazon