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Yakov's Ladder, a novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2015)
2016 Big Book Award (3rd place) and Reader’s Choice Award
German rights are handled by Christina Links:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Rights sold: Azerbaijan - TEAS, Brazil - Editora Estação Liberdade, China - People's Literature, Croatia - FRAKTURA, Czech Republic - PASEKA, France - GALLIMARD, Georgia - Palitra L, Italy - LA NAVE DI TESEO, Iran - HOUPAA, Germany - HANSER, Hungary - MAGVETO, Poland - WYDAWNICTWO LITERACKIE, Romania - HUMANITAS FICTION, Russia - AST, Serbia - ARHIPELAG, Slovakia - SLOVART, Sweden - ERSATZ, Ukraine - BookChef, World English - FSG
At first glance, Yacov’s Ladder perfectly embodies the generic definition of a “family saga.” The story of several generations of Osetskys, who were originally from Kiev and then transplanted to Moscow, spans an entire century, from 1911 to 2011. The family saga is, however, no more than a shell, a shapely vessel chosen by the author in her search for answers to the questions posed inexorably and unrelentingly by literature and philosophy since the beginning of human existence: to what degree is the human individual free or unfree? How do circumstances, DNA, or history combine to determine or condition the individual personality?
The novel revolves around two axes, Nora and her grandfather, Yakov Osetsky. Nora and Yakov have seen each other only once, in the mid-1950s, when Nora was just a child, and Yakov’s life was already nearing its end. The encounter was no more than a fleeting episode for both of them. A true meeting of minds and souls occurred only much later, in 2011, when Nora had already emerged from the commotion and tumult of everyday existence and the course of her life was winding down, and she read the diaries of her grandfather, as well as his family correspondence (which covered many decades), and the dossier of Yakov Osetsky from the KGB archives.
From the first page, the reader is thrust headlong into the masterfully depicted world of the main character, Nora Osetsky. Nearly all the people who play an important role in her life appear in the narrative in quick succession: her son Yorik, theater director Tengiz Kuziani, her mother Amalia, her father Henrik, her grandmother Marusya, and an “occasional” husband Victor. The people are enmeshed in themes and objects: theater, the career of a set designer, books, sugar tongs, an old blouse trimmed with an ancient Egyptian motif, and an osier chest holding the family archives.
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Escape Hatch & The Long Road Ahead: Two Novellas by Vladimir Makanin (1979)
Rights sold: Finland - SN-kirjat, France - BELFOND, Germany - Neuer Malik, Italy - Edizioni e/o, World English - ARDIS, Spain - Siruela, Sweden - NORSTEDTS,
Shertlisted for the 1992 Russian Booker Prize
The book, which contains two dystopian novellas (written in 1991), indicates that, directly or indirectly, Makanin has been influenced by Evgeny Zamyatin, the author of We, a book that anticipated in great detail Brave New World and 1984. (Actually, Zamyatin's a better writer than Huxley or Orwell, who both appropriated details of We's plot.)
Zamyatin and Makanin (born 1937) also share a background in science and mathematics. Zamyatin worked for a while as a naval engineer, in fact. In the novella Escape Hatch (Лаз), the protagonist, a mathematician named Klyucharyov, travels through a tunnel from a deteriorating aboveground city, where public order hardly exists, to an underground community where residents live comfortably and safely but seem on the edge of some crisis. The Long Road Ahead (Долог наш путь), set in a future Utopia, finds a young engineer traveling from Moscow to an isolated food-manufacturing plant in the steppes to install a machine he's invented.
Both works display nightmarish, Kafkaesque qualities. Everyone in Escape Hatch seems terrified, waiting for the other shoe to drop. In The Long Road Ahead, the inventor is horrified to find that the plant he's visiting does not manufacture synthetic meat but actually slaughters cows, something considered barbaric in his society.
The inventor doesn't know what to do about the situation. He can't stay at the plant, but he's is afraid to leave, because, having been introduced to evil, he'd be a corrupting influence in Moscow. Eventually, he camps outside the plant on the steppe, keeping a bonfire going in hopes that a helicopter will see him and give him transportation to somewhere. Soon, he discovers that there are many people keeping similar bonfires going and calmly waiting--for what they do not know.
The Long Road Ahead has a story-within-a story construction. It turns out that the tale of the engineer has been made up by a narrator who appears in the middle of the novella and explains that he's composed it for his friend, Ilya Ivanovich, a schizophrenic who cannot bear to witness any living thing suffer. As the novella progresses, Makanin alternates between the two narratives, and the characters and events in each influence the other.
In these novellas, Makanin obviously draws on the experience of Soviet/Russian citizens now and in the recent past; the remote meat-producing plant, for example, could correspond to a prison in the Gulag archipelago. Makanin's works are allegorical, and it's difficult to discern where he stands on specific issues--possibly because he wants to provoke readers into asking questions rather than providing them with answers.
Makanin's protagonists are isolated and struggling with social, psychological, spiritual and political problems. Because he depicts their struggles so believably and poignantly, even in the context of fantastic plots, Makanin will appeal to a wide variety of readers. His stories can be dealt with on a number of levels. Even if you're not into speculating about the mysteries of the cosmos they may grab you, because Makanin, in addition to his erudition, is a top-notch storyteller.
(Harvey Pekar, a review for metroactove)
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