Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

There, at the cemetery, it doesn't say Natasha Ignatenko. There's only his name. She didn't have a name yet, she didn't have anything. Just a soul. That's what I buried there. I always go there with two bouquets: one for him, and the other I put in the corner for her. I crawl around the grave on my knees. Always on my knees. [She becomes incomprehensible.] I killed her. I. She. Saved. My little girl saved me, she took the whole radioactive shock into herself, she was like the lightning rod for it. She was so small. She was a little tiny thing. [She has trouble breathing.] She saved... But I loved them both. Because--because you can't kill something with love, right? With such love! Why are those things together--love and death. Together. Who's going to explain this to me? I crawl around the grave on my knees.

Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl begins and ends with two monologues by women whose husbands were killed by radiation poisoning as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear disasters. Lyudmilla Ignatenko's husband was a fireman; Valentina Pasanevich's, a liquidator--those tasked with cleaning up the disaster, and whose roles ranged from disposing of tons of radioactive graphite at the reactor site to shooting the dogs and cats abandoned in the evacuated town of Pripyat. Their stories are mirrors of each other: their husbands conscribed by duty, then subjected to horrible death. Ignatenko describes her husband's skin sloughing off like a glove; Pasanevich, rivers of blood that pour out like holes in a milk bucket. Ignatenko's husband died within weeks of the disaster; she hid her pregnancy from the doctors and nurses because she knew she wouldn't be allowed to see him; her daughter was stillborn. Pasanevich's husband died years later, the last of his squadron to do so, the cancer having disfigured his face so badly as to be unrecognizable.

Sometimes, words fail the women, but more miraculously, words come. Famously, Alexievich is the standard-bearer for the oral history, a collection of first-person monologues around a central topic or event. What is so remarkable about Voices from Chernobyl, I think, is just how eloquently the "normal people" Alexievich interviewed are able to speak about their experiences--Ignatenko calling her stillborn daughter a "lightning rod," or the way one speaker remembers the puddles of yellow and green water from acid rain, like paint. The amount of trust, and humility, required for a writer to give their project over like that must be immense. What emerge are stories that have been told and retold, but also stories that have been suppressed and ignored, as if the "Chernobylites" have been waiting behind the veil of the reactor's zone of exclusion for a chance to say how it was.

They are firemen and liquidators, but also ordinary peasants and farmers living in the contaminated area from Ukraine to Belarus, scientists, photographers, politicians. In some of the most powerful sections, Alexievich interviews refugees from war-torn Soviet republics like Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan who had to flee, with nowhere to settle but the ruined land of Chernobyl no one else would occupy. Alexievich herself seems to disappear within the text, feeding questions, perhaps, that are erased, leaving the impression of unbroken monologues. When an interviewee does turn their attention to Alexievich, it creates a sense of shock, so thoroughly have we forgotten she's there: "Can you help?" one enraged subject asks. "No! Then why did you come here? To ask questions? To touch us? I refuse to trade on their tragedy. To philosophize. Leave us alone, please. We need to live here."

Like the HBO series Chernobyl, which drew heavily from Alexievich's book, Voices from Chernobyl suggests that the tragedy of the disaster was an especially Soviet one. Dozens of the liquidators describe feeling unable to say no to the bureaucrats who sent them in to "the Zone" to get sick and die; partly they desire to become heroes of the Soviet Union, but partly they describe a feeling that the State is more important than an individual life, and that the idealism of Communism mean their lives were forfeit to a "greater good." They describe a bureaucratic state expert only at keeping secrets, more concerned with stamping out panic than saving the millions who live in the path of the radioactive cloud from its life-altering harms.

But I was struck by how much these stories resonate with our own American response to COVID. (I said this about White Noise, too, but in many ways White Noise's "Airborne Toxic Event" reads eerily like a prediction of Chernobyl's radioactive cloud, which emerged a year after it was published.) Our American individualism isn't much like the Soviet ideology of collectivism, but similar themes emerge: the insistence on maintaining a "normal life" in the face of a disaster that can't be seen, the sense that victims have of being ignored and distrusted. I was struck, too, by how deeply the response to Chernobyl was shaped by two wars--World War II, for older "Chernobylites," and the war in Afghanistan, in which many of the young liquidators served--and how the metaphors of war and heroism warped the ability of the Soviets to understand what was happening. (More than one interviewee tells Alexievich something along the lines of, "We don't even know what Chernobyl was.") In much the same way, I think, American myths about our wars--World War II, yes, but also our post 9/11 insistence that maintaining normality was itself a victory over Islamic terrorism--warped our ability to confront our own disaster, our own lethal cloud. 

The presence of a writer can give us a sense of detached safety, a barrier between us and the terror of the world, someone who will shape the facts and filter them through a reassuring consciousness, and prevent us from having to do it ourselves. The radical power of Voices from Chernobyl, I think, has to do with the sensation of unfiltered experience--unfiltered grief, unfiltered fear, unfiltered pain, unfiltered anxiety, unfiltered love. It was, at times, so intense I had to close the book while reading it on the train to keep myself from being overwhelmed.

I had a vague sense that Chernobyl had deleterious effects all throughout Europe. but I didn't realize how close it was to the Belarussian border and how intensely, therefore, it affected Belarus as well as Ukraine--in fact, 70% of the fallout drifted to Belarus, Alexievich's home country. With the addition of Belarus, my "countries read" list is up to 64.

The Use of Man by Aleksandar Tisma

Vera mourned everyone who had ever spoken to her, who had longed for her, whether out of love or lust, even the German soldiers whose convulsive spasms on top of her before they left for the front were the last expression of their will to live. They were all shadows now, voices from the past. Was there anything solid on this earth, anything that stood firm, so one would not need to say of it: That, too, has passed? It seemed to her that there was nothing. Desires, plans, people sending their calls of love and screams of pain into the air, and ultimately all this dissolved into a fog that floated aimlessly. And she herself was a wisp in that fog, lost among strange shadows and voices. Did she exist, or was she just another of those shadows and voices?

Sredoje Lazukic returns to his hometown of Novi Sad in Serbia as a member of the victorious Partisans at the end of World War II. His former home is occupied, but the home of his old friend and crush Vera Kroner stands empty. Wandering in, he finds a strange object: a little red book, a diary that once belonged to Fraulein Anna, who taught them both German, and who died young of illness before the war began. This object brings Sredoje back to the life he once had as a boy, and to the lives of others: Vera, a beautiful and aloof half-Jewish girl, her boyfriend, Sredoje's friend, Milinko, who ended his days armless, legless, deaf, and blind in a field hospital, to their various parents and siblings, killed in war or in camps, or simply absent.

Structurally, The Use of Man is a wonder: it vaults from the era before the war to the era after, to the war itself, from Sredoje to Vera to Milinko to Fraulein Anna to Vera's father to Sredoje's brother, and on, and on. It's one of those books that seems to have no organizing principle but intuition, and an intuition that works flawlessly. Although, now that I've said that, I think there's perhaps one organizing principle: it keeps until the very end the story of Vera's experience in the concentration camp, where she was spared a quick death by being selected for a special block in which the German officers kept the women they wanted to sleep with. Even then, she outlives most of the other girls, who are tortured to death when the officers tire of them, or over petty slights. When we read this section--recounted in pitilessly toneless fashion, like the tale of a dead and numbed psyche--we begin to understand why Vera, having returned to Novi Sad, submits sexually to any man who darkens her door; it is the rote mechanical movement of someone whose life has been emptied out of everything but this horrible routine.

Sex is a big part of The Use of Man. It ought to be called The Use of Women, honestly. Vera's trials are mirrored by Sredoje's sexual sadism, Sredoje who only ends up with the anti-occupation Partisans because he's chased out of the Serbian police force for abusing the power of his badge by threatening to arrest prostitutes unless they service him for free. Despite this, Sredoje and Vera are the twin poles of the novel, destined for each other as much as they are foils for one another. When they finally re-meet, years after the war's end, Sredoje is in possession of the diary that was given to Vera by the dying Fraulein. They kindle a brief romantic and sexual relationship centered around it, reading and re-reading it, dumbfounded by a relic of despair recorded by someone who never even saw the war's beginning. Was it better to die, like Fraulein Anna, of some strange disease, than to live through the war's ravagings?

The way in which the war upended lives is the novel's big theme. To make it work, Tisma lingers for a hundred pages on the pre-war lives of the characters in Novi Sad, not without their conflicts and complexities, but somehow, like Anna's, conflicts and complexities of a different tenor and scope completely. The book's structural tricks give this prelude a sense of foreboding and doom; Tisma sets aside one chapter to tell us, paragraph by paragraph, how each of the characters will die, which by gas chamber, which by bullets, which by suicide. The war is a knot into which time enters in both directions. It gives a sense, too, of how the ethnic and cultural complexities of the Balkans exacerbated the war's uncertainty. How does Vera's father, the Jewish Kroner, end up with his brother-in-law Sep, a dedicated anti-Semite and Nazi, staying in his house? This could be merely a preconceived notion, and much of Europe must have been the same way, but something in The Use of Man reflected the flammable ethnic and cultural conflicts that have dogged the Balkans forever.

The Use of Man sounds like a too-familiar book: a Holocaust story in a realist mode. Who needs another book like that? It makes it all the more impressive, I think, that the book is so engaging and affecting; though the structure is clever and skillful, it's the richness of the characters and the detail of their lives that makes the novel what it is.

With the addition of Serbia, my "countries read" list is up to 63.

La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono

I didn't understand what it meant to be a man. If in the past I thought it was enough to have genitals dangling between one's legs, now I wasn't so sure. Because Uncle Marcelo's were like that, but nobody in the village considered him a man. So would the perfect man be one who fathered children? Of course not, I answered myself. My grandfather had done that, but in my grandmother's opinion, he couldn't be considered a man because he had proven himself unable to impose order within his family. Would a man be someone who subdued or dominated others? I didn't know, and I tossed and turned in bed, unable to fall asleep, until I saw a vision of my mother walking before me. I followed her in silence, without asking about my father.

Okomo is una bastarda, a bastard-child: her mother dead, her father mysteriously absent, she is no one's daughter, and yet she is oppressed by the patriarchal claims of family. Her grandfather, an imperious jerk, sits her down and regales her with stories of the men in her family who became men the right way, by having children with their wives, properly married--and paid for. Meanwhile, he has taken a second, younger wife, and Okomo's grandmother spends all her time trying to find money to pay the curandera for a spell to get Okomo's grandfather into her bed again.

Against this backdrop, Okomo begins to learn the rigid rules of heterosexual coupling in the culture of the Fang people of Equatorial Guinea. She's strangely compelled by her uncle Marcelo, a "woman-man" who lives in the forest with his male partner, and who has invited the opprobrium of his family by refusing to impregnate his sister-in-law. (This demand may seem odd, but it underscores, like Okomo's bastard status, the way that the rigid laws of traditional family dictate the biological and genetic process, rather than the other way around.) Okomo, seeing how Marcelo is shunned, begins to fear for her future when she has her first lesbian encounter with her friend Dina.

La Bastarda is, as I understand it, the first book by a Equatorial Guinean woman translated into English, and it is banned in Equatorial Guinea. That's no surprise, given how critical it is of gender roles and sexual politics among the Fang. It is more interesting than good: the setup is rich and complex but the writing often amateurish. I was shocked when, after being invited into the forest by three older girls (including Dina), Okomo is invited to remove her clothes and get right down to having sex. That we're only told after the sudden forest orgy that Okomo has been lusting for Dina for a long time seems to underscore the sense that the plot is being made up as it goes along, and that the characters are being pushed around by the demands of the critique.

But for all that, La Bastarda is a fascinating document about the experience of LGBTQ+ people living under traditional African societies. For Okomo, liberation means leaving family altogether, and making a new family with Dina, Marcelo, and the two other girls--conveniently paired off after initially snitching on Okomo and Dina because of their jealousy--in the forest. The forest, away from the villages, is a magical place, a reversal of the image of the African jungle as a place of mystery or dark magic. La Bastarda makes one wonder about familiar Eurocentric explanations for homophobia and gender rigidity, and reflect on how a worldwide sex and gender rights movement might encompass experiences like Okomo's.

Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah

He would go away, there was nothing simpler. Somewhere where he could escape the oppressive claims everything made on him. But he knew that a hard lump of loneliness had long ago formed in his displaced heart, that wherever he went it would be with him, to diminish and disperse any plot he could hatch for small fulfilment. He could go to the mountain town, where Hamid could torture him with self-righteous questions and Kalasinga could divert him with fantasies. Or join Hussein in his mountain retreat. He could find small enough fulfilment there. Or go to Chatu, to become the court clown of his ramshackle fiefdom. Or to Witu, to find Mohamed the hashish smoker's mother and the sweet land he had lost by his transgressions. And everywhere he would be asked about his father and his mother, and his sister and his brother, and what he had brought and would he hoped to take away. To none of the questions would he have anything but evasive answers. The seyyid could travel deep into strange lands in a cloud of perfume, armed only with bags of trinkets and a sure knowledge of his superiority. The white man in the forest feared nothing as he sat under his flag, ringed by armed soldiers. But Yusuf had neither a flag nor righteous knowledge with which to claim superior honour, and he thought he understood that the small world he knew was the only one available to him.

Yusuf is only a child when he is sold by his parents to the merchant he knows only as "Uncle Aziz." Aziz takes Yusuf from his home to his shop in a town by the coast, where he is put to work alongside his older "brother," Kahlil, who has grown up amid similar arrangements. But Aziz has more in mind for Yusuf than being a stockboy: once he has grown a little, he enlists him on one of his arduous trading journeys into the heart of Tanzania's bush land, where silk and textiles can be traded for ivory and rhino horn. The trip is a difficult one: there are animals--a man's face is eaten off in the middle of the night by hyena--and people who mean to do them harm, including the chieftains of isolated villages who operate according to superstitions that Aziz and his Swahili and Arab associates find frightening and strange. (And that's not even to mention the menacing safari guide who has sexual designs on the beautiful young Yusuf.) Yusuf grows up on the journey, becoming perhaps stronger and wiser in the face of such dangers.

One of the things that fascinated me about Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise was how neatly it resembled some of the classic European novels about Africa, like Heart of Darkness. Like Conrad's Marlowe, Yusuf travels into an African interior that becomes increasingly strange, violent, and terrifying; like Marlowe this journey mirrors one into the interior of the self where Yusuf must determine who he is and of what he is made. (He has premonition-like dreams that grow in intensity as they go further in, dreams in which he sees "his cowardice glimmering in the moonlight, covered in the slime of its afterbirth.") But how fascinating is it to see this narrative from an African perspective? Unlike Heart of Darkness, Paradise depicts an Africa where conflicts between civilization and its opposites, or whatever you want to call it, are already kindling before the European imagination can turn it into a single idea, with the "heart of darkness" at its center. Marlowe and Kurtz are simply far from home; Yusuf is searching for one. Everywhere "oppressive claims" are made on him, but he has no place of his own to claim.

The Europeans do loom over Paradise, which is set on the eve of German conquest of Tanzania. It may have already happened, in fact; German soldiers troop through towns and across villages, planting flags and making decrees, but for many the fact of German invasion is a strange notion with no real bearing on their day-to-day existence. When Aziz and Yusuf are captured by a hostile chieftain named Chatu on their safari, it is the fortuitous arrival of a German lieutenant that saves them, much to the surprise of Chatu, who seems neither to have seen nor heard of Europeans at all. The Germans save the merchant's life, but they also herald the arrival of a changing world, in which the old ways of trade will be disrupted and perhaps obliterated. There is a profound ambiguity to Yusuf's coming of age: though he observes sharply the merchant's methods and his attitudes, there seems to be little chance of a world in which these lessons can be used.

I really enjoyed this book. Something about it feels classic; there's a nineteenth century-ness to the coming of age narrative, and its adventure elements, that is stronger than just its setting. The characters are rich and the language is mutedly powerful, and it captures a time and place that are utterly unfamiliar to me in a way in a way that is recognizable. Somebody ought to give this man a Nobel Prize.

With the addition of Tanzania, my "countries read" list is up to 61!

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi

How could the house ever be spacious enough to hold all of my passion? How did its single balcony bear up under me, as I stood there alone, weighed down by so much love, without collapsing onto the dirt street or fragmenting, to be carried off by the breezes into God's heavens? How did the small room bear the tons of clouds I kept stored away in there, simply so that I could walk across them? How did the walls stay still and unshakeable, never once quaking with the torment of my unbearable joy?

When Abdallah comes to ask for Mayya's hand in marriage, she is at her sewing machine, dreaming of another man. Her sister Asma marries a painter, Khalid, hoping for a marriage of love, unlike her sister, but it turns out that Khalid only desires her for her social status. Their sister Khawla has even grander dreams: she is promised to a cousin in Canada, whom no one really expects to come back for her. These three women, the son of Salima and the Shaykh's son Azzan, are a cross-section of life and love among the small villages of Oman, each desiring a love match but being thwarted by the rigid rules of family and marriage. The celestial bodies of the title are satellites that orbit each other, drawn together, and by being drawn together locked in perpetual motion, but never seeming to touch. And not only them: like the sisters, their parents, grandparents, children--and even slaves--look for love in their own way.

Man, I don't know. I think maybe I am simply growing more impatient as a reader as I grow older. (You'd think it'd be the opposite, but you have to age a little, I think, to realize how many books there are to read in the world, and so it's easier to get impatient when one isn't cohering.) But this book just had too much going on for me to follow. Each individual story is sharp and well-drawn, the three sisters especially, but for each sister there are a half-dozen other characters whose stories are chopped up and strewn throughout the book: Marwan, whose obsession with purity leads him to chop off his hand; Masouda, the woman locked in her courtyard because the village thinks she's crazy; Azzan, who is drawn into the charms of the Bedouin woman Qamar; Sanjar, the son of the slave Zarifa who escapes the village with his new bride; London, Mayya's daughter who marries, and then divorces, a caddish poet; several dead children; Abdallah's mother, who was, I think, poisoned, etc., etc. No sooner does one of these stories get going than it stops and another narrative thread is taken up.

The best of them, I thought, was that of Abdallah, Mayya's lovelorn husband who realizes too late that she has no love for him. Abdallah's section is the only one in first person, and comprises his reflection on his life as he waits to touch down aboard a plane to Europe. (Although it might have been symbolic and he might actually be dead--that's how obscure parts of this book were to me.) Abdallah's is the only story, I felt, that's really given space to develop, and I was really fascinated by his relationship with Zarifa, his father's slave, who serves as a substitute wife to the father and mother to Abdallah, and who acts, to the chagrin of the other women, as if she is well above her station. Her relationship to Abdallah and Abdallah's father is complicated by the outlawing of slavery in Oman, but it seems that it is her sheer boldness that keeps her in the family. Abdallah's story has all the pieces of a good novel: the unspoken relationship between his regard for Zarifa and his fantasy of Mayya; his tortured relationship with his father; the shock when he finds himself repeating his father's cruelty toward his own son.

That being said, I enjoyed Celestial Bodies quite a bit at the level of language. Translated from Arabic, it has a simple and homespun quality to it that does justice to the thoughtful depiction of life in a changing Oman: the lightpoles shaped like the Burj Khalifa, Mayya's black butterfly sewing machine, the arduous process of the date harvest. I made a pact with myself a while back to reflect on these books as they are, rather than on the book I wish they were in my head. But man, I wish Celestial Bodies had been a little narrower, a little tighter.

With the addition of Oman, my "countries read" list is up to 60!

The Villagers by Jorge Icaza

That year was a dreadful one. Hunger, cunning and merciless, punished the people of the houses, of the huts, and those on the huasipungos. It wasn't the hunger of rebels who starve themselves to death for a cause. It was the hunger of slaves who let themselves be killed while savoring the bitterness of their impotence. It wasn't the hunger of the idle, out of work. It was the hunger that curses with exhausting work. It wasn't a hunger with the rosy, future prospects of a miser. It was a generous hunger which fattened the granaries of the highlands. Yes. A hunger which obstinately scraped a tune on the ribs of the children and dogs, a tune half complaint, half weeping.

Jorge Icaza's book Huasipungo is named for the small allotment of land an Ecuadorian patron would grant an Indian laborer in exchange for labor on his estate. The English title--The Villagers--hardly seems to capture what Icaza captures in this novel, which is that the state of the huasipunguero is a brutal one, something between the states of sharecropper and bona fide chattel slave. It begins when Don Pereira, an upper-class profligate in Quito, has his debts called in. His uncle suggests that, to pay the debts, Pereira should snatch up and develop tracts of land of Ecuadorian mountain forests, building roads, cutting timber, and extracting oil. Pereira's hacienda is remote from the pleasures of Quito, but when he and his family arrive, they are entering a world in which their word is law, and there is no one to prevent them from working their Indian peones to death. From the very moment of their arrival, they perpetuate cruelty: unable to move through the swampy bottomland on horeseback, they ride the backs of the huasipungueros.

Boy, this is a bleak book. Icaza's book, as I understand it, is the first volley of a genre called indigenismo, which uses social realism to reflect the plight of indigenous South Americans. As such, there's no satire or humor here, no moments of levity or farce; there is only the brutal regime of Don Pereira. After his daughter gives birth, he commands an Indian woman to serve as her wet nurse, banishing the woman's own infant child to the care of strangers, where it suffers and dies. The huasipungueros are enlisted into the hard collective labor called mingas, building a road across the swamps and the high mountain plains of; some of them die swallowed by the muck from which it is impossible to be rescued. Traditionally, the payment for such labor is considered a yearly gift from the don to the laborers, but Pereira refuses; daily wages are eaten up by exploitative company accounts and the exorbitant costs of masses imposed by Pereira's accomplice, the village priest. The trapped huasipungueros, who fall victim to malaria, floods, and hunger, all artificially imposed by the don's neglect.

At the center of the novel is Andres, a huasipunguero whose wife Chunsi is forced to serve as the mistress Pereira's subsequent wet nurse. A worried and angry Andres drives a gardening tool into his foot and is permanently crippled; still he must work. Later in the novel, he is driven to steal the meat of a spoiled cow's carcass to relieve his family's hunger, but the sickness that results kills Chunsi. Andres' bitter life sharply illustrates the trap in which most of the Indians find themselves, in which the only choice that exists before them is how to die: starvation? Sickness? Flood? Or to take one's fate into one's own hand, and rebel against the don? The failure of the short-lived rebellion that Andres leads against Pereira is as inevitable as its existence; the Indians live lives of pure contingency, while the don gets fat off the land. To the rich, the Indians are another resource to be extracted, used up.

The Villagers is exceptionally grim. It reminds me of those old commercials that would beg you to help end hunger by donating now, the ones that present the boy with the swollen stomach and the flies on his face. The pillaging and despoliation of the Ecuadorian Indians is certainly well-drawn--and the novel works best when it focuses more narrowly on Andres and Chunsi--but it made me yearn for the wider array of tools developed social protest novels Icaza wrote it in 1934. Turning the last page, I felt lucky to have the kind of opportunity not afforded to the huasipungueroes: to think about something else for a while.

With the addition of Ecuador, my "countries read" list is now up to 58.

The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana by Maryse Conde

She looked Ivan straight in the eye. All the love and desire they had for each other was revealed in this look. They relived their entire life like those who have come close to death might. Ivan and Ivana therefore relived every moment from when they emerged from Simone's womb on a warm, fragrant September night right up to this gray frosty  autumn morning. Some memories lingered more than others. When they had begun to stand on their own two feet Simone would measure them against one of the house walls. For a long time they stayed the same height as each other. Then one year Ivan began to grow and within a few months he had grown taller than his sister. At the time Ivana admired in bemusement his body that stretched out beside her. What a magnificent package of muscles.

Everything goes well for Ivana Nemele. She is hard working, charming, and intelligent, well-loved by everyone, whether in her birthplace of Guadeloupe, or in Mali, where she is sent to live with her father, or in France where she eventually settles, joining the police academy. But for her twin brother Ivan, the world is not so kind: a series of stultifying jobs and run-ins with various authorities leave him marginalized and defeated. Whereas Ivana grows up to have a gentle faith in the world and those around her, Ivan becomes radicalized, first by his socialist teacher in Guadeloupe, then a radical Muslim sect in Mali. His involvement in a local militia is what pushes both him and his sister to France, where he moves farther and farther down the ranks of society, and deeper and deeper into the world of radical Islamic terrorism, toward an act of stunning violence that will pit him irrevocably against his sister.

The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana is what you might call a yarn. It skips from the Caribbean to Africa to Europe at a blistering pace, collecting and casting off minor characters in the space of paragraphs, dragging Ivan from humiliation to humiliation and catastrophe to catastrophe. How is that Ivan's experience in the world is so horrible, and Ivana's so good? Ivan and Ivana is a kind of fictional twin study, examining how social differences emerge under identical conditions. What leads one person to become radicalized, and another to join the police academy? One answer, given the precipitating conditions, must be masculinity: degrading physical labor, toxic ideas about manhood, homosexual panic, these are all part of Ivan's story. But Ivan and Ivana seems to me to suggest that much the answer is pure chance, that the geopolitical world is large and chaotic, and that it breeds unintended consequences in people, especially those at the lowest social rungs.

Through it all, Ivan and Ivana remain close, too close: they burn with a physical and romantic desire for each other. Practical Ivana sees the need to date and marry, and pushes Ivan to do the same, believing it will give him social stability, but Ivan is so caught up with his admiration and lust for Ivana that he has no eyes for anyone else. His increasing social alienation from his sister is a cycle of positive reinforcement: as he grows farther from her, he becomes more bitter, leading him into the arms of the radical imam who tells him he must have admiration only for God. Weird as it is, Ivan and Ivana's attachment works as a representation of the ways in which our most intense and treasured attachments can be undone by insidious social forces. At the end of the novel--spoiler alert--Conde makes this painfully, literally clear, when Ivana becomes the first victim of Ivan's bloody Bataclan-style shooting rampage.

My project this month is to fill out the ranks of the countries from which I have never read a book, so imagine my dismay when I discovered that Guadeloupe is not an independent nation but an overseas department of France. ("A French overseas department!" one of Ivan's associates laughs--"what is that?") No doubt the diminishment of Guadeloupean national identity--Guadeloupeans' subordination to France and their alienation from their historical and cultural kinsmen in Africa--are part of Ivan's story. So I declare this book read according to the spirit of the project, if not the letter.

The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov

And the earth continued on its orbit, bathed by the upper winds. On it went on its journey round the sun, turning on its axis, carrying on it a man, bowed on his knees in the snow, lost amid the snow-covered desert. No king, no emperor, no ruler, had fallen on his knees in such despair at the loss of his domain and power, as did Burannyi Yedigei on the day when he was parted from the woman whom he loved. And yet the earth spun on.

He is called Burannyi Yedigei because he has been a decades-long fixture at the Boranly-Burannyi railroad station. The station is a blip for most travelers, a moment of color and shape flying past amid the featureless Kazakh steppe, an empty and barely populated plain that boils in the summer and freezes in winter, and where Yedigei has spent fifty years of his life. When the book opens, Yedigei is interrupted at his duties by the news that his old friend and colleague Kazangap has died. It is Yedigei, rather than Kazangap's ungrateful son or his alcoholic son-in-law, who makes the arrangements to carry his body to the remote cemetery where his ancestors have been buried, and see that he is interred according to Muslim custom. As the burial caravan travels across the steppe, Yedigei recalls the long history of his simple but difficult life.

At the beginning of the novel, Yedigei watches a Soviet rocket rise out of the steppe. (For the Soviets, and I think still today for the Russians, the Kazakh steppe is basically Cape Canaveral, where rockets and space shuttles are launched.) Aitmatov follows the rocket, rising high over Yedigei's head, to describe how a Soviet cosmonaut and an American astronaut have made first contact with a group of aliens and abandoned their post in order to be transported to their homeworld. These aliens, they say, have been interested in mankind for a long time, and want to bring the human race into their interstellar community. But frightened Soviet and American officials, sequestered on a secret aircraft carrier anchored in the middle of the Pacific, are scrambling to put into place a satellite shield that will prevent further contact from being made.

The science fiction storyline is a relatively small part of The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, which is really about the life story of the railroad worker Yedigei, but it really deepens and enriches the novel. I loved the contrast between the simple and dedicated Yedigei, a small cog in the larger Soviet machine, and the grand sweep of interplanetary history. There is a contrast, too, between the deep tradition of the steppe, as represented by the cemetery toward which the burial caravan moves, and the many Kazakh folktales that are retold in the novel, and the futuristic march of progress.

One of these folktales--which, I have no idea if they are real or something Aitmatov made up--is the story of the mankurt, a captured slave whose head is wrapped in wet camel skin, then dried until the brain is squeezed and shattered, leaving the mankurt a mindless automaton with no memory of his former life. The prologue to the novel--written shortly after the novel's publication in 1983 and before the fall of the Soviet Union--cautions against reading the symbol of the mankurt as a criticism of the Soviet Union. It's Chinese warriors who create the mankurts of fable, and the threat of China looms large for those in Central Asia. But come on. I think it's impossible not to see the mankurt in the mindless Soviet apparatchiks who cause havoc in Yedigei's life by their obsequiousness: first, the inspector who informs on Yedigei's friend and colleague Abutalip for writing his memoirs, and then the lieutenant--possibly that inspector's son!--who prevents the burial caravan from accessing the ancient cemetery, which lies on the other side of the rocket launch facility.

Opposite these mankurts is the image of Yedigei's camel Karanar, admired throughout the steppe for his power and stature, but whose unbridled lust makes him uncontrollable for half the year. In a long and funny scene, Yedigei has to chase Karanar down because he is absolutely terrorizing the she-camels of a nearby town, biting and kicking at any man who comes near him. How does one find the balance between being a good citizen and following one's own passions? For Yedigei, this question becomes a crucial one after he falls deeply in love with the widow of the murdered Abutalip. Though he dreams of separating from his faithful wife Ukubala and marrying Zaripa, even adopting her treasured children, it's Kazangap who persuades him to forsake his passions for his obligations to others. What makes The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years worth reading, I think, is the portrait it paints of a man walking a careful line between these forces, between doing what his best for himself and what he is obligated to do for others.

Though it's set in Kazakhstan, Aitmatov was a Kyrgyz writer, and The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years is one of the very few books from Kyrgyzstan translated into English. It's the first book in my March project, which is to only read books from new countries, and with the addition of Kyrgyzstan my list of countries is up to 57.

The Bridegroom Was a Dog by Yoko Tawada

One August day soon after school had let out for the summer, a man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight came calling at the Kitamura School with an old-fashioned leather suitcase but not a trace of sweat on him despite the hot sun beating down from above, and although he didn't look like a friend of Mitsuko's, with his closely cropped hair, immaculate white shirt, neatly creased trousers and polished white shoes, he seemed to know all about her house, for he walked straight into the garden through the gap in the fence, and when he saw Mitsuko repairing her mountain bike, half-naked, her hair disheveled, he went right up to her and said:

"I'm here to stay."

A Japanese schoolteacher tells her pre-teen students an inappropriate fable, about a princess whose bottom is licked clean by a dog every time she uses the bathroom. The story has several possible endings, but in one, the dog disappears at the same time a mysterious stranger appears to woo the princess. A few days later, the schoolteacher, Mitsuko Kitamura, is approached outsider her house by a man calling himself Taro, and who insists he's come to stay. Mitsuko barely has time to say anything before he's got her clothes off and his large, wet tongue up her ass.

Like the bridegroom in the fable, Taro is very doglike: he humps and licks Mitsuko, but has no interest in her appearance--or her breasts--he sleeps all day and then is gone for most of the evening; he sleeps in a patch of sunlight in the yard and is agitated by cats. Taro allows Mitsuko to indulge in her most transgressive impulses, of which she has many; she's always talking to her students, for example, about poop, or exposing her breasts to them. Taro's doglikeness is, like Mitsuko's inappropriateness, a rejection of polite social norms. Mitsuko's strange new suitor is the subject of town gossip, but the mothers of her students barely know how to express what it is that seems to be going on in her household, and without the understanding or language to talk about it, they sort of gloss over it, until someone notices that Taro looks a lot like the missing husband of another neighbor.

Taro, the woman explains, was once a sensitive and anxious man, one who was especially sensitive to harsh smells, until one day he was attacked by a strange pack of dogs, changing his personality completely. Dog-Taro seems especially attracted to Mitsuko's smell, in that dog-like way, and this attraction allows Mitsuko to begin to smell and appreciate herself. Tawada's short novella is very physical and earthy; to find release from social norms is to return to the smelly, shitting, sex-having body. In the end, Taro runs off with another man, like a dog that finds a house with better food--it's heavily implied that he and the other man are having a sexual affair as vigorous as his with Mitsuko--and Mitsuko replaces him with the other man's daughter, an awkward girl in need of a parental figure.

I'd never heard of Tawada until Brent sent me this book, but she's got a new book out this year and I feel like I'm hearing more about her. The style of The Bridegroom Was a Dog is, assuming the translator has been faithful, something unique, with its physical language and its long sentences that chug along like tiny trains. It's a strange little book, and though I don't think it will stay with me very long, it did make me interested in reading her newer, longer book.

Search History by Eugene Lim

When you were dying of incurable disease, I cursed your life choices--not those that led to your dying but those that led you farther away. For instance: the choice to abide in time. I think I knew you best and so, now, am amazed how mysterious you were to me. What were you thinking? All those years and hours--what were you thinking? We were friends most of our lives, but, if I live long enough, that will cease to be true. It's impossible to conceive all those years without your weight in them, like papers without a stone to hold them down. They flutter across the field, scattered, gone, now trash.

Eavesdropping on a conversation between two women at a cafe, someone comes to a shocking realization: the dog the two women are discussing is the reincarnation of their dead friend, Frank Exit. They pursue the dog, which turns out to be a complicated robot designed by a mad genius, through a series of escalating espionage-style hijinks.

Is this the main narrative of Search History? It certainly seems to be, in a way, the fulcrum of the novel, which is a larger meditation on the nature of loss and grief in the artificial intelligence era. And yet this plot is by far the silliest and shallowest of the novel's many threads; a spit-shined simulacrum of a thriller, emptied of tension and intensity so that only the rote movements remain. The digressions--if they are really digressions--come to the forefront: conversations between friends, orbiting booth around Frank's death and attempts to build an AI that will write a prize-winning book, as well as lengthier reflections on death and Asian-American identity that are only tenuously connected to the "Shaggy Dog" story. Movie stills, paintings, and YouTube links are scattered through the pages.

It seems to me that at least part of what Lim is up to an interrogation of narratives, especially familiar narratives involving grief and loss, recovery and closure: an AI, perhaps, might be able to analyze a million books and spit out a story like this that provides a recognizable movement, a neat resolution, but it can never capture the true nature of grief, which is spiky, disorienting. An AI can say, here is a story, but can it ask, like Search History does, what is a story? One of the characters remarks that the AI will only work if they can feed it not just with books but with the stuff of life, suggesting they add to its library snippets of the real-life conversations, but whether the stuff of life is reproducible by these methods is never answered. The novel itself is a kind of AI, perhaps, a recombinant machine that brings together various genres, but I don't think you can say that it produces something resembling a whole. But then again, I think it's a novel that reminds us that the "wholeness" more traditional novels suggest is itself a falseness and a sham.

I used to work with Eugene, a middle- and high-school librarian. He's a really great librarian! It's gratifying to discover that he's an equally wonderful novelist: Search History is fresh, new, full of energy and pique; it constantly recycles itself and offers new and touching surprises. I really enjoyed it.