греда и няма да я довърша.
Има книги, които при цялото си богатство и ерудиция, ми въздействат страшно угнетително. Дори не е тъга, всъщност бих предпочела да е тъга, да пусна сълза и да ми мине. Както и при "Памет на паметта", и тук се почувствах в плен на твърде литературното и изсмукано от живот писане, сгъстяване и нагнетяване, психологизиране на ежедневния ужас и тоталната невъзможност за спасение. VERDICT: Powerful, intense, and poetic evocation of Soviet prison camps, Reading like a detective story, it will haunt the reader and help him escape oblivion, Unforgettable.
my full review is here:
sitelink comb his images running again in my head, . . I couldnt sleep.
Who was Grandfather II Is he even real And the narrator What part of his story is dream
This ones deeper than most.
One must pick up the language along the way, lest one be as blind as Grandfather II, Who is he Stay stay.
“ the abandoned slag heaps of the mine where they tossed the bodies attracted bears for many years he whispered that he had shot people himself, with a Nagant rifle, he whispered that there are still undiscovered graves near the town, he knew where, he could show me if I didnt believe him the old man was scared.
”
“ the source of all this impoverishment, destitution, and privation beckoned the way a struck dog on the side of the road, flies in its exposed guts, catches your eye it attracted your imagination by the honest openness of ugliness.
”
“ snow blackened by the smokestacks fell on the graves, black snow, It looked like ashes from an old fire falling from the sky then the stacks belched smoke the color of cinnabar, and the snow turned deep red, melting on my face, spotting the cemetery paths.
. . ”
Stay, stay until the end. If you can stand the haunting images that Lebedev paints inside your head,
Sergei Lebedev's Oblivion was shortlisted for theBest Translated Book Award and from comments on the Mookse and Gripes forum sitelink goodreads. com/topic/show/ perhaps the best received among readers,
I started to read this on a flight from London to Korea anhour flight, a large part of which is spent flying over the vast area of Siberia, home of the gulags and labour camps in Soviet Russia.
see sitelink photobucket. com/albums/a
Lebedev's moving debut novel tackles the relatively underexplored, once suppressed, topic, sitelink wikipedia. org/wiki/GulagA
The novel consists of three parts, The first doesn't directly address the camps at all, but rather focuses on the childhood of the firstperson narrator, and, in particular his interaction with an elderly man, living close to his family's dacha, clearly a figure of some former significance in the Soviet regime but whose exact provenance is sketchy, indeed people seem reluctant to probe into his history and he has little interaction with his neighbours:
It wasnt that he kept himself aloof, taciturn, it wasnt about his behaviour or character he was alienated from life almost in the legal sense of the word and only as a consequence of that was he alienated from people as well.
Everything that happened in the present did not involve him directly but only brushed against himnot because he was unreceptive but because he seemed to have already lived his life, his existence outlasting his destiny.
But the man who the boy knows as Grandfather II though not a blood relation, becomes closely involved in the boy's life, beginning when his mother is pregnant with him but is advised by the doctors that the pregnancy is dangerous to her health.
A debate ensues, involving inlaws on both sides, as to whether to terminate the pregnancy, until Grandfather II intervenes decisively in favour of carrying to term.
He said that she should definitely have the baby, medicine was advanced now and that the doctors were being overly cautious.
He listed births in trolley cars, the lamp room of a mine shaft, a cornfield, on a Central Asian steppe near the space center, in a bakery, a dentists chair, a bomb shelter.
A more attentive listener would have recognized that Grandfather II was inventing these incidents, choosing such images from the life he knew or from newspapers, but he filled and overpopulated the room with these unexpectedly born infants.
He begged her so persistently to have the baby, pleaded with her to fear nothing, that no one ever thought he was asking for himself
There's is a relationship with little affection the boy suggest Grandfather II treats him as a pet, but even that implies too much of a relationship: a domestic animal may be a better description with Grandfather II feeling only responsible for his welfare.
At the section's end Grandfather II rescues the boy from a near fatal attack by a wild dog, then, against the advice of the doctors, donates his own blood to save the boy's life at the ultimate expense of his own: the blood loss weakens him, but as the accident coincides with a day of severe political turmoil in the Soviet regime, he is unable to obtain the medical help he needs.
The novel explores how people coped with their memories of the excesses of the Stalinist regime:
The adults tried if not to forget the time about which Grandfather II could have spoken, then at least to make it palatable for their own private memory.
They broke it up into small impressions, personal stories what an ice hill there was by the ravine, now covered up what nits, all with rotten, wrinkled kernels, they once bought at the market to make jam what pale, waterdiluted ink they used to pour into the inkwells at school, and them the teacher complained she couldn't read anything in their notebooks.
That kind of stuff was like keys, wallet, and papers that you could stuff into your pockets when you go out it was small, domesticated everyone diligently reinforced the little sport of personal memory, and no one remembered the collective.
As the boy grows up he becomes a geologist as indeed Lebedev did, in part to get away from his home and explore the wider fringes of the Soviet Union.
He finds himself in Siberia where he encounters the legacy of the labour camps:
I saw
that a great force of compulsion had erected the town, cleared the forest, laid the roads, dug the canals, and built the factories but it turned out that compulsion is incapable of one thing: the effort a person brings to work freely chosen.
Without that effort, without that bit of spiritual labour that merges with physical labour, all the roads, bridges, cities and factories were held up only by the will of the state that had them built.
When that will had vanished, when its time had passed, people were left with a legacy of great construction in which spiritually they were not involved.
Many people were deprived of life, of fate, of freedom, in the context of that enormous, allaccompanying evil any lesser evil became invisible it became possible to live where everything from the look of the housing to speech dehumanized instead of humanized the camp and the housing from former inmates expanded, settled in, and began producing itself without the state's involvement.
My passage through these parts, changed by the camps, became my path of return: to Grandfather II and his life and works.
In the third part he tries to trace Grandfather II's history, only to find that the town he visits was founded from one of the same labour camps.
The town was named for a Bolshevik killed in the mids the name of the town communicated nothing of the place to its name.
They spoke different languages and avoided each other,
The area's mountains bore names given to them by local ethnic groups these names left the sensation of raw meat and gnawed bones in your throat reading a dozen names on the map was like drinking thick blood tat was steaming in the cold the names were redolent of campfire smoke, fish scales, rawhide, canine and human sweat, they were long and the syllables joined up like reindeer or dogs in harness.
The town name two syllables, with an sk ending gave away its alienness, the Bolshevik's name looked good on a big map of the country where the names of his comrades formed a toponymic constellation, a lifetime and posthumous pantheon, but up close the name seemed ridiculous, a random collection of letters which the residents got used to and considered themselves dwellers of Abracadabsk.
There he finds about Grandfather II's senior and sinister role in the administration of the labour camps, but also the story of Grandfather II's own son and his early death.
And he goes on further than Grandfather II into the very distant edges of Siberia where the most condemned exiles were sent to establish communities, in the full expectation that they would likely perish in the process:
I still had to go to the river and find the exiles island I had to travel the entire trajectory of Grandfather II's fate I felt that there, in that book that even he did not know fully, was a limit I called it the limit of oblivion.
The novel was translated by Antonina W, Bouis, a new translator for me but one with an impressive resume, and the resulting novel reads beautifully in English:
The sun had filled the lake at the foot of the mountains with light convex, like a drop on glass, its contour struck me in the eye.
A mean trick of nature, a joke that had waited several million years: the lake looked like Lenins profile, which was imprinted on us by medals, badges, stamps, statues, paintings, and drawings in books.
The lake with its thick, almost pastrylike icing of sunny light seemed like a monstrous monument, monstrous because the natural forms easily and willingly took on the features of something manmade, and this acceptance, without coercion, clearly evinced the meaningless, memoryless existence of nature, which we had anthropomorphized much too frequently.
Seeing this betrayal of matterbetrayal of the men who climbed up to the heaps every day from the barracks, looking at the profile of the dead leader in whose name they were forced to laborI rejected the feeling of closeness with these mountains, from the line of imagination that had anthropomorphized them.
A different, older feeling arose: the possible humanity of nature was just a mockery, a devilish joke man can count on no one in nature except himself.
However, this can actually be a weakness of the novel the prose was laid on a little too lyrically thick it wasn't the "stoutbodied passerines" of:sitelink goodreads. com/review/show , perhaps closer to Andrei Makine, but at times the novel felt like wading through, admittedly very sweet and tasty, syrup.
The coincidence of the narrator first visiting the labour camps as a geologist and then later discovering Grandfather II's connection with them seemed a little unnecessary particularly at one rather contrived plot point where his life is saved by recognising an assailant as the brother of an escaped convict that he had tried to help some time before, although there is some basis for this coincidence in Lebedev's own family history:
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Overall flawed but necessary I prefer the actual winner, the Chronicle of the Moving House, as well as the shortlisted Ladivine, but this was certainly an excellent discovery from the BTBA list.
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