Sukhbat Aflatuni’s Weirdly Enjoyable Ant King

I’d intended to include Sukhbat Aflatuni’s Муравьиный царь (The Ant King) in my 2016 year-end post, listing it as the weirdest book I read last year… but then, in all my December 31, year-end hurry, well, I simply forgot. The Ant King is weird and wonderful in a fun, postmodern way—I love weird, it can carry me away—and it’s my favorite, so far, of all the books I brought back from Moscow last year, though I’m now thoroughly enjoying Sergei Kuznetsov’s Kaleidoscope, which is also slightly weird, not to mention, to various degrees, enjoyable, wonderful, and postmodern, depending on the individual chapter/story.

Part of what makes The Ant King peculiar is that the first part—a first-person narrative from an architect named Lena—kept me reading despite not being especially interesting or unusual. Lena tells of all sorts of family hell, flashing back to childhood, as well telling of present-day legal issues related to a building failure. Most important, she describes two family vacations, one in her childhood, the other in adulthood: both involve her adopted brother (intimations of incest) and the adult vacation includes (but of course!) a fling with a lifeguard in red shorts generally referred to as Mikhalych, a name that’s a slightly abbreviated patronymic. Maybe family vacations deserve more credit as plot elements.

The second half of the book is a third-person narrative that focuses much more on Mikhalych, who’s essentially the novel’s title character—ant kings, according to the text, which I’ll translate loosely here, fertilize the queen then die as unneeded organisms that have done their job—so it’s interesting that he’s known by his patronymic. Though the book’s ending doesn’t make Mikhalych’s fate clear, it is clear that he did his ant king biological duty: he, Lena, their baby, Lena’s teenage son, and Mikhalych’s treasured tank of tranquilizing fish all live together. I think the best part of the book is Mikhalych’s car journey through a blizzard—this wacked-out trip reminds me a bit of Vladimir Sorokin’s Blizzard (previous post) but Aflatuni’s journey feels far fresher to me—to bring his mother to a gerontozorii, isolated housing for geronty, people who become immortal (and dangerous) from rogue sleeping pills.

I suppose the juxtaposition of the generally realistic first narration with the rather odd surrealistic portion of the second narration is a big part of what makes The Ant King feel fresh to me, particularly because Aflatuni slathers on a thick layer of (oh, happiness!) storybook motifs that make me want to pull out my old notes on Vladimir Propp. Among them are Old King Cole, Baba Yaga, vampires, and Kolobok, a Gingerbread Man-like character who escapes his grandparents. Mikhalych’s geront mother even reinvents the Kolobok story during the car ride. That ride, by the way, brings us to locales off the cell phone grid (danger!), the River Beda (beda is trouble: the Oxford Russian Dictionary offers up “misfortune” and “calamity”), and, of course, the forest. Plus there are weird cops, the story of Mikhalych’s father being hit by lightning, and a million other things, including the gerontozorii itself, a monastery (there is a runaway, a twist on Kolobok, here), not to mention waxen-faced geronty who approach the car. The latter reminded me of Night of the Living Dead.

If you were to ask me what I think all this amounts to, I’m not quite sure how I’d answer… beyond fun reading that made me think about Propp, archetypes, dying, and society. That’s already a lot: this is yet another short-but-dense text of a book I’d love to read again (or, honestly, translate, to really get at all the connections…). What stands out most for me is how Aflatuni depicts family and, hmm, the structure and order of life and communities. Mikhalych, for example, analyzes his relationship with Lena as if they were ant colony members, Lena’s parents have marital difficulties, the sibling situation is uncomfortable at best, and then there’s the question of isolation at the gerontozorii and the monastery. That layer, together with all the Proppesque motifs, which of course often include family, sometimes feel updated (a term I don’t much like flashes here: “paradigm shift”) for the present day—combining the deep, dark forest as a place to disappear with going off the cell phone grid is just perfect, as is the immortality-giving drug that shows that better living does not always come through chemistry—lend the book’s characters a beautifully motley collection of traits, meanings, and motives from folk motifs, myth, and contemporary life. It’s a fitting way to examine what’s (sur)real and look at patterns. I’m now very much looking forward to Aflatuni’s Adoration of the Magi.

Since we mentioned ants: Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s translation of Hamid Ismailov’s story “The Dervish and the Mermaid” is in Image magazine, here. The connection: the story is from Ismailov’s (currently unpublished) novel Gaya, Queen of Ants, written in Uzbek. (Aflatuni is also from Uzbekistan.)

Another ant reference: I failed in my attempt to finish the Strugatsky Brothers’ Жук в муравейнике (Beetle in the Anthill). Though I enjoyed aspects of an investigator’s work tracking someone down—futuristic devices for translation and communication were kind of fun—the Strugatskys’ blend of corny humor and interplanetary travel, either of which sometimes work for me on its own, just didn’t hold me. This must be the fourth or fifth of their books I’ve tried; I read more than half. I’ll keep trying for another one or two…

Up Next: That roundup post I keep talking about, Kuznetsov’s Kaleidoscope, Nose Award winners, and Plot Project bits on reading Crime and Punishment, which I may well include as add-ons to my regular posts. I’m also thinking about a Pushkin Project for later in the year: that would combine a reading of Andrei Sinyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin—which I received from the Russian Library/Columbia University Press in Slava I. Yastremsky and Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy’s translation—with reading Pushkin works Sinyavsky mentions. It looks like the perfect starting point for some remedial work on my knowledge of Pushkin.

Crowded "On the Sunny Side of the Street"

Dina Rubina’s На солнечной стороне улицы (On the Sunny Side of the Street) is the work of a literary magpie: the novel combines a comfortable nest of a story with shiny devices and descriptive passages that attract attention and embellish. Fortunately, the story underlying all the decoration is engrossing, thanks to the situations and city, Tashkent, in which Rubina places her characters.

On the Sunny Side of the Street is, at its simplest, some form of melodrama, the story of a girl, Katya, who survives the blockade of Leningrad and is evacuated to Tashkent. She becomes a criminal and a mother, and her daughter, the difficult Vera, grows up to be an esteemed artist. The two have a difficult relationship that doesn’t improve when Katya tries to kill her own lover, a kindly man whom Vera takes in while her mother is away. Vera finds “Uncle Misha” drunk on the street and brings him home, where he treats her better than Katya ever has.

My favorite passages in On the Sunny Side of the Street involve Katya and Uncle Misha, probably because they bring Rubina further away from characters I’ve already met in her fiction: artists and herself. Many of the dozens of secondary characters – particularly Vera’s father and a woman from the market who takes Katya in – are interesting, too. Rubina also gives a wonderful feel for the multicultural Tashkent, where she grew up.

Sometimes, though, it feels as if Rubina doesn’t trust herself to simply tell a good story. Instead she piles on imagery, exclamation marks, endless ellipses, and first-person metafiction tangents that detract from and even repeat her storytelling. Other techniques, like the novel’s timeline zigzags, distract less, and many motifs, such as classical music and watches, add to the book’s themes. Sometimes I wonder if Rubina tries too hard to use all her memories and ideas as soon as possible, lest she forget them.

Although I can rationalize in several ways the purpose of this fragmentation – to establish commonalities of childhood experiences in Tashkent or creative alter egos – I think a simpler narrative structure could have accomplished at least as much. More important, it also would have felt less as if Rubina, the writer, was trying to seize attention from her own fictional figures. Some of the metafiction passages she includes in On the Sunny Side of the Street feel a bit cheap, particularly a twist of the epilogue that I won’t detail here.

On balance, though, I was more than happy to follow the example of a Russian friend and just make peace with the way Rubina builds her fiction. Most of On the Sunny Side of the Street is an absorbing novel that examines the damage that history, biology, and human abuse heap on us. Rubina shows how we become artists and hoard our memories in various ways to preserve our versions of our pasts and the places where we grow up.

Summary: On the Sunny Side of the Street often kept me in my chair for lengthy reading sessions, despite Rubina’s autobiographical interruptions. Though the novel’s characters don’t feel particularly unusual, Rubina places them in extreme situations that test their emotional limits. This absorbing novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker and the Big Book prizes, offers plenty of room for highly personalized interpretations. Not yet translated into English.

Translation Squared: Liudmila Ulitskaya’s “Daniel Stein, Translator”

I began reading Liudmila Ulitskaya’s Даниэль Штайн, переводчик (Daniel Stein, Translator) with a metaphorical deep breath that I’d been gathering for months. Knowing the book’s history of awards and sales, I was afraid of disappointment. Knowing Daniel Stein focuses on religion, I was afraid my undistinguished Sunday School education would fail me.

Fortunately, both Ulitskaya and the fictional Stein are translators who make even the densest theological ideas and passages in this utopian book accessible (or short!) enough that they don’t hinder reading comprehension or flow. That’s fitting for a book and hero stressing understanding, kindness, and love among all people, including nonbelievers.

At first glance, Daniel Stein looks like literary proof of the existence of entropy: Ulitskaya tells her title character’s story through 170 fictional documents, presenting new sources and twists until the end of the book.

Ulitskaya’s method, however, is anything but chaotic. Careful planning means her polyphonic approach reveals details of Stein’s life bit-by-bit through recollections, from Stein and people who knew him. Though the book’s mock documents aren’t always offered in chronological order, they generally follow stages in the life of the paradoxical Stein, who was born a Polish Jew but works for a Nazi officer, and dies a Carmelite monk in Israel.

Daniel Stein covers, in 500 pages, more big and serious topics than might feel realistic for several books: World War 2 and partisans, religion in the former Soviet Union, national and religious identity, doctrine and heresy, sexuality, language, misunderstanding, and masks people wear to survive. Much of the book takes place in Israel, and Ulitskaya also fits in a potential Messiah, the Jerusalem syndrome, and religious violence.

Ulitskaya succeeds in corralling highly divergent topics, views, and characters to reach an emotional overarching conclusion that might appear naïve in a more traditional novel: people of all beliefs should simply behave well and love one another.

Daniel Stein works as a novel because Ulitskaya never lets the reader forget she controls her material. Lives and narratives intertwine more successfully than in some of her previous novels (notably Медея и её дети (Medea and Her Children)), which sometimes feel more like undisciplined collections of characters than novels.

With Daniel Stein, Ulitskaya appropriates the history of a real person – Stein is based on the life of Oswald Rufeisen – to write fiction, and she decides which pieces of his history belong in her book. In case the reader forgets who’s in charge, Ulitskaya includes, within the novel, letters to her literary agent, describing progress on the book. These letters reveal Ulitskaya’s efforts: what’s real, what’s imagined, and her own feelings.

Some readers may not like these metafictional intrusions, but I think they solidify Ulitskaya’s message. Not only does she glue together shards of divergent and complex philosophical material with her own thoughts about organized religion, she reinforces the writer’s role as creator. Daniel Stein, Translator, would not have existed without Ulitskaya’s translation of Rufeisen into Stein.

I hope Daniel Stein will soon be translated into English and other languages so non-Russian readers can also learn from Ulitskaya, Stein, and Rufeisen. For now, those who read English have In the Lion’s Den, Nechama Tec’s (nonfiction) biography of Rufeisen, a book that Ulitskaya cites in her novel as an important source. My husband read it while I read Daniel Stein, and our discussions uncovered many, many commonalities.

Summary: An unusually rewarding and unified polyphonic novel that examines why and how organized religion and kindness do not always coincide. Despite its structure and heavy-sounding topics, the book generally reads very smoothly thanks to Ulitskaya’s tremendous discipline in piecing together a novel from diverse witnesses. Even if Daniel Stein is not always easy to read or describe, it can be read on many levels, and its positivity and emotion are difficult to resist.

Edit, February 21, 2008: For readers who understand Russian well, I recommend this interview with Ulitskaya on Эхо Москвы's "Книжное казино" show. Among other things, she speaks about Daniel Stein and tolerance. I agree with my friend who called the interview a treat.

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