Sourcing the longlisted books can be an expensive and difficult business, as my local library only has a couple of them, but I have had a chance to read three of the books since the longlist was announced on Monday 11th March, so am hopefully on track to read most of them before the shortlist in April. However, the reviews will be quite short, because I will provide a more in-depth review of the shortlisted titles.
Andrey Kurkov: The Silver Bone, transl. Boris Dralyuk, Collins.
This was the only one of the longlist that I already had downloaded on my Kindle, not because I predicted that it would be longlisted, but because I like crime fiction generally, have been a Kurkov fan since Death and the Penguin, saw him speak a couple of months ago and heard about his struggles to get back into writing fiction when his country is at war.
It’s set in Kyiv in 1919 and is about a very confusing and painful period in Ukrainian and Russian history, in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. There are many details about hunger, violence, ideological contradictions, rapid changes which reminded me of Marina Tsvetaeva’s Moscow Diaries from the same period. But there is also a fantasy element to it, a cut-off ear stuffed in a drawer which can eavesdrop on people, that could have come straight from Bulgakov or Gogol – probably a deliberate choice, since both of those writers have strong Ukrainian links, although they wrote in Russian, just like Kurkov himself.
The two contrasting covers to the book probably show the lack of certainty as to what this book is exactly. The dark cover seems to indicate a noir novel, but it is too slow-paced to satisfy crime fiction aficionados, too full of historical details and descriptions, with a forgettable whodunit element that I really didn’t care about solving. However, as an insight into a particular time and place, it is fascinating – yes, quite anti-Russian, as some reviewers have pointed out, but there are some decent Russian characters there too. There are also satirical strands to it – or rather absurd and grotesque elements, to fit in with an absurd and grotesque period of history – but overall it does not strike me as a humorous or cosy crime book in any way other than the fantasy element of the hidden ear, which is why the white cover feels a bit off. Personally, I’d have preferred a cover featuring a historical image of Kyiv during that period, but publishers probably feared that might make it look too much like non-fiction.
Although it’s competently written and well translated, I’m a bit puzzled why this one made the longlist. There isn’t a single paragraph there that makes me think ‘This is so beautifully written, I want to share it with the whole world’ – maybe it is a sort of recognition of Kurkov’s body of work and because it feels relevant to the present day? It is not one of his strongest or most imaginative novels in terms of literary prizes, but I will certainly continue to read this series as a crime fiction fan.
Ia Grenberg: The Details, transl. Kira Josefsson, Wildfire.
This book, as the cover indicates, is made up of four vignettes, four portraits of important people in the narrator’s life, in non-chronological order, with the narrator looking back on her youthful escapades from a vantage point of twenty-plus years.
Through the descriptions of these people and the relationship they forge with the narrator, we of course get a better understanding of the narrator herself. We are all shaped by the people we come into contact with, or at least the ones we have most loved or hated or been obsessed by. The other way in which we get to know the narrator is through the shared books – the ones that she and her friends/lovers discuss or love or hate.
It’s a quiet, short book, easily read one sitting, with several passages about a procrastinating writer where I smiled in rueful recognition, as well as general ruminations about the world which gradually reveal things about the narrator – in some cases subtly, in other cases more obviously. The author’s approach is captured best in a quote about one of the briefest and most mysterious episodes in her life, the section entitled Alejandro:
…what he told me, the information he shared with me, I carefully committed to memory with a view to recounting it to Sally and others who might ask, and perhaps also for the benefit of future me, but the information was just the container and not by any stretch the details that woke me up the next morning, heart thumping…
It’s these details that the author tries to capture, the unspoken, the gesture, just what it is that makes our heart beat faster when we see a person, or forgive them or abandon them. It’s a perfectly nice novella, with flashes of wit and lyricism, but once again I was slightly puzzled about its inclusion in the longlist. I’ve read many books that were equally as good that would have been eligible for the prize. I’ve also read some Romanian books that were on par with this, but which are not getting translated…
Jenny Erpenbeck: Kairos, transl. Michael Hofmann, Granta.
A love story set during the cusp of transformation in East Berlin in the late 1980s – this was always going to be catnip for me, so I thought I could not be entirely objective about it. And I’m probably not, for I love a blend of the personal and political, and have always felt close to Erpenbeck’s own experience.
I loved all the descriptions of life in the city before and after the collapse of the Wall, and this went a long way toward quashing my reservations about the love story. The masochistic and punitive aspects of the love affair made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I had to remind myself repeatedly that the love story itself – between the authoritarian, gaslighting, egocentric older man and the naive, often passive younger woman – is a metaphor for those of us living under Communism.
Once again, the main protagonist, Katharina, is remembering the past from a safe distance, but there is a final twist which makes her question all her memories – and makes us rethink all that we believe we know about their story.
Of the three I’ve read so far, Kairos is the one that I hope to see on the shortlist, and that I want to analyse in more detail, from the title itself, with its ‘seize the moment, but make sure it’s the right moment’ kind of guarded urgency, to the double disillusionment of both the love affair and the social order (socialism AND capitalism). This is no Ostalgie, but a clever and affecting look at how major historical changes affect two different generations.
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