Rosemary Sullivan's STALIN'S DAUGHTER: THE EXTRAORDINARY AND TUMULTUOUS LIFE OF SVETLANA ALLELUYEVA

Some people have unbelievably strange lives, and then there's Svetlana Alleluyeva, aka Svetlana Dzhukashvilli, aka Lana Peters, aka... but better known as

Her real life, even in a bare bones outline, is weirder than any novel or movie could convey, which is to say that author Rosemary Sullivan had something of an unfair advantage as far as writing a book which would absolutely rivet its audience. As a young girl, Svetlana watched* her family disappear like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, but only later on in life learned that this was usually because they'd either angered her father or in some way posed a threat to or just annoyed one of his advisors. Usually a combination of those. When her father died his weird lingering death surrounded by people who weren't sure if they should help him, she got to watch the bizarre power struggles to succeed him and got treated as a pawn in them. She had been forbidden to marry her first love, a screenwriter who had rather glowing biopics of V.I. Lenin on his resume, because whoops, he was Jewish, but then was later allowed to marry a Jewish man (the first of many husbands; how many depends on how you count them, because some marriages were more official than others because totalitarianism). She finally got out of the U.S.S.R. only to scatter the ashes of an Indian citizen (whom she considered her fourth (?) husband but wasn't allowed to actually marry) on India's Ganges River and managed to slip her minders and sneak over to the U.S. Embassy to defect. She became a successful author and earned a lot of money with sensational but honest books but lost a lot of it in, for example, another ill-advised marriage to a member of Frank Lloyd Wright's posthumous cult. She met everyone from Isaiah Berlin to Terry Waite. She defected back to the U.S.S.R. at one point, teenaged half-American daughter in tow, because she missed the children she'd left behind in her first defection. And so on.

Sullivan gives all of this an immediacy and a felt impact largely through intimate interviews and hard-won access to enough of Svetlana's private (?) papers to be able to share Svetlana's perspective on matters in her own voice. Wisely, Sullivan foreshadows very little; if we don't already know what Stalin and his cohort were really up to from sources other than this book, we are not enlightened, in the course of the narrative, until Svetlana is. So at first Joseph Stalin is just a weirdly distant daddy whose children enjoy (?) considerable privilege but don't understand that they do because they're so insulated from the rest of society and aren't even told the truth about why certain family members (including Svetlana's own mother) aren't around anymore, and only later do we come to see him in anything like the way the rest of the world does -- and we get to share Svetlana's whiplash as her home country goes through crazed cycles of revering and reviling her father's memory, sentiments that she bears the brunt of once her father is dead, both in the U.S.S.R. and in her other homes of India, the United States and the United Kingdom. As she observes of the cult of personality around Stalin even decades after his death, "Tragically, many, even in the Gulag, continued to insist that Stalin knew nothing. It was evil advisers who were responsible.."

In the process, we get a timely reminder, as the present moment has brought many socialist ideas back to the fore, that we can't blindly trust people who espouse them to stick to them or the credo behind them. Once upon a time, Stalin and Beria and Khruschev would have agreed that eating the rich and defunding the police are good ideas, but not for the reasons that most of those now proclaiming them (myself included) generally mean them. The price of freedom is vigilance, and if a second socialist revolution ever occurs here in the West, the revolutionaries will do well to keep each other in check and remain vigilant against power grabs, ideological purity tests, authoritarianism in the guise of fairness, and any notion that ends justify means. It's really, really hard work, and I hope that we are smarter than the poor, starved, hidebound Russian populace of 1917 were and can learn from their experience. Sharing this book widely can only help.

*Ok, "watched" isn't quite so much the word as something like "noticed week's later that it had been a weirdly long time since she'd seen a person", but hey. We don't have a word for that, do we?

Tatyana Toylstoya's THE SLYNX

It's not every day that I come across a novel that seems destined for the "among the strangest things I've ever read" category simultaneously as it also just never quite winds up feeling strange enough, somehow, but such is Tatyana Tolstoya*'s The Slynx, a post-apocalyptic and satirical fantasy that is couched very much in terms of a folk tale.

The setting is sort-of-rural Russia, some 200 years after a violent unknown event referred to by its survivors as, simply, "The Blast", which was pretty obviously a nuclear war that didn't quite destroy the world, but sure did change it, starting with the aforementioned survivors. Those in our little corner of what's left of the world who managed to live through The Blast and its immediate aftermath just kept on living unless murdered or killed by a freak accident or finally just sickened of it all enough to commit suicide. But get this: they don't really age, and, if they were of childbearing age at the time of The Blast, they could keep on having children, and did, and so repopulation happened at a good rate.

Only about those children. Yes, about them. That's where mutation sets in. Everybody's got some kind of disfigurement, some visible, some not. And these children age, and die off, and basically enjoy the lifestyle and span of your average Russian serf, circa the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It could be almost idyllic, if your idea of an idyll is a return to pre-mechanized agriculture, ignorance, superstition, and boredom. Oh, and of a whole new sub-race of people who are human but alas, are also quadrupeds and are thus used in place of draft animals.** Draft animals that drink too much vodka and talk back to their owners and occasionally maybe try to stage a revolution...

Enter one Benedikt, son of an "Oldener" woman, who works as a copyist of old pre-Blast manuscripts. His calling is kind of noble and it lends him a certain weird distinction -- in order to copy one has to read -- but the 200 years between the last of these books' publication and his own time have wrought changes that make a lot of the knowledge he can gain thereby useless or nearly so, because it's all about context, and the context has changed. For instance, while books are precious in Benedikt's world, it's chiefly as testaments to the wonderful wit and wisdom of Dear Leader, one Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe. He wrote them all, you see. All the novels, all the how-to books, all the chemistry text books. War and Peace, by Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe. A Manual of Applied Organic Chemstry, by Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe. The 1972 Sears Catalog, by Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe.

And yes, he is a despot, ruling from afar with the help of the dreaded Saniturions, secret/thought police in the guise of public health officials, who punish freethinkers by treating them as vectors of disease. Straight out of the movie Brazil, these guys. All that's missing are the weird baby masks.

But so, the plot of The Slynx (the Slynx being an imaginary monster that attacks and tears apart lone villagers in the night, and pretty much serving as a metaphor for all the woes of this world, especially ignorance and oblivion, because this book is all about what happens when a culture's memory is obliterated and everyone is just trying to make sense of it all from random pieces) is pretty much that of Snowpiercer. Benedikt is very like Curtis, if Curtis was more of a lovable doofus who marries above his station than a guilt-ridden antihero who kills his way to the front of the train, who advances uncomprehendingly through the several strata of a very confined society and learns that its very top/front isn't all that different from the rear/bottom and that it's all pretty much just a sad little cemetery of a society he's living in. But funny. Darkly and deeply funny.

You know, like life is. We're having a Blast. And maybe that's all that we deserve to be remembered for?

*Yes, she is from the same family as that War & Peace guy.

**Not a lot of animals survived The Blast. Mice are the primary food animal, and also serve as a kind of currency, for example. There are other, barely recognizable, creatures around, but most of them are not safe to eat.

Michael Moorcock's BYZANTIUM ENDURES

Mention Michael "Eternal Champion" Moorcock in pretty much any crowd you'd care to and I'm 100% sure that no one is going to mention mundane historical fiction. Or social fiction. Or Russian fiction.

But he wrote some, and it was damned convincing. Someone I'm too lazy to look up again has called Byzantium Endures the best 19th century Russian novel written by a 20th century Englishman there is. And so maybe there's not so much competition in this category, and so maybe this is damning the book with faint praise, but look, this is still quite possibly the weirdest thing Moorcock has written, for all that it lacks soul-sucking swords and beast-masked warriors and six-fingered prosthetic hands that can summon monsters.*

How it manages to be weird without these kinds of things comes down to, of course, its narrator. For this is the first of four volumes, what is called the Colonel Pyat Quartet, and it's told in Pyat's own voice.**

Pyat was, or claims to have been -- yes, another unreliable narrator -- born with the 20th century and so has seen and experienced an awful lot on his journey from genteel poverty in Ukraine to the seat next to you at the English pub where he holds forth at great obnoxious and pompous length every exhausting night about what he's seen and done in his eventful life, living through two world wars, revolutions, etc. and what have you done with your life, loser?

For quite the Renaissance polymath wunderkind secret author of everything is Pyat.*** The only reason you don't know his name is conspiracy has denied him credit for his great inventions, his strategic brilliance, his general thwarted awesomeness. Most of which he blames on the Jews, even though he is himself probably Jewish, a fact which he rantingly denies at every opportunity, often (unintentionally) hilariously. He is, in short, the last guy you want to be trapped having to listen to for any length of time, and here he's gone and "written" four volumes of autobiography, apparently, all of it loaded with his overblown claims. I know a hundred guys like this one. They're in every dive bar in the land. It's never their fault they're not ruling the world. Nor that lesser men are ruling it, and letting it go to pot because they have no standards. Democracy and socialism have teamed up to turn all to kipple. No, he never uses Philip K Dick's awesome word for the deteriorated detritus of civilization, but yes, one can imagine him doing so if only he'd gotten to learn of the word.

But so why on earth should one read these things? Because, if this first volume is anything to go on, they're brilliant, and not just because of the character(s) they so vividly realize. They are absolutely convincing works of pseudo-Russian literature, full of period detail and gorgeous descriptive passages and vivid evocations of the whole lotta history through which our man has lived.

And yes, obliquely they tie into the Eternal Champion stuff, despite their complete lack of fantastic elements, for Pyat is a close friend of Mrs. Cornelius, mother of Moorcock's swinging 60s version of the Champion, Jerry Cornelius, whose adventures I have not yet read because the last time I had them handy I was too young and teenagery to want to read anything of Moorcock's that didn't involve moody sword-swinging albino sorcerors or hunted one-eyed princes or guys with big black jewels embedded in their skulls. I'm going to rectify this soon, though it's going to take me a while since I'm going to have to mess with a dead tree book to do so, and I still have big trouble manipulating dead tree books due to chronic medical conditions that have left me not very dextrous. But I'm gonna.

But there's more than just that obvious link going on, here. Check out the title: Byzantium Endures. Here, Byzantium refers to the cultural heritage of Greece as preserved and transmitted via the Eastern Roman empire, aka Byzantium, and the Orthodox church it spawned, a church that dominated the cultural and spiritual life of Russia until the Revolution. Pyat spends a lot of time rhapsodizing about this, and bemoaning the culture's decline, a decline he helped, at least in a small way, to set in motion. He had to, to survive.

An ancient and sophisticated culture that degenerated until it was finally all but destroyed by its scions. How Melniboné. How Elric.

But this is the real world, where the forces of chaos and law are lower case and lack any supernatural force. Humans did it. Humans can undo it. Byzantium endures. Sort of.

*And it seems that no one in my circle has read it. When I was debating giving this book a try, I asked a few times on Twitter if anyone had an opinion and got nothing but cricket sounds. Which is a shame!

**There's a whole lot of faux preface and appendix material dealing with how Moorcock had to stitch the narrative together from a lifetime's accumulation of notebooks and scraps on which his narrator composed his memoirs, his manifestos, etc. The effect of reading this "material" is kind of like slogging through a Christopher Tolkien hodge-podge of J.R.R. Tolkien's ephemera. I got impatient with it and finally just skipped to the story proper. The stuff at the end, proported to be raw snippets from Pyat's notes, is somewhat more engaging but it's a tough slog, in many languages and next to no complete sentences. I found it blurring, then interesting, and finally tiresome. Your mileage may vary.

***See also Philip K. Dick's CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's ROADSIDE PICNIC with remarks on Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER

I recently and for the first time* saw Andrei Tarkovsky's glorious lo-fi sci-fi (before that was much of a thing) adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, Stalker, and loved it so much I watched it four times before I could bring myself to send it back to Netflix.** And it turns out that I love the source material just as much, which doesn't always happen with books-adapted-to-films. But then again, this is Tarkovsky doing the adapting.

The film is a stripped down version of the book, its trio of main characters deeply abstracted and Tarkovskified from the cast of Roadside Picnic, partly due to the constraints under which the director was working -- hence the low-fi part of the sci-fi, i.e. nothing near the special effects budget that would be required to render all of the alien artifacts and gadgetry the novel's characters encounter -- and partly because Tarkovsky, as always, had his own things going on. Like creating breathtaking underwater Cornell boxes while contemplating the bitter hilarity of our mortal existence:



But what's this all about, you're probably asking?

Roadside Picnic and its adaptation concern the aftermath of an alien stopover on Earth by beings so incomprehensibly different and presumably advanced that they might not even have realized (or cared) that this planet was inhabited by at least one species that presumes itself sentient. Like careless travelers stopping for a picnic lunch, the aliens left behind a fair amount of crap, to which we humans are drawn as ants are to the wrappers and napkins and food scraps human picnickers might leave.

But what crap it is, glorious and dangerous and mysterious and powerful and did I mention dangerous? As are the Zones themselves that were visited and contain the Alien Crap (a list of which can be perused over at Wikipedia but ware spoilers!), in which the laws of physics, life and death, etc. are profoundly different from those prevailing in the good old ordinary universe as we know it and may also change from time to time.

So of course humanity is studying it (carefully) at very high levels and of course at lower levels there is a black market in Alien Crap and in unauthorized trips to the Zones to acquire more Alien Crap and also to exploit some of its properties like the Golden Sphere (which in Tarkovsky's film is changed into a Room), which grants wishes! Hence the existence of folk like our main character (and the title character of the film), Red, who is a Stalker -- a guide into and smuggler out of the Zones, who starts off his career as an unskilled research assistant, takes up a line in Stalking to make a little beer money, and then, when he gets his girlfriend pregnant, realizes he's got to keep breaking the law to keep his new family in groceries.

So even though the novel has a lot more gee-whiz sci fi elements than the film did, it's still a bottom-up view of a world transformed by an alien visit; Red is a working stiff, not an eminent scientist or astronaut, something which critics have made much of when writing about this book over the years; this book, of course, predates the "high tech/low life" scenarios to which cyberpunk and its spawn have long accustomed us. But just as we never get tired of working stiff stories in other genres, there's still plenty of room for working stiff sci-fi, especially when it's this good.

Roadside Picnic manages to be a slightly farcical (in that dry, dark and Russian way) quest narrative, a meditation on how small and insignificant we very probably are in the universe, a family drama and a cautionary tale. With Alien Crap.

In other words, it's completely wonderful.

But what really keeps it intriguing is the novel-world's central mystery: is there an overall, coherent, logical system behind all the Alien Crap and how it works, as in did the Brothers Strugatsky plan it all out and develop it as a complete puzzle for us to solve -- one with a solution -- or is it just a whole bunch of weird phenomena that they thought would be cool and just brainstormed one night over, say, some mushroom tea a la Babylen and Andrei in the fantastic Generation P (an adaptation of some more amazing Russian science fiction, my beloved Victor Pelevin's Homo Zapiens, and which film contains more than a few visual and narrative homages to Stalker. It's fly agaric all the way down, yo.)? Which might mean it's still weirdly meaningful, but not in a systematic way that one can tease out with mere reason... an exercise all the Alien Crap and Zone Traps which Roadside Picnic offers pretty much irresistibly invites the reader to try.

The film, of course, has other things with which to bake one's noodle, big philosophical and religious questions without which a Tarkovsky film would not be a Tarkovsky film, as well as long, slow, meditative and dreamlike scenes like this travel sequence:
:


This sequence should be required viewing for anyone who thinks he or she could pull some lo-fi sci fi cinema. It's just three guys sitting on a railroad car watching the scenery go by, but Eduard Artemiev's perfect musical accompaniment (which I played on a loop for a while during my reading of Roadside Picnic) and the transition from gritty industrial sepia-toned film stock to full color film*** and a lush green landscape**** makes Tarkovsky's Zone feel just as strange as the Strugatsky's but in a completely different way.

 Wonderful as Stalker is, though, now that I've read the novel from which the film is abstracted, I kind of wish Tarkovsky used more of the source material, not so much the Alien Crap as  the novel's social dimensions: the novel takes us inside the Institute which studies the Alien Crap and has a lot to say about the difficulties being encountered in figuring out how it works, why it works, what some of it might be for; it also spends some time with what must surely be the organization behind the Professor's mad scheme in the film, with those who oppose the exploitation of the Zones and regard them and their products as EVIL. Too, a movement within the Institute charged with policing and shutting down the Stalkers introduces a huge friendship and betrayal plot/theme that adds layers of intrigue to the novel (but also, sadly, winds up not being resolved within its text). But all that would require a different filmmaker altogether to develop. Richard Linklater, say.

It's hard, too, to read this book now without perceiving a lot of Soviet themes and thinking, spotting allegories about the dangers of Western-style materialism, for instance, as well as a certain environmental/pollution-themed cautionary tale. Careless aliens made whole swathes of our planet uninhabitable and hostile. Careless people have the same effect on other species' habitats. Species have evolved that are entirely dependent on our artificial impacts; in Roadside Picnic, we are in danger of adapting irrevocably to the impact of the Visit. Which, for all the novel's cast knows, might just be the whole point!

Oh, so much to think about, when we think about The Other...

*This to my shame, because I do consider myself a fan of Tarkovsky. But I'm a fan of a lot of things, and it takes time to get to them all!

**And no, this was not just so I could keep looking at Anatoliy Solonytsin. No, really!

***This is probably due to another one of the famous Soviet austerity/resource choking constraints that left directors like Tarkovsky having to work with little bits of lots of different kinds of film rather than a deliberate choice to do some Wizard of Oz-ish gimmicky contrast, I'm pretty sure. But that's Tarkovsky, making lemonade. But, you know, the lemonade might transform your digestive tract and eventually your whole body into more lemonade if you drink it.

****And the whole theme of a gorgeous natural landscape transformed into something still beautiful but deadly as hell strongly prefigures/predicts what would become of the environs of Chernobyl as you can observe in Michelle Boganin's 2011 Stalker-esque tour of Terre Outragee.

100 Books #121 - Jonathan L. Howard's KATYA'S WORLD

I had to keep reminding myself, as I read Katya's World, that without Wesley Crusher, who annoyed millions with his over-the-top precocity and tendency to save the occasionally weirdly bumbling asses of the crew of the Enterprise-D, we would not have the 24k slab of awesome that is Wil Wheaton today. Which is to say that sometimes, it's worth putting up with an improbably gifted young protagonist being the one to think of all the solutions to all the problems in order to enjoy the rest of a show's or novel's offerings.*

And what offerings there are! Like a stormy human-colonized water world, in which everybody lives in underwater cities, travels by submarine, and struggles to exploit the amazing mineral resources on the ocean floor and in the ocean water. Like a colony of entirely Russian descent (the powers-that-were in the waves of human colonization having concluded that removing the possibility of ethnic tensions was a very good idea) who eschew intoxicants and other Russian folkways because the environment is too hostile and drunkenness can easily lead to death.

Like a war fought under the waves, not among said Russian-descended colonists, but against invaders -- from Earth! A war that warped the culture of Katya's world forever, ten years before the events of this novel unfold, and is still warping it.

And, most importantly and excitingly, like a giant mysterious something haunting the deep, destroying subs and interfering with transport and commerce, which Big Benthic Baddie starts having a direct and frightening effect on Katya's own fifteen-year-old life as she starts her career as a submarine navigator! Said BBB and its secrets providing a marvelously creepy and menacing undertone to the whole novel. Yowza.

All this and a fascinatingly enigmatic hero-villain amalgam who totally steals the book even before we find out what he's really up to. Except that might not be what he's really really up to. Except that it might be after all. See?

So on the whole, I agree with my dear EssJay, who loved the Snape out of this book and hopes to see more works, maybe even for grown-ups, set in this fascinating world. Howard handles the science and the sociology very well, as well as the tension of sub-oceanic combat, sub-hunting, seek-and-destroy missions, discussions on the nature of synthetic vs. artificial intelligence**, so I know that, for instance, some prequel work on the war that preceded this story, or how Earth went from a colonizing powerhouse to something mysteriously crippled and desperate, would make for good reading for any age group.

And really? Katya's Wesley Crusher-ism isn't that annoying. If you could tolerate Sheriff Carter's always being the one to come up with the brilliant off-beat solution that all the scientists in Eureka couldn't, Katya won't bother you at all. But if you caught yourself rolling your eyes at Carter sometimes, well, they'll roll a bit more for this. But don't let that stop you. This is a neat book!

*And really, I want to forgive said annoying precocity and ass-saving as maybe one of the necessary trappings of young adult fiction, which I have but rarely read, even back when I was a young adult, but is that the case? At any rate, I probably wouldn't have noticed/been bothered by it so much had this been a first person narrative, in which case I could take it as a slightly unreliable narrator maybe inflating her importance to the course of events a bit, instead of the third person omniscient that I got. A pity.

**And, as Essjay so gleefully pointed out, even this heady stuff is made lucid for young readers but is never presented in a condescending info-dump, in narration or dialogue, which is always appreciated!

100 Books #119 - Fydor Dostoevsky's POOR FOLK

At first glance, there would appear to be just two characters in Dostoevsky's epistolary first novel, Poor Folk, but really there are four. We have the two letter-writing doomed lovers, Barbara (Varvara) Dobroselova and Makar Devushkin, and we have the pair's mental models or emulators of one another. The story told in the letters of this pair of chastely loving neighbors, in which they live out their lives of privation and longing for one another, is thus given an almost unbearable tension as they all but scream at one another for understanding. "Ah, little angel, you are a perfect child! I know well you are weak as a blade of grass," Makar might say to the decidedly not weak Barbara, for instance, projecting quite forcefully his distorted ideal of femininity on the woman he has decided he must protect even though it is obvious from the very beginning that, sad as Barbara's straits are, she is doing a much better job of taking care of herself than Makar is.*

It's this tension, rather than the horrible living conditions described or the novel's famed status as a possible satire on Gogol's "The Overcoat" and other works, that kept me reading this**; it's the same inter-character tension that I love best about Dostoevsky in particular, and Russian novels in general, after all. There is a perverse streak in me that loves to watch characters willfully misunderstanding each other while claiming (usually dismissively) to understand each other perfectly. I say perverse because nothing makes me angrier than when this happens to me in real life. In fiction, however, it's my crack.

So, while earlier this year I decided, after having thoroughly loved the first volume of Joseph Frank's giant biography of Doestoeversky, that I needed to read Poor Folk right away, I kind of put it off, largely out of a feeling of obligation to others. I am comrades with lots of writers who released new fiction this year and whose work could benefit from what small light I could shine on it; I finally allowed some friends, new and old, to talk me into reading all the Harry Potter and all the Dark Tower novels.... the year slipped away.

But as it comes to an end, I find myself in what my good pal EssJay aptly describes as a "sneaky hate spiral" in which all fiction annoys me or otherwise fails to keep my attention. I've been here before; I know what I need, and so I keep "guaranteed good stuff" that I know I'll like against such times. Hence Poor Folk at last. AaaaaaAAAAAaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh.

My own pecadillos notwithstanding, this book is a searingly worthwhile read even if  you don't get off on the kind of tension I'm celebrating here. Doestoevsky at the kinda-faltering start of his career is better than almost anyone else at his or her peak. Listen: I hate epistolary novels. Hate them. But if all of them were like Poor Folk, I would love them. They would be my favorites.

For instance, a good chunk of Barbara's correspondence is devoted to a rather lengthy account of her childhood and upbringing, which means Dostoevsky, brand new novelist, has already set for himself the daunting task of writing convincingly in a female voice -- and a unique and specific female voice at that, for Barbara is revealed as a woman whom we would now understand as a survivor of domestic violence, both physical and emotional, whose character has been shaped/warped by terrible events that she simply understands as commonplace, as just the way the world works. Her presentation of self, not precisely from a victim mentality seeking redress but as one who subtly demands a weird blend of pity and respect for her suffering, is astonishing and uncomfortable to read, and utterly masterful. One cringes at lines like "Yet this did not arise from any WANT OF LOVE for me on the part of my father, but rather from the fact that he was incapable of putting himself in my own and my mother's place. It came from a defect of character." Isn't making excuses for one's abuser a classic sign of abuse in the modern paradigm of same? But Dostoevsky knew it and saw it from the very beginning of his career, decades before it got codified into modern social services jargon. He was that good, right from the start.

All that and a bravura depiction of the humiliations and extraordinary degree of unrewarded effort that poverty inflicts on its victims, whatever the century.

Dude. My jaw is still in my lap. And I'm thinking about opening a hot dog stand.**

*Indeed, Barbara spends a lot of the novel berating Makar for spending money on unwanted gifts for her, which he insists on doing despite her many, many protests, because as far as he is concerned, that is what men must do for women they love, and women who claim they don't want them are just being coy. This, of course, enrages Barbara further, even as it also causes her to worry because it is plain that not only can Makar not afford the bonbons and presents of cash he is constantly sending her, but that he is basically endangering his own survival to do so. Her protests just drive him to try harder to please her with gifts. And so on. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so awful. Or vice versa.

**Well, that and the "just enough" funniness, chiefly achieved in exchanges between our lovers about whether or not a writer for whom Makar serves as amanuensis is a genius (Makar's version) or a hilariously bad hack (Barbara's), complete with extensively quoted passages so ridiculously overblown that they can't even be counted as satire. When Barbara continuously declines to read more, Makar's assumption that she is simply reading them in the wrong spirit and might like them better "when you have a bonbon or two in your mouth" makes it all even funnier. If you're the type who can laugh at patriarchy and patronizing, anyway. Which I can.

***Wink again at Unca Harlan.

100 Books #87 - Victor Pelevin's THE YELLOW ARROW

Everybody knows by now that I'm a big fan of Victor Pelevin, but I've never read the novella via which he first came to international attention. Until now, when I came across a sweet little used hardcover edition at the Powell's mothership on vacation in Portland last week. Which I then, while waiting for my sister and hostess to get off work, proceeded to take to the nearest pub and devour over a few pints of Guiness, not only because it is Pelevin, but because it is also another entry in that weird trope of fictions concerning perpetual railroads about which I have written here before.

The Yellow Arrow is the name of this train, crossing the wilds of the post-Soviet frontier but never actually reaching its possibly no-longer-existent destination. The train has been travelling for so long that most of its passengers no longer remember their lives before boarding it; indeed, many seem no longer to believe that they had lives before becoming passengers. A whole slightly Kafkaesque culture has developed on board, complete with histories, competing mythologies, secret societies and yes, black market economic cartels based around the strip mining of the train itself for raw materials. There is a news media, a secret governing cabal, even a set of peculiar funeral customs that, bizarrely, do not involve treating the bodies of the dead as more raw material for recycling and reuse; though the train never stops to take on supplies, some kind of basic carbon/nitrogen/water inputs are coming in from somewhere, even though we are assured there is no inhabited world outside the train anymore.

Pelevin is still kind of finding his voice here (this work was originally published in 1993), but already playing well with his themes of absurdity and willful ignorance and misplaced faith and trust and the way in which mass media manipulates reality. Its protagonist, Andrei, feels very much like an early sketch of his later hero, Babylen of Homo Zapiens fame, somewhere between a naif and a sophisticate in the ways of his world, not sure he should trust his friends, not sure if they are his friends, but willing to do what he has to in order to make it all work for him somehow. If it's not quite as wickedly funny as Pelevin's later works, it's plenty philosophical, impossible not to read as a parable of both Soviet and post-Soviet Russia (masterfully and weirdly, it manages to be both at once), and enjoyable. I wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to Pelevin -- I still think that should be Omon Ra -- but if you've found you've liked his other works and curious to have a peek at his beginnings, this is a must-see.

100 Books #29 - Joseph Frank's DOSTOEVSKY: THE SEEDS OF REVOLT 1821-1849

Though the event is not actually depicted or described in Seeds of Revolt, the specter of Russian uber-novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky's arrest, mock execution and sentence to Siberia looms large over this first of Joseph Frank's five-volume biography of the man. This should not be a spoiler for anyone; this fact and its timing (1849) are quite possibly the best-known and most-talked-about biographical detail in all Dostoevskiana, mentioned in every introduction, foreward, sketch and essay I've ever seen about the man. I might say it's as impossible not to know Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia as it is not to know that he wrote The Brothers Karamozov and Crime and Punishment, but then I run the risk of wandering into bless-me-what-do-they-teach-at-these-schools-ism.

What is not generally known to the casual Dostoevsky fan (which is what I would call myself; I certainly could not hold forth with Michael at Pink's for any length of time*) is the details of why and how this pivotal event came to happen. Enter the redoubtable Joseph Frank, whose staggering work I learned of, as is probably the case with everyone in my cliques and circles, through an essay by the late and much-lamented David Foster Wallace.** And before you ask, yes, I plan to read the other four volumes, for having completed this one I find myself a much less casual Dostoevsky fan and a Frank fan as well.

Frank could definitely go toe-to-toe with Michael at Pink's, and wouldn't even have to serve up a hot dog to keep the ordinary punter's attention while he did so.

As I said, the arrest looms large over this account, ominous and always feeling just around the corner even as Doestoevsky grows up with his strict father, suffers through military school, attracts the praise and attention of the great critic Vissarion Belinsky with his first novel Poor Folk (which I have yet to read but now very much want to) and then falls out with him, takes up other, nicer friends and watches them move away, writes, writes and writes and always wrings his hands over the plight of the enslaved peasantry of Russia (among whom he had had mostly happy formative experiences as a boy on his family's little estate) -- and then meets Petrashevsky, he of the circle accused of subversion and revolution and all sorts of other things that autocratic regimes do not like.

Frank's painstaking examination of the Petrashevsky circle -- a very informal salon in which members of the intelligentsia gathered of a Friday night to talk Socialist ideas, religion, politics and, occasionally, literature -- frankly gave me the chills, not so much because of what happened to them per se, or how they conducted themselves or what they talked about as what they resembled: they resembled Twitter, if not the entire internet. Everybody got a chance to spout off or argue, there was rarely a set agenda, anyone who wanted to could participate (within limits, of course, in St. Petersburg of the 1840s, of course), anyone could get sucked in and, potentially (and later actually), everyone could become tarred with the same brush. So when some members started up a secret society with the aim of actually staging a revolution in Russia, everybody got busted.

Back then, of course, the government had to work hard at it, to infiltrate the circle with an actual person hanging out at actual gatherings at specific times; nowadays, we've turned everything inside-out, having our conversations in full public view, asynchronously, trusting the First Amendment and the odd pseudonymous identity and that those in power won't confuse rhetoric with intent. This may be very foolish of us. Especially as things like NDAA have been allowed to happen. I do not fear being mock-shot or sent to Siberia, but I do fear an internet fettered and stunted by corporate/government interests, or being cut off from it and thus my world. I fear falling into the prison of my own flesh.***

Such are the dark thoughts a good Dostoevsky biography can inspire. And this one is very, very good. And, as I said, I'm itching to get my hands on the other four volumes.

And I'll be sleeping with one eye open, and tweeting with a little more concern (though I'm sure I already damned myself long ago out of my own typing fingers. I've always been free with my opinions, and have paid the price for this before when they were misconstrued, misunderstood, or just unpopular. Dostoevsky was not a revolutionary or even much of a socialist, Frank says, but if you got him going defending literature that wasn't written purely as a dialectical tool for social reform, or, worse, on the plight of the peasantry, then he could potentially wind up out in the streets screaming and waving a red flag. As a friend of mine once observed, some people have buttons to push, others have a whole keyboard. Unca Fyodor had perhaps a modestly sized keyboard; mine is vast and varied).

But what of it, Orson Welles might ask. Go on singing.

*Wink wink at Unca Harlan Ellison, the modern writer of whom I was most reminded as I read this biography of Unca Fyodor. Go watch the YouTube video I linked to above, or better yet, get your hands on a copy of Angry Candy, far and away my favorite of his short story collections and the one containing the amusing and awesome "Prince Myshkin and Hold the Relish."

**Which appears in his last essay collection Consider the Lobster, if you're wondering. I could not find a link to the complete text online. The book is worth acquiring or at least reading, though, and not just for the Frank/Dostoevsky piece!

***Wink wink at William Gibson. Of course.

100 Books 55 - Victor Pelevin's HOMO ZAPIENS

I love Victor Pelevin, but I somehow managed to miss this one when it came out. I only learned of its existence because a film adaptation premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this year under the title Generation P. The film blew me away and was my favorite from this year's festival and I promise that soon I'll get around to writing about the rest of the films I saw there; for now, suffice it to say that Victor Ginzberg's film adaptation was magnificently faithful to a novel that was begging to be a film from the first page.

Homo Zapiens -- the title refers to a theorized new, devolved form of human being whose thoughts and reactions are largely governed by the television, even if, maybe especially if, what he's mostly doing is zapping to avoid commercials -- is Pelevin at his most gleefully nihilistic as he surveys the chaos that was Russia in the 90s. Not since The Exile: Sex Drugs and Libel in the New Russia have I seen this milieu so vividly depicted: blatant corruption at all levels of public and private life, gross materialism and drug abuse, vodka and cranky mysticism, all wrapped up in the Russian version of How to Get Ahead in Advertising; had hero Babylen Tartosky sprouted another head I would not have been surprised. But Pelevin has other, crazier ideas to play with, here.

Like the idea that at some point the mass media stopped reporting the news and started making it up -- even to inventing the politicians, who only exist as artfully computer-generated animations and carefully seeded urban legends (a cadre of ordinary-seeming ex-soldier types has the job of planting stories of seeing, e.g. Yeltsin or Berezhovsky in a grocery store or walking down the street). It's unclear whether or not we readers are expected to take this idea as true for this fictional world, or as just another whopper his co-workers and employers have laid on for Babylen's confusion or edification, and it's one of the amazing things about this novel that it ultimately doesn't matter if the reader believes it or not, if Babylen's superiors believe it or not, or if Babylen believes it or not.

Which is to say that Homo Zapiens, novel and film, messed with my head in all of the ways I most like having my head messed with. But if you're not familiar with the real world that inspired this phantasmagorical fake (or is it? Hmm?) one, do yourself a favor and have a look at The Exile, either the book I linked to above, or look at some of the archived "classic" issues from its original run as one of the bitchiest and most profane alternative newspapers the world has ever seen. Doing so will not only enrich your experience of reading or watching Homo Zapiens/Generation P, but will also give you a unique and completely compelling look at the  world through the eyes of "two hairy-assed jerks" who had front row seats to watch the chaos, cannibalism and cockery of the collapse of the world's last great empire.

TIFF 2011: LAND OF OBLIVION (AKA TERRE OUTRAGEE)

I think I like the original French title for this film, Terre Outragée, a little better than the English Land of Oblivion. For film that examines in a very specific and  haunting way the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, a phrase that appears (to this non-Francophone) to translate as "the insulted" or even "the assaulted" land just better suits.

This film, director Michelle Boganim's first non-documentary, hit me where I live, despite how its narrative kind of falls apart toward the end (to be frank, I didn't notice how much was left dangling until I discussed it later with my best film buddy, who has a sharper eye for that sort of thing and into whom this film did not get its emotional hooks as deep). It begins by presenting a rapturous rural Ukrainian idyll, all rowboats on the river and kids at play on a lushly wooded riverbank; we learn the pair in the rowboat are soon to be married and they are happily in love. Knowing this film does concern Chernobyl, the viewer can't help but know this is not going to end well, but everything is so beautifully presented and photographed that happy sighs escape as the scenes are taken in -- even when rain interrupts the wedding party and drives everyone under cover.

Queue dead fish floating belly up in the river. Dying, blackened trees. And power plant employees, including the bridegroom, being summoned to work under mysterious circumstances.

Boganim wisely doesn't dwell on any attempt to re-enact the tragedy itself; all of this is just prologue. The main events take place 25 years later, when stubborn, homesick former residents of the village of Pripyat (just eight miles from the reactors) start finding various excuses to return home despite official warnings not to. Noplace else is home; nowhere else feels right; cancer and radiation sickness and ruined, moldy houses with mutant birch trees growing through them be damned.

I could relate. I have a similar attachment to the valley where I grew up, a valley that lives under threat of destruction, not from a nuclear accident but from forest fire (look up any article you wish about the Medicine Bow National Forest and its lost battle with the Mountain Pine Beetle). It has its hooks in me gut-deep and I can never tear myself away, and you bet even if it did somehow, someday, become an irradiated hellhole, I would still sneak back to be there if even one tree was standing, one pool of water still reflecting the sky.

Yeah, this film made me cry. Well done, Ms. Boganim. Well done.

Once again, I have embedded the AudioBoo I recorded with Paul Laroquod the day we saw the film, just for completeness' sake.

100 Books: 1-Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE

Memories of the Future

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Translated by Joanne Turnbull

NYRB Classics

I had not even heard of Krzhizhanovsky before NYRB Classics announced it was publishing this volume a little over a year ago. Having just recently enjoyed Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, and also a big fan of Mikhail Bulgakov and Nikolai Gogol and Victor Peleven, I was in the mood for more Soviet-era fabulism and this looked to fit the bill precisely.

Had the book been available on Kindle, I no doubt would have devoured it immediately, but as it was, I had to wait for a physical object to be located in a warehouse and packed and shipped to me, and by the time it arrived my mood had shifted and I was haring off after something else, like I do. It hit the to-read pile, which these days takes longer to get to because I do most of my reading outside the house and my Kindle weighs less and takes up less space and I never worry about finishing and being stranded, bookless, somewhere.

I'm sad now that I took so long, though this was not a seamlessly perfect read for me.

Krzhizhanovsky seems to have been largely ignored during his lifetime and writing career, which was contemporary with the Russian Revolution of 1917. This was probably dreadfully frustrating for Krzhizhanovsky, the man, but wonderful for Krzhizhanovsky, the writer. Under the radar and little regarded, he could write what he liked, and he did. And oh, what he wrote!

A lot of reviewers I've come across seem to like to compare him to Jorge Luis Borges (whom I absolutely adore), and I get the comparison, but I don't find it really that useful or accurate. Both are fabulists of a certain very elegant type, fond of intellectual games and exploring the impossible, but Krzhizhanovsky's stories are far more accessible and, weird though it is to say, grounded in the banality and grit of the Soviet world in which he lived; there are none of Borges' dizzyingly erudite Berkeleyan speculations and narrative hoop snakes here. When Krzhizhanovsky brings the Eiffel Tower to life and sends it rampaging, Godzilla-like, across Europe to join the Moscow comrades, western powers use radio, not wordplay or metaphysical puzzles, to defeat it, and its journey's end is tragic and moving rather than leaving the reader saying "Huh!" And when a man acquires a treatment that, when painted on the walls of his tiny living space in a communal apartment, makes his space expand TARDIS-like so that its outside is bigger than the inside, Krzhizhanovsky doesn't play with the metaphor of expanding walls and labyrinths as Borges would (though he does add Lovecraftian touches as some misapplied substance results in uneven growth and distorted geometry that only gets worse as the room gets bigger), but instead explores the implications of the transformation in a real Moscow where remeasuring commisions are an omnipresent threat as demand for space increases, and what happens when a space outgrows its electrical wiring and is plunged into eternal darkness.

The expanding room is the feature of the first story in the collection, "Quadraturin," which is very likely my favorite. The whole account feels like the sort of prank that Woland and his band of devils might have played on an unsuspecting citizen in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, or like an extra lesson from W.W. Jacob's "The Monkey's Paw." There is a dark humor here, in other words, that again gives lie to comparisons with Borges, who is many wonderful things but rarely funny.

Less funny is "The Bookmark" for all that it contains the Eiffel Tower narrative I mentioned above. That mini-narrative is one of many shared by a "theme catcher" who intermittently shares a park bench with the narrator. Each of the catcher's stories is more poignant than the last, expanding on a delicately critical metaphor for the changes that came to Russia with the Revolution. No wonder Krzhizhanovsky had publication troubles!

It is with one of the more intriguing-seeming stories, "The Branch Line" that my trouble with the book and its translation begins. A train trip into nightmares made concrete and are set to overthrow reality -- this should be my favorite story! And indeed it contains some powerfully interesting and original ideas and images. I fear, though, that here Turnbull got carried away with the need to convey dreaminess, to be poetic. For every arresting moment or observation* there is a passage of what threatens to descend to the level of word salad, clumsy allterations for the sake, it appears, of alliteration (perhaps trying to copy a similar degree of same in the original Russian?) and awkwardly florid word choices (almost nothing is blue in this story, but rather "azure", for instance). The effect of these choices was of constantly yanking me out of the story to notice the writing, which spoilt, somewhat, my enjoyment of this story -- especially since the language is in quite stark contrast to that in all the others, which are mostly in a plain and clear voice that George Orwell would praise.

That's all right, though, because my brain is still reeling from the titular story for whole different reasons. "Memories of the Future" is famously (for descriptions of a rather obscure Soviet-era short story writer's work, anyway) described as a time travel story, but again, it really concerns itself with the viscitudes of fate suffered by ordinary Russians through one of the most profound regime changes history has to offer. Max Schterer has spent a lifetime developing a thought experiment to build a "timecutter" which, when attached to the user's head, so alters his experience of time that the past and the future are a matter of to what he desires to pay attention. He almost completes it once -- only to get drafted and sent to Germany to fight in World War I. When he returns to the inheritance he has long awaited, the Revolution has happened and his resources are now the state's; it is only through the largesse and imagination of one of his fellow inmates from the German POW camp where he spent most of his war that he gets a second chance to build his timecutter, and to use it, but like Ellie Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact, he goes on a journey he can neither prove nor describe well, and sees only the goings-on in his room and through his window. Again, a moving fantasy, but Borgesian only in its barest outlines.

Really, if I had to chose a writer to whom to compaire Krzhizhankovsky, I would choose Philip K. Dick. The paranoia, the dystopianism, the sheer inventiveness both display make them brothers, as do their publication woes. And indeed, in his mind, Dick inhabited a universe not unlike Soviet Russia, where it was impossible to be good, where bureaucracy and isms do their best to trample and reform simple humanity, and where creativity and madness might just be interchangeable. And both, both are unforgettable.

My 100 Books participation is off to a lofty and amazing start.

*A passage lauding the "heavy industry of dreams" and a discussion of a line of pillows disguised as briefcases, "just tuck this under your elbow and you -- while standing up with your eyes wide open in broad daylight -- will sink into the deepest sleep: you'll dream that you're a manager, a mover and shaker, a public servant, an inventor of new systems" will stay with me for a very long time indeed.