Tidying Up the Shelf: Quick & Basic Takes on Books by Ganieva, Yakovleva, and Stolpovskaya

I’d been planning to write about the ASEEES (Slavist!) conference this week but my “read recently/read sooner” shelf is so packed that I decided to focus instead on three books so they can go to the stacks: Alisa Ganieva’s Оскорбленные чувтсва (Offended Sensibilities), Yulia Yakovleva’s Небо в алмазах (hmm, maybe The Diamond Sky?), and Olga Stolpovskaya’s Ненавижу эту сучку (I Hate That Little Bitch). All three books read quickly and easily, with no thoughts of quitting – what a relief after last year’s horrible streak of books that felt like rough drafts! A few thoughts on each book:

Ganieva’s Offended Sensibilities combines whodunnit (why did the regional economic development minister die?) with elements of parody and/or satire (I can’t quite decide which I’d emphasize but let’s say there’s arch humor), recent sociopolitical developments (corruption plus, yes, offended sensibilities), personal stories (one life is particularly hard-knock), and tinges of Gogol’s Government Inspector. The book is set in an unnamed Russian city, taking Ganieva away from her usual setting of Dagestan, and she certainly seems to enjoy her change of scenery. Among other things, she serves up some juicy love triangles, vivid details of opulent, over-the-top lifestyles, conflicts over how history is taught, protests, and a romance between one of the dead chinovnik’s staff members and a police detective. Offended Sensibilities left me with the impression of a light-but-pretty-serious novel about twenty-first century culture wars, politics, and the need for love. A couple of scenes felt a touch long but the book didn’t drag and I enjoyed seeing Ganieva’s city through characters who form a sort of Greek chorus showing contemporary life to the reader. Sure, the book is very Russian but many of the details feel painfully familiar. For more: an excerpt translated by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler; that page has a link to a She’s in Russia podcast about the book.

The Diamond Sky, by Yulia Yakovleva, is volume three of crime-solving from Leningrad police detective Vasily Zaitsev. This time around, Zaitsev investigates the death of silent film actress Varya Metel’ (her surname means “blizzard”), who’s found in her room at a communal apartment where she lives with a group of people friendly to her. Although the settings in this Yakovleva book didn’t quite feel as textured as her other two – probably because this communal apartment isn’t as gritty as others, the “friendly” above is important – my notes included “overwhelming sense of dust => old things/times” and “she doesn’t want people to see her aging/changes.” All true and all part of Metel’s story. Despite not finding The Diamond Sky (the diamonds, by the way conjure up an aspect of Ilf and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs) nearly as intriguingly convoluted as installment one or as unusually mixed in genre as installment two, the book still made for a very decent companion on winter evenings. I can only say a big “ouch” about what Zaitsev finds in the mystery’s denouement.

I enjoyed the Ganieva and Yakovleva books but (largely for reasons of genre) it’s Stolpovskaya’s I Hate That Little Bitch that has the most heart and soul: the novel tells the story of two women who work together at a TV production company (I think that’s the right way to put it) and start living together. The narrator, a Muscovite, is no longer with her husband and her girlfriend, Alex, was born in Russia, emigrated to Australia, then came to Moscow to work, away from her Australian husband. Stolpovskaya includes lots of little details that characterize her people, their settings, and their situations: a research institute renting out office space (been there, done that!), the narrator reading Kharms to her daughter at bedtime, and green slime (the “toy”) getting stuck on an Australian ceiling. There’s even an incident with an Australian bat. And a naked pianist. A trip from Moscow to Australia with other co-workers (!) felt a bit long (yes, travel delays are real but these made for slightly tedious reading) and sometimes the family feels a bit too wacky for fiction (see above: naked pianist) but Australia serves as a “through the looking glass” setting for the narrator to see Alex in a new way. (There’s a fair bit of antipodeness running through the book.) I certainly wouldn’t argue with the blurby back-cover quote from Stolpovskaya saying the book is about freedom. I think that, along with a combination of humor and melancholy about not belonging, is what helped the book endear itself to me, despite the travel delays: I love reading about women I can’t help but root for because they do what they want and aren’t afraid to love as they wish.

A quite note: I’m reading primarily books written by women this winter as I prepare to participate in a panel at the London Book Fair on March 14: “Women in Literature & Translation: Realities & Stereotypes.”

Up Next: The Slavist conference. Ludmila Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped. Alexei Salnikov’s The Petrovs In and Around the Flu, which I truly am enjoying a million times more in print format – it makes me giggle.

Disclosures and Disclaimers: The usual. Something connects me to each of these books.

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.

Riding Yakovleva’s Red Horse

I often seem to enjoy detective novels most for their portrayals of fears related to violent crime. I love the formal aspect, too, particularly when writers stretch the genre: What builds suspense and keeps the pages turning? Beyond that, I like thinking about how all those factors tend to differ in books from various countries. What might they indicate about cultures and societies?

In novels like Yulia Yakovleva’s Укрощение красного коня (Taming the Red Horse; you might want to click through for a plot summary), the fears go far beyond violent crime and, for me, anyway, the suspense comes far less from trying to figure out who dunnit than in wondering how detective Vasily Zaitsev will act when forced to face moral dilemmas. Zaitsev isn’t perfect but he does pretty well, ethically speaking, particularly given the decisions facing a resident of Leningrad in the early 1930s. I’ll confess that I don’t even remember who, exactly, ended up committing the crime. I focused primarily on Yakovleva’s geographical settings in Leningrad and Starocherkassk, not to mention the treacherous temporal setting when—this is mentioned early in the novel—most crimes were being labeled with “political.”

The basic crime here is that a lauded horse (Пряник, Gingerbread, sometimes a cookie, I love them) keels over at the race track and his rider ends up dead, too. Despite a distinct lack of interest at HQ, Zaitsev insists on investigating, leading him to a cavalry riding school, a vet school, and, eventually, Starocherkassk. The horse turns out to an Orlov and varying opinions among the novel’s horsey characters—is it better to purify the breed or bring in new blood?—seem to echo social issues of the time, particularly given the “red” in the novel’s title. Even with the horse details, in my reading, Zaitsev’s detective investigation feels like just a formal skeleton for a novel about a period when society is divided—the revolution wasn’t even a full generation ago—leading Zaitsev to wonder, for example, how a horse can differ in tsarist and Soviet times, and to notice differences in how former nobles and present peasants/workers comport themselves. Yakovleva somehow works this all into the story so it feels very natural: she’s chosen her temporal setting and formed her main characters wisely.

One of Zaitsev’s challenges is an assignment to travel to Starocherkassk with a woman named Zoya, whom he first meets when she comes to his office and throws up in his wastebasket. I figured out the cause long before Zaitsev does (he’s smart about crime but not biology!) and though he initially seems to have difficulty with Zoya’s feminist views (I noted down “Zaitsev not much for women’s lib”), he softens considerably over the course of the novel, particularly after realizing why she’s thrown up and seeing how she sacrifices so they’ll both have enough to eat during their time away. Zoya, by the way, brings Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don on the trip with her.

Dekulakization is the source of many of Zaitsev’s moral dilemmas. He gives food to starving children at a station stop during his train trip with Zoya and is later asked to participate in a security operation, as part of a “communist answer” to the “kulak bandits.” When Zaitsev is asked to participate in another unsavory bit of work later in the book, he again finds a way to refuse. The era’s catastrophic combination of repression, food shortages, dekulakization, and collectivization affect Zaitsev and Zoya in other ways, too. Zaitsev even wonders if they’re being lodged with a family that’s moved into a former kulak’s house.

If all that isn’t enough, the book oozes with atmosphere, something Yakovleva’s very good at creating. There are smelly bars, Zaitsev’s crowded communal apartment (a neighbor lends him luggage), and the unbearable heat in Starocherkassk. Sweat. Fairly early in the novel, I noted “a feeling of filth” when Zaitsev pats a stray dog then goes to rinse his hand in the Moika river, the same place people urinate. Not to worry: the water smells fresh anyway. I cringed anyway. There are nice little touches about Zaitsev, too: before leaving Starocherkassk for Leningrad, he makes sure to return tiffin boxes to a cafeteria worker so she won’t get in trouble.

I enjoyed Yakovleva’s first Zaitsev novel, Tinker, Tailor (previous post), but I think Red Horse is a much better book. Tinker, Tailor has some awkward plot lines (the love story, the imprisonment) and is saved by atmosphere, Leningrad, a serial killer’s quirky method, and Zaitsev himself. Red Horse isn’t perfect—it’s a bit long in places—but it moves along at a moderate pace, going into enough depth about Zaitsev’s psychological state and all the difficulties he faces at home (why does he suddenly have lots of servants he doesn’t need?) and work (will he be a goner because he’s acting according to his conscience?). Yakovleva layers all that very well, creating a sort of hybrid book: it’s ostensibly a detective novel but, as I mentioned above, I don’t even remember who dunnit because I was far more interested in Zaitsev, his identity, and his environment. That’s what kept me turning pages. Reviewer Kira Dolinina, writing for Kommersant, seems to have read the book similarly and I hope she’s right that Yakovleva doesn’t seem to have exhausted the detective genre yet. I, too, would love to read more about Zaitsev.

Up Next: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, two English-language titles, and the Strugatsky Brothers’ Doomed City, which will be the first of their books that I’ve been able to read in its entirety in Russian. (I’m not quite done but I already know I’ll have to finish!)

Disclaimers: The usual. I first heard about Yakovleva’s books from Banke, Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency; BGS represents Yakovleva and quite a few of my authors, and I often collaborate with them.

Yakovleva’s Atmospheric & Art-Filled Leningrad Detective Novel

Yulia Yakovleva’s Вдруг охотник выбегает, known in English as Tinker, Tailor, is a wonderfully atmospheric detective novel set in 1930 Leningrad: detective Vasily Zaitsev and his colleagues investigate some rather staged-looking murders. What made Tinker, Tailor tick for me was Yakovleva’s ability to blend dark details – nasty weather, dark streets, violent crime, and the start of the purges – with almost (I said “almost”!) cozy elements of Soviet life, things like train etiquette, a special delivery of potatoes (what says “love” like potatoes, anyway?), and an affection for the arts. Ballet, fine art, and the Hermitage all play large roles. Floating along with these and other period details, of course, is the Petersburg myth, something that seemed to follow around me like the Bronze Horseman both as I read and as I hurried down many of the same streets as Zaitsev when I was in Petersburg last month.

Although the plot of Tinker, Tailor felt rather lumpy – a little slow to gain momentum, then barreling to a conclusion – Yakovleva worked in plenty of historic and cultural details to hold my interest even when I was waiting for the book’s pieces to come together. Although I never quite felt I could distinguish Zaitsev’s entire supporting cast of colleagues, that’s often a problem for me, particularly with detective novels (in both Russian and English) where I seem to focus so/too much attention on clues and other details. In Tinker, Tailor it was especially fun to see historical, cultural, and political elements that came up in other books, among them Anastasia Vyaltseva’s song “Хризантемы” (“Chrysanthemums”), which comes up in Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator (previous post) as well as the film adaptation (maybe the novel, too; I don’t know) of Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch. And then there’s the fact that one of the deceased in Tinker, Tailor is an African-American communist, a detail that recalled Paul Goldberg’s The Yid (previous post).

And then there’s uneasiness and mistrust among the collective after an arrest. And political conclusions to criminal investigations. And generational clashes of values: toward the end, for example, the killer accuses Zaitsev, who’s younger and an orphan besides, of being a “дикарь” (“barbarian”) for his lack of cultural knowledge. Apparently it’s nicer to be a murderer than a police detective who’s willing to do plenty of remedial work that involves research requiring books as well as shoe leather. Zaitsev’s an appealing enough character that I’m very much looking forward to reading Yakovleva’s next book, Укрощение красного коня (Taming the Red Horse), which I bought, appropriately enough, last month in Petersburg. Even if Zaitsev isn’t quite as irresistible a figure as Boris Akunin’s Erast Petrovich Fandorin, he’s far more down-to-earth than Erast Petrovich (who can get a bit fussy) and has more than enough presence and smarts to make Tinker, Tailor an enjoyable novel.

I think that’s plenty, both to avoid spoilers and because it’s a lazy, snowy Christmas Day here. Merry Christmas!

Disclaimers: The usual. I first heard about Yakovleva’s books from Banke, Goumen & Smirnova Literary Agency; BGS represents Yakovleva and quite a few of my authors, and I often collaborate with them. I received the book from one of the organizers of the Russian stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair, thank you very much!

Up Next: Sukhbat Aflatuni’s lovely Tashkent Novel, Vladimir Medvedev’s polyphonic Zahhak, an end-of-year post, and something else…I have some appealing-looking books in English waiting for me!