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Poison and Honey, a novel by Yuri Buida (2014)
Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Russia - EKSMO, Serbia - GEOPOETIKA
Shortlisted for the 2014 Ivan Belkin literary award
Yuri Buida’s Poison and Honey is a modern Russian family saga that focuses on a house and a family, the Osorins, covering lives, ambitions, and deaths, including murder most foul. Buida manages to weave together what sometimes feels like legions of characters and an entire history book of world culture, creating a compact, packed story that’s realistic, mythical, and metaphysical. It’s also strangely enjoyable and even more strangely suspenseful.
Buida’s first-person narrator is Semyon Semyonovich, who’s not, by blood, an Osorin but who becomes part of the extended family when his grandfather, a physician’s assistant, brings him to the Osorins’ house as a little boy. The house, which is set on a hill, is sometimes known as the House of the Twelve Angels. The house is magnificent, and it contains, among other things, statues and paintings of naked women, a set of twelve bronze figures of horsemen, a cat named Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst, and a matriarch known as Tati. Semyon becomes a long-term member of the extended household after Tati invites him back to play with her nephews: when the book ends, decades later, Semyon is working with the family’s archives, making him a sort of inside outsider. Semyon chronicles Osorin family history, too, as the narrator of Poison and Honey, telling of affairs, careers in literature and intelligence, and, of course, numerous enmities.
Everything changes in a very big way at the house on the hill when Ilya (son of one of Tati’s nephews) slides off an icy road, hits a young woman named Olga Shvarts, and then brings her home. Olga’s unhurt, at least initially: she stays at the house until she winds up dead (and naked) a few days later. Olga’s the archetypical outsider in many ways, someone who wants to become part of a house and family like the Osorins’, with its chiming clocks, heraldry, and old glory. After Olga’s death, Tati interviews members of the household, and Semyon duly describes the proceedings… until, that is, his wife gives birth during the night. Buida references Agatha Christie as well as Dostoevsky as he describes the interviews. One alibi is a bank robbery.
When Semyon returns the next morning (It’s a boy!), the whodunit aspect of the story has been resolved, at least on a certain level, though the identity of the killer isn’t revealed. Then follows the breakfast scene: everyone sits down to a usual breakfast—salads, sandwiches with ham and cheese, somewhat stale bread, butter, tea, and coffee—but the family is wearing nice dresses and suits, and the table is set with a white table cloth, crystal, and silver. There’s even Champagne. And then the resolution to the murder is announced.
Poison and Honey is thoroughly lively and oddly lovely, in part because the pace is brisk and Buida works in so many references to history and culture, folding in lots of high society and low doings. Like murder most foul, in its literal and literary senses. One of the central elements of Poison and Honey is clearly homes, homelessness, and uprootedness: toward the end of the novella, Tati tells Semyon that Russians are only truly at home in church and at war, after all, they might lose their homes because of war, arrest, and fire. Tati, however, wants her family to keep living in her house—where the clock will continue to chime and people will continue discussing the Russian idea—for hundreds of years. This, after all, is a house where artists, musicians, writers, and dissidents discussed everything from the Prague Spring to Solzhenitsyn.
For all that talk about the family and the house, though, just about everyone in the Osorin household seems supremely unhappy. That’s probably as it should be since this family—like the circumstances surrounding Olga’s murder—feels so hermetically sealed in at The House of Twelve Angels that the issue of who’s who as an individual feels almost as irrelevant as the issue of who-really-dunit in an atmosphere where guilt feels collective.
The Poison and Honey contains the novella plus a clutch of stories, collectively known as “chronicles,” about the Osorin family.
This text contains excerpts from the review published in Lizok's Bookshelf blog (http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com)
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He and She, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1987)
Rights sold: Spain - Alfaguara, Cirulo de Lectores, Sweden - Bromberg
Main heroes of Makanin's 1987 novel He and She (Odin i odna) are "shestidesiatniki" Gennadii Goloshchekov and Ninel', two idealistic people who were involved in student politics during the 1950s, and who could never bring themselves to kow-tow to the regime, people who realized that ‘the intellect and conformism arc two incompatible things, Salieri’. They are depicted as innately honourable, but the harsh spotlight of Makanin’s prose shows them also to be pathetic and even farcical. Ninel' is always bathetically tormented by a sense of guilt over trifles, usually involving her co-workers. Gennadii is the kind of man who gets out of bed late at night to rescue a stranger whom his own drinking companion, Daev, confessed he had abandoned in a snowdrift. Gennadii the knight-errant then finds himself in the snowdrift — pushed in by an ungrateful rescuee who then co-opts Gennadii’s taxi. In such incidents Makanin’s Gennadii is rather like an intellectual version of some of the characters created by Makanin's contemporary author Evgenii Popov — people whom, despite their fundamental goodness, life treats unkindly according to its own rather black sense of humour.
Obliteration is the fate that lies in wait for these two people. The description of Ninel’s dream, in which she walks naked through a succession of empty rooms with tables laid for meals and looks for the ‘race of her time’ (‘vyvodok svoego vremeni’), suggests that Makanin’s text is about a generation which has disappeared, leaving no trace, like the victims of the purges. Ninel’s dream also suggests the desire that she has to ‘belong’, to be part of a collective, a desire which Makanin had examined in his earlier works. The two are unable to find common ground with the people, or even with other members of the intelligentsia; and, most damningly, they are unable even to recognize each other as members of that lost tribe of the shestidesiatniki. Attempts by Igor' Petrovich and his wife to draw the two together fail utterly, and Makanin suggests that even after death Ninel' and Gennadii would be unable to find a common tie. They will remain, as the text’s title indicates, alone.
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