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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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Asan, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (2008)
Rights sold: Albania - OMSCA-1, France - GALLIMARD, Germany - LUCHTERHAND, Netherlands - DE ARBEIDERSPERS, Poland - REBIS, Russia - IZDATELSTVO E, Slovenia - Modrijan, Spain - ACANTILADO, Turkey - ALFA
Winner of the 2008 Big Book Award
On the surface, Vladimir Makanin’s Asan is a stream-of-consciousness account of events in the life of the Russian manager of a military warehouse in Chechnia. Deeper down, Asan is less a book about Russia’s Chechen wars than a novel showing how war forces participants and observers to piece together narratives that explain or justify actions.
At the centre of Makanin’s narrive is major Aleksandr Sergeevich Zhilin, nicknamed Asan by his fellow officers. He finds himself running a supply depot during both the first and second wars, supplying the Russian troops with fuel--and running his own little business on the side. A basically honest man, Major Zhilin is still one of those corrupt officers who used the war to make money for themselves, something that enables him to protect injured or runaway soldiers, and help desperate mothers ransom their sons who have been captured by Chechen forces. Is Major Zhilin a self-centered schemer, or a modern-day Russian Robin Hood? A bit of both, it seems.
Like most "Chechen" works, Asan is at its heart a tragedy, and full of the brutal details of the Chechen wars, where there were no real good guys; rape, pillage, torture, and murder were all commonplace; and even support officers in the rear could find themselves held at gunpoint or pawing through piles of dismembered corpses. But it juxtaposes that brutality with flashes of lyricism and heartfelt sympathy for the people caught up in the war. In the novel, Asan is both the name of a bloodthirsty mythological figure and of a person trying to do the most good he can in bad circumstances, and maybe stay alive against the odds.
Asan patches multiple stories together to form a rough novel about rough topics. Of course war, as Makanin reminds readers on several of Asan’s pages, is an absurd venture. You can’t understand it, says Zhilin, and there’s no logic. In short, truth slips and myths gain strength as Zhilin attempts to make sense of events, his actions, and his life. Asan is not about the kinds of war truths we expect from newspapers. It’s about how people try to order chaos by transforming war’s realities, commodities as elusive as sun bunnies, into a myth. Novel's message about money, truth, and war are important reflections of sociopolitical life in today’s world.
The most important thing in the book isn’t the topic, the scenes, the double break with genre, or the irony of the story but the character, the central figure. Makanin hit the mark, he DISCOVERED: he discovered a character whose biography and way of life could be the key to understanding an era, a metaphor for contemporary life. -- Lev Danilkin, a literary critic
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