After reading (and loving) Maidenhair a while back, I was keen to try more of Mikhail Shishkin's work, hoping that another book would appear in English. I was pleasantly surprised then when the kind people at MacLehose (well, Quercus, actually) sent me a review copy of another of his novels, his most recent translation into English. In some ways it's a very similar book to Maidenhair - however, in others it's very different...
*****
The Light and the Dark (translated by Andrew Bromfield) is an epistolary novel (written in letters) between Sasha and Volodenka, a pair of young lovers who have been parted. As Sasha talks about everyday life and reminisces about her childhood, Volodenka writes about his experiences in the army, on the march to China to help crush the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxer Rebellion? That happened at the turn of the twentieth century - hang on a minute...
That's right. You see, unlike Australia Post (who can struggle to locate a sturdy letter box with a large number painted on it) the Russian postal service seems to be able to work in four dimensions. Sasha appears to be living in modern times, and moves further on in life as each letter goes by. On the other hand, Volodenka's side of the story takes place over a matter of hot, sticky, blood-drenched months. Is there any hope for two people separated by space and time? Well, I'm sure love will find a way ;)
Anyone expecting a story reminiscent of the Hollywood movie The Lake House is barking up the wrong tree though, and those who have already experienced Shishkin's work, in the form of Maidenhair, will have guessed that there is a lot more to The Light and The Dark than a cheesy tale of star-crossed lovers. In fact, the two writers barely acknowledge each other's letters, leading us to suspect that their missives aren't really reaching their destination after all. If we attempt to make sense of the story, it would be tempting to surmise that perhaps Sasha is pining after a lost love, a soldier who died long ago...
...but the plot, as you may already have suspected, is of little consequence here. The story is merely a canvas upon which Shishkin can sketch out his theories on time and relationships. It's a book of childhood memories and stories of the past in which the two protagonists open up about their formative years. Both Sasha and Volodenka have a lot to say about their relationships with their parents and the effect that marriage break-ups had on their childhood. However, a more prominent theme is a circular return to their parents, this time in the role of carers, later in life. For Shishkin, dealing with death is an important part of life:
"It's
very important for people when their dear ones leave them. That's a
gift too. It's the only way they can understand anything about life.
The death of the people we love, people dear to us, is a gift that can
help us understand the important reason why we are here."
p.243 (Quercus Books, 2013)
It's a lesson Sasha and Volodenka are to learn in different ways.
As much as the book talks about death though, the two main characters also grow to understand the importance of embracing life. Caught in the middle of a horrific conflict, Volodenka discovers the joy of life and a desperate wish not to die. What he is yet to realise (and what Sasha discovers over the course of the novel) is that it is your body which drags you down, pulling you closer to death:
"Do
you know what made me feel afraid the first time? When I was fourteen
or fifteen - it was a realisation that suddenly hit me: My body is
dragging me into the grave. Every day, every moment. Every time I
breathe in and breathe out.
Isn't that alone already a good enough reason to hate it?" (p.183)
But then, the body is also used to enjoy life - as we see in other parts of the book...
Just as in Maidenhair, the writer uses his characters to discuss the nature of time, refuting the idea of linear progress. One metaphor used is that of a book already written, meaning that life is little more than acting out what has already been put down in black and white. However, other people may read those lines at different times, causing those caught in the action to experience a feeling of déjà vu (no, me neither...). In any case, physical objects like coins or letters link everything together, present, future and past connected to a vanishing point in time...
I enjoyed The Light and The Dark, but I'd have to say that it's not as awe-inspiring as Maidenhair. It took me a while to get into the book, especially as the first letters seemed to make up little more than a he-said, she-said work. At one point, I found myself agreeing with Sasha:
"I'm lying here contemplating my own navel.
What a wonderful occupation!" (p.52)
While it was all well written and interesting, over the first half of the book I didn't feel too inspired to rush back after finishing a section. In a sense, the lack of a strong plot and the episodic nature of the structure meant that I was treating it more like a collection of short stories than a novel... Eventually though, The Light and The Dark did win me over, especially as the two lovers drifted further apart. The further you advance into Shishkin's deceptively-light prose, the more you understand what he is trying to do.
Genius or merely a good writer? I'm not quite convinced yet that Shishkin is the next-big-thing he's been touted as. Which is not to say that he's a one-hit wonder, quite the contrary; this is definitely a writer you'll hear more of in the future. If you haven't already, perhaps it's time to get on board the bandwagon :)
*****
P.S. For anyone interested in sampling some of Shishkin's other work, Dwight, of A Common Reader, shared some links to online stories in the course of his posts on a Shishkin podcast. In the Q&A session held at San Francisco's Center for the Art of Translation, Scott Esposito chatted to Shishkin and the American translator of Maidenhair, Marian Schwartz. Anyone interested in Shishkin's work should check out the interview - and read the stories, of course ;)
Anyone who reads Russian literature in English will have noticed that there is, shall we say, a slight obsession with the classics. For every new translation, there are a couple of dozen updated versions of novels from the Golden and Silver ages of the country's literary past. However, there is good new stuff out there too: I enjoyed Oleg Zaionchkovsky's Happiness is Possible when I read it last year, and today's offering is another contemporary book which came with a lot of hype. Let's see if it lived up to it...
*****
Mikhail Shishkin's Maidenhair (translated by Marian Schwartz, review copy courtesy of Open Letter Books) has been touted as an instant classic. The five-hundred page novel starts off in Switzerland as a story about an interpreter for Russian refugees, a man who must listen to the stories of atrocities they spin in an attempt to prolong their stay in the country.
Very soon though any idea of a straight narrative is abandoned. Shishkin creates a tangle of intermingled strands, zipping backwards and forwards in time and space, alternating between fiction and reality (whatever that is). As well as following the unnamed interpreter in his work (and on his travels), the reader must navigate the books the interpreter is reading, the postcards he writes (but never sends) to his son, and the diary entries of a famous singer and actress whose biography he was once commissioned to write.
It is an overwhelming confusion of genres, styles and stories, the parts coming together to create a whole which is extremely difficult to understand fully, but wonderful to read. A book which came to mind while reading Maidenhair was Cloud Atlas, another ambitious novel which plays with genres, meta-fiction and text types. Shishkin, obviously, is indebted to his Russian influences, and mentions of Gogol, Pushkin, Turgenev and Tolstoy are scattered across the pages of the novel. However, there is a lot here that is Joycean too, with drifting stream-of-consciousness passages bumping shoulders with black humour and language straight from the gutter. Hmm - I'm not sure I'm making myself very clear here...
At the risk of falling into the trap of comparing my current book with another recent read, Maidenhair again seems to be a novel which attempts to discuss just about everything. It is a work about war and peace, about love and (above all) about stories. One of the main ideas seems to be whether it is possible to be happy while others suffer, whether we can smile and dance while others are slaughtered in unnecessary wars:
"It's like with happiness. Since everyone can't be happy anyway, whoever can be happy right now, should. You have to be happy today, right now, no matter what. Someone said there can't be a heaven if there's a hell. Supposedly it's impossible to be in heaven if you know suffering exists somewhere. Nonsense. True enjoyment of life can only be felt if you've known suffering. What would the leftovers of our soup be to this mongrel if it hadn't had a whiff of hunger?"
p.474 (2012, Open Letter Books)
The privileged, comfortable reader may well feel a few pangs of guilt at being able to settle back in a soft reading chair while Chechens flee the Russian army - the quotation above shows that not everyone feels the need to worry about justice and fairness...
Another focus is Shishkin's proposal that life is lived in four dimensions. Everywhere we go, we leave traces of ourselves, meaning that we are everywhere we have ever been (or will ever be). This means too that the ghosts of yesterday are still here today, all the people we have ever known existing at the same time and in the same space. In fact, some of these people and things are merely copies of earlier beings - life is full of imitations of imitations with no original. As we see from the statues the interpreter visits in Rome, or the actress Bellochka's constant stream of boyfriends (each one seeming to be 'the one'), everything repeats, nothing is new...
...at least I think that is what he is getting at. With all the constant jumping around between realities, it can be hard to keep tabs on what is actually being said. Not that this is necessarily a problem. Even if all our lives are inextricably interconnected, there is no need to get to grips with every single thread:
"You just have to understand destiny's language and its cooing. We're blind from birth. We don't see anything and don't pick up on the connection between events, the oneness of things, like a mole digging its tunnel and bumping into thick roots, and for the mole these are just insurmountable obstacles and he can't imagine the crown these roots nourish." p.268
Moles, yep, we are all moles. Let's move on.
As you may have gathered from the ramblings above, Maidenhair is not exactly a comfort read. In fact, it is a book which makes the reader work hard for their enjoyment on many levels, whether that involves keeping track of who is narrating which section or having to flick to Wikipedia to look up historical, literary and mythological figures name-checked in the novel. If that all seems like too much hard work though, you can just appreciate it as a set of interconnected stories and enjoy the language (and with Marian Schwartz's excellent translation, that makes for very good reading indeed). In the end, it is all about the stories...
Many reviews of Maidenhair have been rather effusive, and the 'instant classic' tag has been thrown around a fair bit. On a first read, I'm not sure I can make a judgement like that, but it is a very good book, and one which I'm convinced will be just as successful in its translated form as it was in the original. One thing is for sure - it is a novel which will stand up to rereading, and one which will reward the reader who is prepared to put in the time and effort. If that sounds like you...
