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Celestial Express, a novel by Kirill Kobrin, 2019
Rights sold: Russia - NLO
Shortlisted for the 2019 NOS Literary Award
Loosely modelled on Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, the plot of this novel centres around a journey undertaken by a diverse group of figures and two deaths that take place among them within the first couple of days. The setting is the enclosed space of a train car on a solemnly inaugurated direct railroad connection between the Chinese city “X.” and London, but the narrator’s inclination for letting his mind wander freely takes the reader all over the world, jumping between China and Europe, the past and the present, etc. In fact, the story itself doesn’t map more than the first three days of the journey. The chief question of a detective story – who the murderer is – ceases to be important in the light of the musings that play and interweave as the train makes its way across the vast expanse of the continent.
The reader’s guided through most of the novel by the first-person narrative of one of the travellers, a well-read intellectual who enjoys hearing the sound of his inner voice and lets it take him into the farthest corners of his mind (and the world), while remaining slightly skeptical to the ideas it suggests. He presents the scene in a camera-like style, zooming in, describing details meticulously, often letting them distract and inspire him into a digression in which he combines what he knows with sometimes fantastic and far-fetched ideas, constructing a whole system of belief before returning to the narrative. The narrative itself is pushed to the background ever more as it provides merely a scheme for the narrator’s reflections and loosely flowing associations.
The subjects the narrator’s philosophical musings touch upon include: alcohol-drinking traditions around the world; the fact that China represents the future and Europe the past, making the train journey a return from the future into the past; the idea that at some point, apart from “the present”, the distant past will be the only thing that ever truly existed and everything between the distant past and the present will be lost with each new digital system replacing the old one, etc. Halfway through the book the reader is treated to an essay on hell and a thorough analysis of its various forms.
An “opera” performed by the characters appears towards the end, using excerpts from ancient Chinese poetry, which provides another artistic adaptation of the events on the train inserted in the adaptation that is the novel itself.
In the author’s own words, “it is a sort of late modernist (but not so-called ‘postmodernist’!) mixture of Agatha Christie and Alain Robbe-Grillet with a pinch of J. G. Ballard”. A year after its publication, the events of 2020 have imparted unexpected relevance to this novel, not only due to China being the starting point of the journey it describes, but chiefly thanks to its treatment of human isolation and its possible consequences, as well as toying with the grim and funny scenarios of the future of humankind.
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Thief, Spy, and Murderer, a novel by Yuri Buida (2013)
2013 Big Book Award finalist
Rights sold: Russia - EKSMO, AST, France - GALLIMARD, Spain - AUTOMATICA, World Arabic - DAR NEBRAS
"Most of our town was laying in ruins – everywhere shards of houses, walls with gaping windows, basements without buildings – and everything covered by elderberry bushes. In the summer their dense foliage hid all this misery; you could go in the bushes since in the whole town there wasn't a single public toilet, and the men went there to drink, far from prying eyes."
Yuri Buida's new novel, the autobiographical fantasy "Thief, Spy and Murderer", tells a story of hero's childhood, youth, and maturing as a person and writer, his role in that time and place where he was born and lived, namely in the splinters of Teutonic civilization, in Western Prussia, annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II, in a small town outside Kaliningrad, in a time of half-built socialism during Khrushchev's "thaw" of the 60's. Comical and sad, monstrous and beautiful stories from the lives of those around him meld into a complete symphony of his era. Upset by the abyss between the high-minded problems of literary heroes and the vegetative lives of his contemporaries, he comes to a new level of understanding as he matures: to appreciate the harmony and the beauty of life, you need to lower your visor and start absorbing it directly through all your nerve endings. Then all of life's absurdity and horror will also enter you completely – but such is the price of feeling truly alive.
Buida's prose tastes at once bitter and sweet – such is the nature of this author's talent. As a literary critic once remarked, Buida is a little perilous to read, because he "winds his string very tight". But every time the string seems ready to break, it doesn't – it just screams at the limit of its abilities.
That's also how it is with his new novel. Its heroes live a life without a core, built on contrasts that sear the soul, as the sight of a snow-covered, sunlit mountaintop sears the eye. It's a wild life, untethered, newly primitive, knowing neither fear nor shame. Childlike innocence and feral cruelty, generosity of soul and poverty of mind, desire for divine flight and for desperate self-destruction go hand in hand. Here love and death are of equal value, both working toward annihilation.
The world reposes in evil, thinks Yuri Buida's hero, who has adored Kafka since his youth and dreamed of becoming a writer like him: to steal images from reality, to spy after the tiniest movements of the soul, and to kill moments – only to depict them forever.
Buida’s Thief, Spy, and Murderer feels like multiple books, in multiple ways. The description the literary journal Znamya gave the book - an autobiographical fantasy - sums up a lot: over all, Thief, Spy, and Murderer sure feels like an autobiography but some passages sure feel embellished. Thief, Spy, and Murderer read so much like a fiction-nonfiction hybrid to me that I can’t quite bring myself to refer to it as a novel, as Eksmo, its publisher, does. At least neither the journal nor the book publisher labelled it a “documentary novel,” a term I’ve always found annoyingly opaque.
At least the basics are fairly easy to list. Thief, Spy, and Murder is a first-person narrative told by a male who is identified (all of once) as Buida: he’s a boy when the book begins, an adult writer when it ends. ... Details may vary significantly but much of what happens to meta-Buida (as I’ll call the Buida in the book) echoes circumstances and events in the life of the writer named Iurii Buida, including being from the Kaliningrad area, practicing journalism, and becoming a writer.
Thief, Spy, and Murderer begins with meta-Buida’s family getting up in the morning and preparing to go out for a Revolution Day demonstration. The narrator first describes the order in which the family uses the slop pail, then shows us his mother in curlers and his father shaving and putting on his medals. We’re in the post-War years. As neighbors begin to appear, so do stories, like the woman whose daughters came “from the elder bushes” that grow in the ruins of buildings. And then banners and a smell (Red Moscow perfume makes yet another literary appearance) and toasts... There’s an earthiness, a bit of an edge, and a real sense of seaminess.
There are lots of other promising bits in the beginning of the book: railroad tracks that raised my expectations for a Don Domino-esque book, some sordid and lonely crime, and the narrator’s father preventing a group of men from hurting a gypsy child. I think my favorite passage involved a trip to the paper mill where meta-Buida’s father works: they look inside a train car loaded with books by Stalin, all waiting to be pulped. There are sixteen tons of Stalin in each car; hundreds of cars are lined up, if only in the distance. The father gives permission to begin work on the books, allowing them to be unloaded, pitchforked into the pulper, and then piped to a cardboard-making machine. Yikes. Vodka is consumed. Then a bit later: “After they’d cleared out the fourth car, my father took me by the hand and we went home.”
On the next page, meta-Buida says his first experience with the writings of Solzhenitsyn is through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which fails to make much of an impression because “Everything, everything, felt familiar to me when I read it: not the details, of course, but the very atmosphere, the air.” It’s the life and the worst aspects of everydayness that feel familiar to him - and scarier than the statistics of the Gulag - and it is all steeped in Stalin.
That mention of Solzhenitsyn is key to the book, I think because, for my taste, anyway, Buida is at his best in Thief, Spy, and Murderer when he addresses those everyday horrors: the book feels most elemental and smartest then, too, particularly because many of these scenes have the surreal or mythical touches I enjoyed so much in Don Domino and Blue Blood.
(From Lisa Hayden Espenshade's review. Full version is here: http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com.es/)
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