The 2015 Russian Booker Shortlist & a Nobel Note

The Russian Booker Prize jury announced the 2015 Russian Booker shortlist on Friday. What feels most notable this year is that the writers are so young: Pokrovsky, born in 1954, has been on the planet the longest, Senchin is in his mid-forties, and the rest are in their thirties. The list also feels pretty varied and appealing (!). The (!) is because some Russian Booker shortlists have seemed a bit, hmm, dry. Here you go:

• Alisa Ganieva’s Жених и невеста (Bride and Groom), which Carol Apollonio is currently translating for Deep Vellum Publishing, for release in 2017. The novel apparently looks at the institution of marriage (including tradition and superstition) among young people in rural Dagestan.
• Vladimir Danikhnov’s Колыбельная (Lullaby). This book’s description says it’s a noirish novel set in a nameless southern city beset with serial killings. It also indicates the writing reminds of Platonov’s. An excerpt is available on Ozon.ru; epigraph from Mickey Spillane.
• Yuri Pokrovsky’s Среди людей (Among People) is set in the 1970s, also in a nameless city (top secret military stuff), and is composed of 49 connected “fragments” related to nine main characters.
• Roman Senchin’s Зона затопления (Flood Zone) examines what happens when everyone’s forced out of a village to make way for a hydroelectric plant. Not my favorite Senchin—I couldn’t bring myself to finish it and my favorite is still The Yeltyshevs—but Flood Zone is on this year’s Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana shortlists, too. I have to think it will win a major award as a sort of “makeup call” after The Yeltyshevs didn’t win. Excerpts available on Журнальный зал; I read more than half the book and thought “Чернушка” was one of the best chapters I read.
• Alexander Snegiev’s Вера (Vera or Faith, depending on whether you’d like to translate the meaning of the name or not…). Either way, Vera was on the NatsBest shortlist, too; I’ve seen Snegirev’s writing in Vera compared to Platonov’s, too (for example here). I enjoyed reading the beginning of Vera on an electronic reader but was just jonesing to take real notes in the margin, with a real pencil…
• Guzel Yakina’s Зулейха открывает глаза (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes) is also a finalist for the Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana awards. I very much enjoyed reading Zuleikha and translating excerpts was at least as much fun (previous post). An excerpt is available on Ozon.ru.

In other news, I’m sure everybody already knows that Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature last week. With my big old fiction bias, I haven’t read any of her books but thought I’d note current translations in English. (Thanks to a project for the Institute of Translation last week, I just happen to know what’s on the list!) I’ll just mention the English-language titles here, without the original Russian. There may be more excerpts of various works available online: they aren’t easy to track down due to varying spellings, titles, and multiple versions. These variables make my poor, addled head spin. Please note, too, that the author’s last name is sometimes spelled Alexievitch. Here’s her page on the site of her literary agent, Galina Dursthoff so you can keep track of new books on the way. I welcome any and all corrections and additions to this list—I’m sure there are other pieces available!

Books

I think the Nobel Prize’s site has the best listing of current translated books so will send you there rather than retype book information. Time Second-Hand, which was a Big Book Award finalist last year and won the reader award, will be out from Fitzcarraldo Editions next year, in Bela Shayevich’s translation.  

Shorter Pieces and Excerpts that I believe are from the same cycle or collection:

• “The Wondrous Deer of the Eternal Hunt,” a short story translated by Marian Schwartz
• “Landscape of Loneliness,” translated by Joanne Turnbull (more about it here, from Glas)

There are also several pieces in various issues of Autodafe: The Journal of the International Parliament of Writers; some pages are blocked so I’m not always sure exactly what’s where or there.

• “Inquiries into Love in Russia,” translated by Marian Schwartz
• Three pieces, not sure who translated them…
• “Go Where You Shouldn’t,” translated by Marian Schwartz

Disclaimers: Having translated work by Senchin and Yakhina, and met Ganieva and Snegirev multiple times.

Up Next: So many books! Narine Abgaryan’s People Who Are Always With Me.

Lots more books from the Big Book finalist list, including Boris Yekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e, which I finished but didn’t like very much (at all), some books I didn’t finish, plus the ones I’m working on now: Alexei Varlamov’s The Imagined Wolf (it really is “imagined”), Valery Zalotukha’s super-long but ridiculously mesmerizing The Candle, and Igor Virabov’s “biography” of Andrei Voznesensky that I might want to call “kitschy” or “tacky,” though/therefore that factor does keep me turning the pages. And there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, all with very small type. We’ll see if I tire…

Another Long List: NOSE

Well, another week, another long list: this week it’s the НОС/NOSE Award long list, though this time I’m reporting on said list in a timely fashion. In other NOSE news, NOSE has a new jury this year, and most members aren’t writers, critics, or other representatives of the literary profession (whatever that means), though they’re all somehow involved in the arts, journalism, or oral history. I’m still trying to figure NOSE out so will be interested to see how this season goes. For starters, though, I can say the list is yet another a mishmash of books.

Here’s the entire nineteen-book long list, in the order NOSE presents it. I had just the kind of week that makes me want to go through a long list, just for kicks (ha!), partly so I can collect links to reviews to read later… for now, I haven’t delved into each title to see how interested I am. And I do mean “delved”: one thing I’ve noticed while sorting through this list of books is that publishers’ descriptions seem to be getting vaguer and vaguer (meaning less and less useful) by the minute.

• Aleksandr Ilyanen: Пенсия (Pension). According to the book’s description, this is another novel about a nonexistent Petersburg; there’s lots of language play but the pension is literal. Apparently an odd love story. Igor Gulin’s review on Kommersant. Author interview on colta.ru.
• A. Nune: Дневник для друзей (A Diary for Friends). (excerpt) Based on an actual diary written while spending time in a hospice in East Berlin.
• Polina Barskova: Живые картинки (Living Pictures) is a book of prose by a poet, a collection of twelve pieces that came out of Barskova’s research into the history of the Leningrad blockade (excerpt). Knowing Polina’s dedication to this subject, I can’t imagine that the book isn’t interesting. Also on the NatsBest long list.
• Aleksandra [sic? I think this should be Tatiana] Bogatyreva: Марианская впадинa (The Mariana Trench). I read this novella/long story in the journal Искусство кино a year or so ago.
• Aleksandr Ilichevsky: Справа налево (From Right to Left). An essay collection. (an example)
• Platon Besedin: Учитель (The Teacher) is apparently a novel about a Ukrainian boy, the first book in a tetralogy (!). (Mitya Samoilov’s NatsBest Big Jury review). A veteran longlister (NatsBest, Booker).
• Vadim Levental: Комната страха (House of Fears, per the cover). A short story collection by the author of Masha Regina, my translation of which is coming in spring 2016.
• Aleksei Tsvetkov: Маркс, Маркс левой (Marx, Marx [with your] left, I’d say, playing on a song title from Наутилус Помпилиус, (here if you want to listen), where the phrase has “марш” (“march”) instead of “Marx.” That song brings back memories!) Tsvetkov won last year’s NOSE.
• Danila Zaitsev: Повесть и житие Данилы Терентьевича Зайцева (The Life and Tale of Danila Terentyevich Zaitsev). In which a Russian Old Believer born in China and living in Argentina tells his story. Already a Yasnaya Polyana Award finalist and Booker longlister.
• Igor Levshin: Петруша и комар (Petrusha and the Mosquito). A debut short story collection. (excerpt)
• V. Gureev (a.k.a. Maksim Gureev?): Калугадва (Kalugatwo). Apparently a novella originally published in a journal in 1997 (!) by one Maksim Gureev.(I’m so confused!)
• Andrei Bychkov: На золотых дождях (Literally, In Golden Rains, though this Russian phrase can mean all sorts of things, including gobs of cash or golden showers.). (excerpt) Apparently about forbidden love between family members; I can’t quite figure this out even after Evgenii Lesin’s review. In a book where one of the characters is named Lobachevsky, pretty much all bets are off until reading everything.
• Andrei Astvatsaturov: Осень в карманах (Autumn in (Our?) Pockets). A novel in stories set in Petersburg and Paris.
• Maria Golovanivskaya: Пангея (Pangea). Apparently a historical fantasy novel (or dystopia?) in brief stories/episodes; a cast of over a hundred characters… A long review that I’m saving for later. And another.
• Ekaterina Margolis: Следы на воде (perhaps Ripples in the Water? or maybe the wake behind a boat or, say, a gondola?). An autobiographical book with Venice. And Moscow. And the “river of human lives,” as the book’s description says. (excerpt)
• Pavel Nerler: Осип Мандельштам и его солагерники (Osip Mandelshtam and His Campmates, though “campmates” sounds rather too cheery). About the last twenty months in Mandelshtam’s life. (excerpts)
• Roman Senchin: Зона затопления (Flood Zone). A 2015 Big Book Award and Yasnaya Polyana Award finalist and Booker longlister; a new take on themes from Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora: a village is about to be flooded for a hydroelectric plant. Not my favorite Senchin.
• Guzel’ Yakhina: Зулейха открывает глаза (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes). Another Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana finalist (previous post) that’s also on the Booker long list; I loved translating excerpts for Yakhina’s literary agency. A historical novel in which a kulak woman is exiled.
• Maks Nevoloshin: Шла Шаша по соше (Hmm, this title is a corrupted version of a tongue twister, in which Sasha walks along a roadway. Instead of “Shla Sasha po shosse” the title is “Shla Shasha po soshe.”). In any case, it’s a story collection.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: Lots of books! More books from the Big Book finalist list, including Boris Yekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e, which I finished but didn’t like very much (at all), and Anna Matveeva’s story collection Девять девяностых (Nine from the Nineties), which I’m finishing. Also: Narine Abgaryan’s People Who Are Always With Me.

Better Late Than Never: The 2015 Russian Booker Prize Longlist

Hmm, I just realized, yesterday, that I missed the Russian Booker Award’s longlist announcement on July 9. Here, then, are a few belated notes on the 24-book list. The six finalists will be named on October 9 so time’s running short for the longlist! Or even for a short version of the longlist.

There are lots of books—a third, if I’ve caught everything—that are already finalists for or winners of other awards this year:

• Aleksei Varlamov’s Мысленный волк (The Imagined Wolf, perhaps?). A novel set in the 1910s that involves some real-life figures, including our old friend Grigory Rasputin. Big Book Award finalist. I’ll be reading this one very soon so hope to figure out the title.
• Danila Zaitsev’s Повесть и житие Данилы Терентьевича Зайцева (The Life and Tale of Danila Terentyevich Zaitsev). In which a Russian Old Believer born in China and living in Argentina tells his story. Already a Yasnaya Polyana Award finalist.
• Tatyana Moskvina’s Жизнь советской девушки (Life of a Soviet Girl): Apparently a memoir about life in Leningrad during the 1960s through 1980s, with lots of detail. National Bestseller Award finalist.
• Sergei Nosov’s Фигурные скобки (Curly Brackets): Described by fellow finalist Anna Matveeva as magical realism about a mathematician who goes from Moscow to Saint Petersburg for a conference of микромаг-s. Big winner at the 2015 NatsBest Award; I already bought this one for when I finish all the Big Book Award finalists. It looks fun.
• Dina Rubina’s Русская канарейка ((The?) Russian Canary). Trilogy, a family saga set in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A Big Book finalist; Rubina’s canary and I did not get along.
• Roman Senchin’s Зона затопления (Flood Zone). A 2015 Big Book Award and Yasnaya Polyana Award finalist; a new take on themes from Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora: a village is about to be flooded for a hydroelectric plant. Not my favorite Senchin.
• Alexander Snegirev’s Вера (Vera, a name and noun that translates as Faith): A short novel about a forty-year-old woman who is unmarried. Snegirev’s Facebook description, posted at the time of the NatsBest long list, includes words like dramatic, comic, erotic (a bit), and political (a little). NatsBest finalist. I read the beginning and enjoyed it but want to read the book on paper.
• Guzel’ Yakhina’s Зулейха открывает глаза (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes). Another Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana finalist (previous post); I’m now enjoying it even more as I work on excerpts. A historical novel in which a kulak woman is exiled.

There are several other writers I’ve read before:

• Alisa Ganieva is on the list for Жених и невестa (Bride and Groom), which you can read about here. I’m looking forward to this one. Edit: an English translation, by Carol Apollonio, will be on the way next winter, from Deep Vellum.
• Andrei Gelasimov’s Холод (Cold), the name of which makes me want to wait to read this book in winter, even without knowing what it’s about. (I love winter.)
• Anna Matveeva made the list for a novel, Завидное чувство Веры Стениной (Vera Stenina’s Enviable Feeling, I think?); Enviable Feeling is apparently about female envy. (Here’s chapter one.)

And then there’s a whole pile of books—I’ll list a few already published in book form—I know nothing or very little about:

• Platon Besedin’s Учитель (The Teacher), which was nominated twice for the NatsBest but not shortlisted, is apparently a novel about a Ukrainian boy, the first book in a tetralogy (!). (Mitya Samoilov’s Big Jury review)
• Unsurprisingly, Vasilii Golovanov’s Каспийская книга (The/A Caspian Book) discusses all sorts of aspects of travel around/near the Caspian Sea. Golovanov won the 2009 Yasnaya Polyana Award for Island, which I’ve had on the shelf for three years but not yet read.
• Oleg Radzinskii’s Агафонкин и время (Agafonkin and Time) is about a time-traveling courier. Hmm.

Bonus Links on a Translated Book! Since Alisa Ganieva’s latest book is on the Booker longlist… and since I spent the fateful Russian Booker date, July 9, with old friends visiting Maine… and since we talked about the situation in the Caucasus, including Dagestan, which Alisa writes about... and since I mentioned Alisa’s books to them, this seems like the perfect time to mention The Mountain and the Wall, Carol Apollonio’s translation of Праздничная гора. The translation was published by Deep Vellum, with an introduction by Ronald Meyer. Though I felt a bit ill-prepared for The Mountain and the Wall—I’m not nearly as informed about Dagestani political and religious issues as I should be—I still enjoyed reading about reactions and unrest that follow rumors of being walled off from Russia. Various forms of chaos struck me and stuck with me the most, whether Alisa was describing personal relationships, skipping through a book (something that always reminds me of good old Pierre Bezukhov!), a visit to a club, or street demonstrations. I haven’t read the Russian original and was grateful that Carol sorted out the Avar and other languages that make appearances in the novel. I also enjoyed Carol’s enjoyment of Alisa’s humor. I’m looking forward to Bride and Groom, which sounds more personal and more “my” book, though I would certainly recommend The Mountain and the Wall to anyone interested in Dagestan or the Caucasus. Links: excerpts on Body, reviews on The Rumpus and Tony’s Reading List.

Disclaimers: The usual. Thank you to Deep Vellum for the copy of The Mountain and the Wall. (I know everyone whose names I listed for this book and would have just kept quiet if I hadn’t liked it!)

Up Next: Lots of books! More books from the Big Book finalist list, including Boris Yekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e, which I finished but didn’t like very much (at all), and Anna Matveeva’s story collection Девять девяностых (Nine from the Nineties). Also: Narine Abgaryan’s People Who Are Always With Me.

Big Book 1: Yakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes

My reading of 2015 Big Book Award finalists started off on a high note, with Guzel Yakhina’s Зулейха открывает глаза (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes), a debut novel that begins in 1930 in a Tatar village, from which a kulak woman—Zuleikha, she of the title—is quickly sent into exile after her husband is killed during dekulakization.

Incongruous though it may sound, Zuleikha is an enjoyable and smooth novel, unpretentious mainstream historical fiction that I realized, upon reflection, covers more cultural, ethnic, religious, and sociopolitical issues than I’d noticed (consciously, anyway) during my reading. As I write, I realize, too, that this is probably the most crucial element of good mainstream fiction for me: it should be so absorbing that I want to keep turning pages, no matter what crazy plot the author is putting forth, but I should want to turn the pages back when I finish. Put another way, I think “mainstream fiction,” can occupy most any genre, so what makes me want to call a book “good” is its ability to hold my attention both as I read and after I’ve read, compelling me to return to my notes and various passages in the book to consider depths I didn’t want to dwell on too much because I was enjoying the author’s storytelling. More on Yakhina’s storytelling below…

Though Zuleikha lives in relative material comfort, in the women’s half of a large house, she’d been married off early (and can’t calculate whether she’s been with Murtaza for half her thirty years or not) and her mother-in-law, who’s deaf and blind, demands chamber pot emptying services first thing every the morning. Zuleikha has lots of other chores, like clearing snow, tending animals, and serving Murtaza, plus she takes lots of abuse from her mother-in-law for her children’s deaths early in their lives.

Zuleikha’s own life—after seeing her husband killed, after a horrendous train trip to a spot on the Angara River where her group of exiles will settle, and after a difficult first winter that kills many—settles into a new routine with characters nothing like her neighbors in Yulbash. The characters are many but distinct, and they include a rather dotty doctor, an artist who paints on the sly, and urbane city dwellers who remember past European travels, as well as Ignatov, Zuleikha’s husband’s killer. Ignatov is persuaded to remain in the settlement, as its commandant, and he stays because of his own political issues back in Kazan. Most important, there is Zuleikha’s son Yuzuf, born in the settlement, who develops an interest for art and learns to paint.

Yakhina’s writing is simple, albeit sprinkled with Tatar words (there’s a glossary), and I particularly like the grace with which she handles her setting in the settlement on the Angara. One of the excerpts from the book that I’m translating for Elkost describes one of Zuleikha’s workdays, beginning with an early wakeup and showing Zuleikha making the rounds of her hunting grounds. I write “hunting grounds” in the literal sense: during a chance encounter with Ignatov and a bear, Zuleikha learns she’s a crack shot, so she’s entrusted with a rifle to hunt for food for the settlement’s kitchen. On the day in the passage, she’s bringing home a hare and some fowl, and is met by Yuzuf near the settlement: he asks her to tell his favorite story, about a mountain-dwelling mystical bird, known in Tatar as Semrug and in Wikipedia as Simurgh. (Edit: And here, thanks to my colleague Liza Prudovskaya, is a Wikipedia version of the story Zuleikha tells Yuzuf.) This day-in-the-life passage does everything, with lovely descriptions of nature that integrate Zuleikha into her surroundings without getting flowery (why can’t more writers do this!?), sweet banter between Zuleikha and Yuzuf, and, yes, oral storytelling that fits the scene plus the novel’s main story, too, because it looks at finding one’s strengths.

I’m not quite sure how Yakhina makes that feel fresh—she herself has said the novel is about how Zuleikha wakes up, opens her eyes to the world, and finds happiness, albeit bitter happiness—but I wonder if details from handed-down family stories about her grandmother’s experiences during dekulakization might be one reason. Another is, again, Yakhina’s ability to use a simple structure and language to tell her story, all as she plants details that will have meaning later in the book. (Side note: one of the most fun aspects of translating after reading an entire book is seeing storytelling motifs early on, the second time around.)

I’m glad to see lots of appreciation for Yakhina, Zuleikha, and, really, good ol’ storytelling: beyond being a Big Book finalist, Zuleikha made the Yasnaya Polyana Award shortlist. The novel has also won the Prose of the Year award and the Ticket to the Stars award.

Bonus Links! This year’s PEN Center USA translation award goes to Ainsley Morse and Peter Golub for Andrei Sen-Senkov’s Anatomical Theater, poetry published in a bilingual edition by Zephyr Press.

Disclaimers: The usual plus my work on excerpts from Zuleikha. Thank you, too, to Elkost for sending me an advance electronic edition of Zuleikha after telling me about the book!

Up Next: More books from the Big Book finalist list, including Boris Yekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e, which I finished but didn’t like very much (at all), and Anna Matveeva’s story collection Девять девяностых (Nine from the Nineties), which was also shortlisted for this year’s NatsBest, and gets off to a great start.

The 2015 Yasnaya Polyana Award Shortlists

I’m very grateful to the Yasnaya Polyana Award organizers for posting shortlists for the “XXI Century” and “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” awards so promptly today: it’s Labor Day and it’s hot, so I’m looking forward to going to the beach. With a book.

I’m forgoing links to online journals for the “XXI Century” list since all these books are available until late October, free of charge, on theBookmate site, which works very nicely. I’ve included some links for “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” finalists, though. So, without further ado (but with apologies for the oddities in spacing)…

There are six “XXI Century” finalists, listed here in Russian alphabetical order, by author.

• Aleksandr Grigorenko’s Мэбэт (Mebet). Mebet was a Big Book finalist in 2012 and I’ve had the book on my shelf, unread, ever since, though I’ve been meaning to give it a try. A novel set in the taiga.
• Boris Yevseev’s Офирский скворец (The Ophir Starling). A historical novel in which a man teaches a starling to speak.
• Danila Zaitsev’s Повесть и житие Данилы Терентьевича Зайцева (The Life and Tale of Danila Terentyevich Zaitsev). In which a Russian Old Believer born in China and living in Argentina tells his story.
• Elena Radetskaia’s Нет имени тебе... (There Is No Name for You… (? Borrowing a Blok poem’s title? I feel like I’m missing something here…)) . Apparently a novel about three women, love, restlessness, and the search for happiness.
• Roman Senchin’s Зона затопления (Flood Zone). A 2015 Big Book Award finalist; a new take on themes from Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora: a village is about to be flooded for a hydroelectric plant. Not my favorite Senchin.
• Guzel’ Yakhina’s Зулейха открывает глаза (Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes). Another Big Book finalist, the only one so far that I’ve enjoyed... I’m now enjoying it even more as I work on excerpts. A historical novel in which a kulak woman is exiled.

There are five books on the “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” list:

• Valerii Bylinski’s Риф (Reef). A collection of stories and a novella.
• Olga Gromova’s Сахарный ребенок (The Sugar Kid). About growing up during the Stalin era. Olga Bukhina’s description of the book is here. I’ve heard lots of good things about this book from Olga and another friend. An excerpt on Snob.
• Vecheslav Kazakevich’s Охота на майских жуков (Hunting for May Bugs, though I’m thoroughly confused about differences between May bugs and June bugs… a topic for another day!) About village life in the 1970s.
• Yevgenii Mamontov’s Приключения Славки Щукина, или 33 рассказа про вранье (The Adventures of Slavka Shchukin, or 33 Stories about Lying). Some of the 33 stories are online here; the first is called “My Friend Dracula,” which is my kind of title.
• Boris Minaev’s Мужской день (Men’s Day? A Day for Men?). A collection that brings all Minaev’s stories about a boy called Lyova, some never published before, into one book. I’ve read and enjoyed some of the stories. (A sample.)

Happy Labor Day to those who celebrate it! In haste...

Bonus links to an interview, in which I answer questions about my interest in Russian literature, markets for translation, and other related burning issues. You can read it in my Russian original (here on the Год литературы site) or in my English version (here on the Russia Beyond the Headlines site). Thanks to everyone who made this happen!

Disclaimers: The usual, including work on excerpts from Yakhina’s Zuleikha, translating two of the Yasnaya Polyana judges, etc.

Up Next: The afore-mentioned Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, then other books from the Big Book Award list of finalists, including Boris Yekimov’s Autumn in Zadon’e.