Hamid Ismailov

A complicated novel, telling the intersecting but sometimes contradictory stories of a large group of characters in a small railway town north of Tashkent between about 1900 and 1980, interleaved with the story of an unnamed character just referred to as “the boy”. The stories are often ribald and usually involve at least a hint of magic realism, and the point of view is always that of a Muslim, Uzbek observer, looking with slight puzzlement at western civilisation and the Soviet project.

Ismailov says in an interview with the translator included as an afterword here that he wanted to contrast the regimented, hierarchical, Soviet way of looking at the world — obviously symbolised here by the railway — with the unprejudiced, fluid, Sufi-like gaze of the innocent boy. Ismailov takes no prisoners either in his social and political satire or in his brutally matter-of-fact descriptions of sex and violence, so this definitely isn’t for everyone, but it is a quite remarkable book, and often very funny indeed, even in places where you had rather it wasn’t… Certainly another one that invites a re-read to get the most out of it.… (meer)

Whilst on a train journey across Kazakhstan, the narrator meets Yerzhan, a twenty-seven year old itinerant peddler and virtuoso violinist who, strangely, has the looks and build of a boy of twelve years. After overcoming his initial diffidence, Yerzhan starts to recount the tale of his childhood. He recalls growing up in a two-family settlement on a lonely, remote railway outpost in the Kazakh steppes, close to a top-secret “Zone” where Soviet nuclear experiments were carried out. He tells of his precocious musical talents on the dombra [lute-like folk instrument] and the violin, and his equally precocious love for his neighbour Aisulu. Chillingly, he recalls a fateful day when, during a school outing to the “Zone”, he waded into a radioactive lake to impress his classmates. Did the poisonous waters stunt his growth or was some other-worldly spell cast on him?

I suppose Hamid Ismailov’s novella might be regarded as a work of “magical realism”. I would prefer to describe it as a modern-day fable or myth. For what is mythology, if not an attempt to describe and explain the world through stories and symbols? In this case, Ismailov conjures up images of terrible beauty, by means of which he evokes daily life in the Kazakh steppes at the height of the Cold War. Andrew Bromfield's sensitive translation from the original Russian retains a poetic feel to it, as if the prose were permeated with the strains of Yerzhan’s dombra.

A haunting coming-of-age novel about a boy who does not come of age, this is my favourite amongst the Peirene Press publications I have had the pleasure to read.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2018/09/hamid-ismailovs-dead-lake.html… (meer)