I might not call Yuri Buida’s
Цейлон (
Ceylon) the author’s headiest or most
metaphysical novel—I definitely prefer both his
Blue
Blood and
Zero
Train—but
Ceylon, like
Poison
and Honey,
his previous book,
is thoroughly readable and enjoyable. Lots of
Ceylon felt familiar after reading several other Buida novels: part
of my enjoyment, I suspect, came from just that because I love observing how authors
reuse structures and tropes in various books. That familiarity may also help
explain why I think
Ceylon feels more
accessible and mainstream (these aren’t bad words!) to me than, say, his
Blue Blood or
Zero Train, though I suspect—it’s been too long since I read those
books to feel safe saying “I think”—
Ceylon
is less densely packed than those books, making it easier to read.
As with Blue Blood
and Poison and Honey, a family home feels
like a key character in Ceylon: in
this case, as in Poison, there’s a
house on a hill. The area it’s in is known as “Ceylon,” which reminds of how a building
in Blue Blood is known as “Africa.” Both
those names are introduced early in their respective novels, leading to
questions about the origins of the building names. In the case of Ceylon, named
thusly by a traveler in the eighteenth century enamored of the island, there were
early attempts to dress up dogs as tigers, boys as monkeys, and wooden
structures as palm trees. Not quite a tropical paradise but an attempt at
paradise nevertheless and (long story short, since of course there’s much more to
things) the place, though not the original house, which burned, is now home to the Cherepin
family, five generations of which are described in varying levels of detail in
the book by Andrei Ilyich Cherepin, a first-person narrator who’s genial and,
though heavily involved in events, feels surprisingly reliable.
As one might guess, the words “magical realism” are often
used in conjunction with the name “Yuri Buida” and elements like the odd family
house and a character named Stoletov (hmm, sto=hundred and let=years) flashed little
“subtext?!” lights even for me, one of those rare literary losers who couldn’t quite
bring herself to finish
One Hundred Years
of Solitude. (Aside: I don’t know why. All I can say is that I approached it
with dread. But will try again. Some year.)
Ceylon,
though, feels almost more like some form of “absurd realism” or at least “quirky
realism” to me, what with brothers on opposite sides at revolution time—this,
by the way, feels like another case of attempts at paradise, of which there are
many in Ceylon and
Ceylon, including
through marriage—and a taxidermied bear and unlikely loves and a woman dancing
the
lambada at the grave of
her son, who died in Chechnya. There’s lots of everyday oddity. And I nearly
forgot the big elm tree growing through the house. A sort of family tree.
There’s a lot of history, too: Andrei’s first job is at a
dig, where he charms all the young women, he goes on to be a teacher, work at the
local museum, and write his dissertation about local history that includes his
family. Digs and
cultural
layers come up a lot in contemporary Russian fiction and Buida piles together
Russian history, local history, and family history for the reader to dig through, working in the two brothers’
conflicts about the revolution—I mention this again because I thought it’s one
of the strongest and best-integrated subplots in the book, with its combination
of “big” history and family history—the military-industrial complex, whose
secrets another family member keeps; the crime-ridden banditry of the nineties;
the wars in Chechnya; and even the conflict in Ukraine. Some of these chunks of
history are more successful than others, I think: as often happens in fiction,
particularly family sagas that draw on and reflect a country’s history, more
distant events usually feel better contextualized and grounded than those more
recent.
In the end, though, the town cemetery, known as Red
Mountain, felt almost more significant to me than Ceylon, both because Andrei speaks,
early on, of his youthful hope for immortality and because his grandfather has
taken on a gigantic cemetery renovation project (financed in a way that doesn’t
sound perfectly legal) that dovetails nicely with Andrei’s thoughts about the
afterlife at the end of the book, when he’s the father of three (almost four) children
and has described rather dramatic losses of family members. There’s a lot of
mortality in Ceylon but also lots of birth.
I’d have to make a long, Buidaesque list to cover all the
other important elements of the book that I haven’t mentioned here: I’d
certainly include characters, romances, and family rivalries. I’ll skip the
list, though, and say that Ceylon may
be a little lumpy in its treatment of various generations, and their characters
and situations don’t feel as evenly developed as they might, but, to repeat, I enjoyed the book, and I think one reason is because I thoroughly appreciate
Buida’s ability to incorporate discussion of history into dialogue without getting bogged down. There are conversations
about how Russians carry on when the world’s falling apart, about justifying
Stalinism, about crazy “what ifs” when people have wild ideas, and plenty more.
And damn if it doesn’t feel pretty balanced and disciplined—by which I mean contextualized, natural
(!), and brief—without giving short shrift to the big questions at hand, many
of which are already pretty familiar even to me, a non-Russian reader.
Up next: I still have
Sergei Nosov’s Curly Brackets waiting
to be written about. And then there will be whatever I start tonight… most
likely Alisa Ganieva’s Bride and Groom,
though the groom comes first in the Russian title.
Disclaimers and
disclosures: The
usual. I received an electronic copy of
Ceylon
from Elkost, Buida’s literary agency, for which I say thank you. But I bought a
printed copy to read after reading the very beginning of the electronic file.
