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.