Two novels that depend heavily on context, maybe on outside knowledge. What novel doesn’t. More than usual, I guess I mean. These were difficult books, I know I mean.
Before & During by Vladimir Sharov, 1993, tr. Oliver Ready. Ready translated the zippy recent Crime and Punishment. He must like texts that make him work.
Sharov’s novel at first appears to be about a man who is having memory problems. He enters a mental hospital in the first sentence. He is writing a Memorial Book, portraits of people he has known, or has thought about a lot, given that the third memorial is for Leo Tolstoy, who is from long before his time.
The first two memorials took odd turns, but the Tolstoy portion turns out to be largely about Tolstoy’s son, who is also Tolstoy himself, let’s say for simplicity a clone, and writes counter-novels arguing against his father. So, a fantasy novel in some way. Fantasy stories, at least.
The conversation had come back to Tolstoy. Clearly, this was an inexhaustible topic for them, one that, for whatever reason, had long been troubling them, to no avail. This latest exchange, like the previous one, reconciled nobody. (93)
The patients at the hospital are arguing about Tolstoyism. This passage is a kind of trick. I was about a quarter of the way into the book, ready for a series of “memorials” hooked to the hospital. But no, there is really just one more, that lasts a couple hundred pages and is about Germaine de Staël, the Swiss writer who died in 1817, and her direct involvement in Russian history up to and past the 1917 Revolution. She occasionally gives birth to herself, which grants her effective immortality.
She also gives birth to Joseph Stalin, and then later becomes his lover. It is that kind of novel.
There is a section where Lenin transcribes the mystical ranting of Scriabin about how his symphony of smells has the method to overthrow the Russian government encoded within it. Lenin then uses the symphony to overthrow the government. This was the only section where I was thinking “Please let’s move on.” But it is far from the only part where I thought “What exactly is going on here?”
Weird, fascinating, and beyond me. Sharov is a major post-Soviet writer. He died recently. Lizok knew him and wrote him a nice obituary.
Grieshuus: The Chronicle of a Family by Theodor Storm, 1884, tr. Denis Jackson. Storm is an intensely local writer, and Grieshuus – just “Gray House,” really – is another Frisian story, set a few miles north of his familiar Husum. But it is also set much earlier than usual, in the late 17th and early 18th century, amidst the so-called Northern Wars, when the Swedish Empire was dissipating its might throughout northern Europe. The Second Northern War, the Scanian War, the Great Northern War.
I suppose it would be possible to read the book like a fantasy novel, a tragic fairy tale about the son who destroys his old noble family through a single horrible violent act, and take the shifting wars and troops and kings as background noise. I thought the history was woven into the story pretty tightly, though. This was a book that earned its extensive notes.
Denis Jackson has done heroic work with Storm, and is happy to annotate everything to the point of exhaustion. I believe this is Jackson’s last Storm translation. There is, surprisingly, an old translation, which Jackson calls “wildly inappropriate” (20). This translation is an act of justice.
It is an exciting and sad story, with murders and wolves, so many wolves. I was never actually baffled, as I was with Sharov. But it felt like a text for the more devoted readers of Theodor Storm.
