Some novels leave me with little to say. Sometimes that’s
because I enjoyed the book so much that I just want to let my enjoyment be
enjoyment, without any analysis, and just write “Read this.” Those feelings are
often strongest if I read the book electronically: a virtual leafing through my
electronic notes rarely feels very practical, satisfying, or edifying, as is
the case with Vladimir Medvedev’s Заххок (Zahhak). I read Zahhak months
ago but the book has stayed with me thanks to Medvedev’s vivid voices,
settings, and plotlines. But. Then there are times when I have little to say
because a book doesn’t affect me much and seems to fade as soon as I finish the
last page. Unfortunately, that’s close to the case with Ksenia Buksha’s Рамка,
which I’ll just call The Detector,
though that only covers part of the meaning here. The Russian title refers to a
walk-through detector used for security; the basic meaning of “рамка” is “frame” or “border.” In its plural
form (which gets a separate entry in Oxford’s Russian dictionary though not in
my beloved Russian-only Morkovkin dictionary) the word means “framework” or
“limits”; I sometimes think of this as “guidelines.”
Both these books left me with little to say—one because I got
so caught up in it, the other because it left me fairly indifferent after a
promising start—but both novels’ characters had plenty to say because they’re polyphonic,
albeit to varying degrees, allowing characters to tell their own first-person stories,
generally in chapters labeled with their names. Medvedev presents seven
characters who simply tell about events from their lives in turbulent
Tajikistan in the early 1990s. Buksha offers a blend of monologues, dialogues,
and description, an approach that often feels like
verbatim—it’s almost
as if the lines were taken from actual interviews or conversations. Some
sections are written without capitalization or punctuation.
Zahhak succeeds
beautifully because Medvedev focuses his narrators’ energies primarily on
present-day actions, weaving in bits about their pasts. Though a few chapters
felt a tiny bit long, the book had more than enough momentum to keep me up at night. Perhaps
what’s most interesting is that his seven narrators who tell stories of their
lives and what’s around them—teenaged twins Andrei and Zarina; their uncle
Jorub; a Russian journalist; the Afghan war veteran Davron, a Sufi scholar, and
a local boy from a village who’s a comic-turned-tragic figure—don’t include the
title character, Zahhak (named for a figure from
Persian mythology), a sort of paramilitary criminal who wants to cultivate
poppies in a village. Another element of the book’s drama, though, revolves around
Zahhak setting his eye on young Zarina. Medvedev’s ability to play on
archetypes, recent and not-so-recent history, as well as the reader’s dread and
sense of justice (not to mention indignation: Zarina’s so young!) make
Zahhak painfully compelling. The varying
voices were a joy to read—and translate, too, when I worked on brief excerpts.
Two characters especially stood out for me. Journalist Oleg is a wonderfully
useful creation thanks to his Central Asian experience, which lends him the ability
to explain, organically, local history to clueless readers like me. And though every
figure feels tragic, Davron, who has long been in mourning for his wife, especially
interested for me for his complexity, loyalties, and psychic tics brought on by
memories.
Buksha’s The Detector
starts off well. Ten characters are tossed into a holding cell at a monastery on
an island just before the coronation of the tsar; they’re being detained for
not passing through a (metal?) detector successfully. It’s unclear what they
have in common. The novel takes place in the not-so-distant future and there
are futuristic elements like implanted chips (apparently for normalization), a
delicious teleported meal (if only!), and the downfall of LiveJournal. The
characters are suitably quirky, even somewhat interesting, and I enjoyed their monologic
introductions. Among them are a journalist, a bureaucrat, an apologist, a
wedding planner/emcee, a woman who understands what her dog says (shades of
Gogol?), a foster mother, and a businessman. Shut in their cell, they tell
about their lives and gather information from the outside world from the
businessman’s family and the dog mom’s dog, all of whom show up just outside
the cell window. One character attempts suicide.
Buksha does well combining tragedy and comedy—she incorporates
life stories that are pretty naturalistic plus humorous moments like the dog barking
in French—but the novel started falling apart for me when dreams took over. (Confession:
this meant I skimmed/skipped several of the book’s brief 43 chapters.) Dreams
are tricky in fiction and, despite the characters dreaming of one other, I
suspect part of the point here is that each person is in his or her own sleepy world—and
frame, too—meaning that despite often sympathizing and empathizing with one other
during their waking hours, these people just aren’t going to stay up all night
to, say, discuss favorite works of literature, play a game, or resolve the
slippery and eternal question of how to make the best borsch. As Lev Oborin’s
very astute
review
for Vedemosti points out, these characters are all essentially
superfluous people (лишние люди). They’re descendents of
good old Oblomov.
I think there’s a technical issue at work here. In
my reading experience, novels with hermetically sealed settings seem to click along
best when authors keep their characters stuck in their surroundings and maintain
emotional tension by not letting the characters’ minds wander from their
physical setting too far and/or too long. I came to that realization when
The Detector—like Yana Vagner’s
Кто не спрятался (
The Accomplices), which
I recently began but abandoned after 200 pages—mentioned Agatha Christie’s
And Then There Were None (
known by other
titles through the years).
The Accomplices is
about a murder at an iced-in vacation house in the mountains and it works
beautifully as long as the Russian characters and their local host are together,
whether they’re cooking, arguing, drinking, trying to sleep, or discovering and
(heavens!) moving the body. It’s filled with wonderfully unappealing characters
but the book lost all its verve and tension for me as soon as flashbacks started
taking me out of that damn house with no electricity, cell phone coverage, or
hope for a quick visit from the police. Vagner’s
Vongozero (
previous
post) and
Truly Human (
previous
post) work because the characters are so utterly stuck with their immediate
problems, whether they’re trapped in cars or a tiny house. The same goes for
The Detector, as long as the characters are
interacting and awake. Unfortunately, the ending, which takes place during waking
hours, offers little in the way of a conclusion, though I agree with Oborin
that the clicking of a metronome does not bode well for anyone’s future. (The
metronome clicks for you?) So as not to end this mammoth and meandering mess of
a post on a complete downer of a note, I’ll add that, despite my misgivings,
I’m glad I read
The Detector—the characters
are generally vivid and Buksha can be very funny—and I’m still looking forward to reading Buksha’s polyphonic
Завод “Свобода”, (The
Freedom Factory),
which won the National Bestseller Award a few years ago and which my colleague
and friend Anne Fisher translated into English for Phoneme Media. Anne read some very funny excerpts from her
translation at a conference last fall, something that does bode well for
enjoying the book.
Up next: A book I just started and am
thoroughly enjoying but don’t want to name, lest I jinx anything. Some
English-language titles, including Paul Goldberg’s The
Château,
which includes a fair bit of Russian.
Disclaimers: The usual.
As mentioned, I translated excerpts from
Zahhak
for Medvedev’s literary agency.
