VOROSHILOVGRAD by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Wheeler

April 18, 2022 / Daniel Haeusser / Leave a comment

Voroshilovgrad
By Serhiy Zhadan
Translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Wheeler
Deep Vellum Publishing — April 2016
ISBN: 9781941920305 — Paperback — 445 pp.

A review from the backlist. I’ve had a copy of Voroshilovgrad in my to-read pile for years now, and I’ve picked it up to start numerous times only to put it aside to get to an immediate priority in my reading triage. With the horrific escalation in conflict and Russian aggression that has gone on in Ukraine since then, I finally decided I needed to get to this, to help balance the despair I would get from reading the current news.

Zhadan’s voice, and this novel, was just what I needed to be reminded of the humanity behind the politics going on in this region, and of the hope that still remains possible even amid the destruction of place and life. Well-respected as a talented and vital voice in contemporary Ukrainian literature, Zhadan is equally (if not more?) known for his poetry as his prose. Poetry is not my bag, but the poetics of his fiction resonate strongly.

Voroshilovgrad takes its name from the Russian name for the current Ukrainian city of Luhansk, and it is the original home of the novel’s protagonist Herman. Herman now lives in another city, where he holds an ‘executive’ business position with responsibilities as ill-defined as his aspirations and engagement in life. But, he is content and happy, abiding with his friends.

Until Herman receives a call telling him that his brother Yura has mysteriously left the country, seemingly abandoning the gas station that he ran for good. Herman decides to return to his hometown to find out more; to temporarily help its remaining employees, Injured and Kocha, take care of the business. Herman arrives to find that Injured and Kocha, while dedicated, are like fish-out-of-water in running things, uncertain of how their boss managed the business, or how he had dealt with a gang of local business leaders who had been pressuring him to sell the station.

Intending to stay only a day – or a few – Herman finds his loyalty and pride pulling him into staying in Luhansk, taking over the responsibilities, and the stresses, that his brother Yura has apparently fled. In addition to his two new friends/coworkers and the politically-tied thugs, Herman meets some of the local women, illegal migrants, wistful travelers, Romani families (referred to as Gypsies in the text), and ghosts of the past. Though he stays in one relative place (Luhansk and its environs) for the majority of the novel, Herman’s story is one of a journey, often traversing the wasted landscape on foot, by bus, or by rail. The landscape is almost like a character, but also a means for his encounters with the varied human characters along a personal journey of his soul, in this vibe of magic realism that even directly references The Wizard of Oz.

The environments and physical objects of Voroshilovgrad are barren and bleak, worn-out and used, abused. Including the people. But only in the physical sense. Zhadan imbues the souls of his characters, and their mind, with refreshing joy, camaraderie, optimism. As beaten as they all are, as decrepit as their city and possessions seem to be, they are fiercely loyal and hopeful. This resounds in the text, and the characters even help the environment display a simplicity of uncomplicated beauty without things like the latest fashions or technology.

Zhadan’s prose is also as comical as it is serious. The humor in the character’s lives, and even their most mundane interactions shines through, almost absurdly against that dark, bleak backdrop of a setting. This appeared most obviously to me in a section that features a football match (and its aftermath) among Herman and his coworkers, and the ghosts of players Herman knew in his past. Literally haunting, yet also absurdly comical and jubilant amid their rough-and-tumble personalities. Dead, but full of life.

Other reviews of the novel I have come across mention one downside to the novel being the female characters, who are all written distinctly from the male point-of-view and are not given much depth beyond serving the needs of Herman (both physically and metaphorically in terms of the journey of his spirit and life). I would agree with this, but also feel this applies equally to all of the male characters. Herman is the heart of the novel and all others really exist more in relation to his growth than any of their own.

Voroshilovgrad is a monumental work of beauty and passionate feeling, rendered all the more bittersweet by the current realities facing Ukraine. I look forward to reading more of Zhadan’s fiction, and I hope that more authors will exist there in the future to continue writing so truthfully. In terms of the plot of the novel, the threats to Herman and his friends (while serious) ultimately give way to hope of a better future, and reduced threats. I pray the same goes for reality.

OF DARKNESS by Josefine Klougart (Translated by Martin Aitken)

January 21, 2021 / Daniel Haeusser / Leave a comment

Of Darkness (Om mörker)
By Josefine Klougart
(Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken)
Deep Vellum Publishing — January 2017
ISBN: 9781941920503 — Papberback — 322 pp.

Today I have a review from the backlist of copies received: the second novel by Josefine Klougart translated into English by Martin Aitken: Of Darkness, published by Deep Vellum. A critically acclaimed young voice in current Scandanavian Literature, Klougart has five novels and additional works of prose published in her native Danish.

Several additional backlist titles from Deep Vellum are planned for review here in the near future, and as I try to bring more attention to translated fiction on Reading 1000 Lives, I hope to feature some of their current, new releases as well. Deep Vellum has an impressive catalog and their endeavor deserves support and readership. I’ve discovered several authors through them that I otherwise would have never read. Their prices are also great deals given the quality they put out.

Of Darkness represents a rare case of a book from Deep Vellum that I didn’t really like. Nonetheless, as I try to do here, let me provide a review that could show potential readers out there why it might be the perfect book for them.

Klougart writes beautifully, and I would give another of her novels a try, if it were more conventional, and at least had some skeleton of plot to support the atmosphere of its words. Of Darkness might be labelled as experimental in multiple regards. It lacks narrative or character development in the usual senses of a novel, with unnamed personages flowing through the scenes of its pages, starting with a particular ‘she’ and ‘he’. Although composed of prose, as novels typically are, the text most often veers closer to poetry, and also includes sketch illustrations and, at one point, turns briefly into the format of a script.

Poetry is not for me, as much as I’ve tried to read it. However, I can fall in love with poetic prose, as long as it has other aspects of story to anchor me. Even without such an anchor, I can still appreciate it in small doses, just not within a work that is over 300 pages.

Everything is shifting and merging in Of Darkness — time, space, perception, revelation, relationships — with the shifting styles of its experimental writing to mirror the nature of its themes. One moment Klougart gives us musical text like:

“January. Bells of frost beneath the horses’ hooves, compact snow wedged to the iron shoe, the frog of the hoof blued and fraying in the freeze.
High walls balanced on the branches here.
It snowed, the way it had snowed for days, weeks soon.
Feet kicking up their fans of powdery snow with each step.
The darkness unrevealing of such detonations of crystal.
The crystal shares much with literature. Material held together in a particular pattern,
determined by particular rules. Structures repeating everywhere.
He can see that, he says. It makes sense.
She remembers the snow consumed her tracks and that she was unable to find her way home again.
Trudging, then to pause and listen to the sound of her breath, which in turn startled her. No way forward, no way back.
Like a year suddenly past. Or just a summer.
She remembers she gave up and thought of a farewell scene, a parting from her family and lover. She recalls being surprised at who turned up in her mind.
How many were present, and the way the snow settled in her hair.”

Another moment, and Klougart writes in a different fashion, more akin to typical prose of a novel:

“There’s something satisfying about hearing a pop song’s reiteration of a simple truth, for instance the banality of not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone. You lose someone but at the same time gain a more complete picture of the love you nonetheless felt for that person. That’s one way of putting it. But one might also consider that time changes everything; that the next day will always be new; that in a way it’s too late to learn what you had to lose after you’ve already lost it—the glancing back over your shoulder, or the longer look, reveals the land you’ve covered to be different from the land in which you lived. The fields you left behind, the distance measured out in units of assumptions and kilometers. She stands with her hands on her midriff, concentrating on listening. But the light has the same effect as water, distorting all sounds. And yet she is certain, he is downstairs shaving with the electric shaver. The door is closed, she lies down and turns on her side. Lying there on the bed she can look down between the beams and see the door, which indeed is closed.
She gets to her feet. The pane is steamed up, a drop of condensation travels down the middle.
The sky is not blue but white; the light is the voice of the sun, unready as yet, though sleep-drenched it muscles in. The pane is soaking wet. She descends the loft ladder and cautiously opens the door of the bathroom.
He is facing away, quite apathetic.”

These two evocative passages represent brief sips that impress and astound me, and the novel may have succeeded for me in its entirety if I hadn’t gulped it in a few sittings, but rather just as sips every once in a while, across a span of months.

Klougart’s Of Darkness is a mediative look at loss, love, pain, living, and mortality. Even with its shifting styles it can become repetitive if forced and not given time to process its details. I would vastly prefer these themes to be covered in a narrative story, with occasions of poetic interlude. But that is not what Klougart has done, and that is valid.

Though not really for me, the evident high quality of this particular work by Klougart is equally the product of its translator into English, Martin Aitken. A sparse, atmospheric, poetic novel such as this demands remarkable and delicate precision in words. I cannot speak to the precision of the translation, but Atiken keeps all of the affect that appears intended by Klougart. Aitken has also contributed to the translation of the final volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic My Struggle, which may be familiar to many readers. There is enough interest for me still in Klougart to give his translation of her novel One of Us Is Sleeping a try one day, which seems to be more appropriate for my tastes.

BEFORE by Carmen Boullosa

April 6, 2018January 18, 2021 / Daniel Haeusser / Leave a comment

Before
By Carmen Boullosa
(Translated by Peter Bush)
Deep Vellum Press — June 2016
ISBN 9781941920282 — 120 Pages – Paperback
Source: Publisher

Before is a perfect example of what makes Deep Vellum Press so invaluable in providing access to English translations of modern world writers. Boullosa’s published works spans from poetry through plays to novels, generally focusing on themes of gender and feminism. This novella provides a finely distilled entry into her themes for those who can’t fluently read Spanish and/or are hesitant to commit to any one of her seventeen novels published in Mexico (with some translated and at least once in print in the US).

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Billed as “part bildungsroman, part ghost story, part revenge novel,” Before is told by a woman who may — or may not — be dead, in an uncanny narration that disjointedly recollects her past, the relationships that kept her in fear while young through that uncertain journey to adulthood. Like Modiano, Boullosa’s seems particularly focused here on the theme of memory. Whereas the French novelist has often explored this on the collective cultural/national level, Boullosa’s prose dredges through the personal and familial.

“(I feel surrounded on all sides by loose ends of memories I’ve invoked when telling you my story. They all rush up, want my hand, as if they were children, shouting ‘me first,’ and I don’t know which to take first, for fear that one will rush out, decide not to come back in a fit of pique. I lecture them: ‘Memories, be patient, let me take you one at a time to consider you more favorably, please understand that if you come at the right moment you’ll shine better in my eyes, you’ll burst and liberate all the treasures hiding on the backs of your roan mares…’ If only I could write what I relate and devote eternity to reading it…)” — pp. 43 – 44.

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Before captures and celebrates the contradictions inherent in these relationships and their associated memories:

“My grandmother looked at me disappointedly because I wasn’t the boy she would have liked. My dad…he didn’t look at me that day or any subsequent day, till I lost count. Then, when I stopped noticing he wasn’t looking at me, he did look and did play with me. He was fantastic to play games with.” — p. 11.

Alongside her family, fear lurks as embodiment of the factor that has most influenced the narrator’s memories and development.

“Afterwards I fell asleep and the [terrifying sounds] that woke up…the ones that woke me up! I was in holy fear of them, a nameless tasteless fear, a fear outside of me, that went beyond me…” — p. 27.

Boullosa paints this fear as as a force that parallels the narrator’s sense of isolation from the universe around her, strengthening the forces of patriarchy that stifle her budding individualism and any self-confidence she might discover.

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The melancholy tone of Before and its soupçon of the supernatural make it into an eerie auto-bereavement of how a woman began and how the power of others molded her into something else, an entity distinct from what she could have been.

“Because I’m not what I was like as a child. I am who I was, that’s true, I am or think I have been the same from the day I was born to today, but my eyes are not the same.” — p. 65.

The disjointed, fragmented nature of Before, characteristics inherent in memory, should not dissuade readers. Within the novella length this type of construction is palatable and apt. Those who appreciate intelligent, atmospheric meditations on these themes of womanhood, family, memory, and mortality shouldn’t hesitate to allow Before to speak to them.

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Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.