Manuela Draeger's ELEVEN SOOTY DREAMS (tr by J.T. Mahany)

"If the Party had been warned," Maryama Adougaï ventured, they could have saved us from outside!" "The Party no longer exists," Imayo Özberg remarked... "Maybe it existed in the past, but today it's not even in basement thirty-six, it simply no longer exists."

I've read me a few literary apocalypses in my day, visited me a few dying earths, watched me a few attempts to save our world through various means, but rarely have I felt it as viscerally as I did in the surreal but succinct Eleven Sooty Dreams.

While "Manuela Draeger"* gives us plenty of glimpses of an actual lifeless world of a quality that we might expect of a Stephen Baxter if not a J.G. Ballard (to name two of my favorite literary destroyers of worlds), it's not those images that got me. Sure, they're plenty poignant, but Eleven Sooty Dreams has much worse to offer in its 140 pages. 

Because Eleven Sooty Dreams is, above all else, an experience of genocide, writ small if no less total, in the form of eleven children being burned alive by their people's ethnic and/or political enemies.

Eleven Sooty Dreams offers us this horror in the form of a "post exotic" novel - a sub-genre of literary fiction I'm still wrapping my head around but that here, at least, seems to present itself as a story drawing on the conventions and images of all cultures and none (though I can almost imagine it taking place in the Beszel of China Mieville's The City & The City; especially as I surveyed the wonderful array of just-bizarre-enough proper nouns), so readers everywhere are on precisely the same footing as we explore a culture that is just foreign enough to us to give us the slight distance and breathing room necessary to appreciate the novel as art and as fiction, but still recognizable -- without appropriating the cultural, historical or symbolic baggage of any actual society that has existed in our world, at least not until the very end when some real world nations and historical figures are briefly mentioned.

Eleven children, the latest generation of an ethnic and political minority trapped in an almost completely destroyed city and a world that has been reduced to a series of concentration camps and ravaged ecosystems, have undertaken a daring mission. They sneak into a building under cover of a pride parade, hoping to steal some ammunition that can help their people rise up against oppression this time, instead of just marching with banners and slogans. Alas; another faction is enacting a plot to burn that same building to the ground under cover of that same parade.

This is not a spoiler, by the way; it's the entire premise of the book, spelled out in the jacket copy.

The sooty dreams of the title, then, are those of these children as their consciousness and bodies burn and warp and fuse in a timeless, blazing moment.

But this isn't just 140 pages of describing their agony; rather it explores the memories they all have in common, having grown up together in a semi- communal creche/school under the tutelage of one Granny Holgolde, an elder stateswoman of their movement who has charged herself with inspiring the next generation to cherish and fight for the ideals of a socialist movement understood as the dying remains of the long-lost Second Soviet Union (wherever and whenever that was). That she does so chiefly through stories of a perpetually reincarnated and peripatetic elephant named Marta Ashkarot, in which the humans she meets morph into "strange cormorants" when they die, is the chief source of the novel's surrealism.

Chief, but not only. Remember, these kids' consciousnesses are merging. "My memories are yours," and variations thereon, is an often-repeated refrain as hallucinatory accounts of, say, how the narrators' own parents met and each removed the other's mandatory placard that exhorted perfect strangers to murder these useless ethnic minority scum**, how the elephant named Marta Ashkarot spends some time being human and thinks it's weird to use hands instead of her trunk to manipulate things while she watches the natural world die off, how this one weird old soldier conducted their classes whenever their regular teacher got murdered by the state, how a girl who went out one day to fetch water wound up having a moving colloquy with the corpse of her little brother where it was tangled up in barbed wire...

All in all, quite possibly the strangest and saddest of the many strange and sad things I've read since I reviewed Stevan Allred's The Alehouse at the End of the World for Skiffy and Fanty. Eleven Sooty Dreams feels almost like a companion volume, or even a prequel, to that slab of weird. Which I was not expecting, least of all from a Russo-French author and the good folks at Open Letter Books. You just never know what those kids are going to come out with next.

Don't ever let them go on an ammunition raid.

*A heteronym of Antoine Volodine, about whom more in a future post.

**The narrator's mother's placard, for instance, reads "This woman is still alive. Isn't there something abnormal about this?"