The Mountain and the Wall was the first Dagestani novel ever translated to English (albeit the original was in Russian), released by Dallas-based small publisher Deep Vellum in 2015. In 2018 Deep Vellum published another novel by Alisa Ganieva, Bride & Groom.
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The recently-translated Islamic-fundamentalist-takeover-dystopia novel that isn't Houellebecq. And whose characters are rather less jaundiced.
In a near-future Dagestan, there are rumours that Putin's Russia has had enough of dealing with trouble from the Caucasus country and has just put a wall up across the border - like the Berlin Wall, as a couple of characters say - and it proves to be true. Extremist Salafi / Wahhabi insurgents, already present in fairly significant numbers, see a power vacuum, and quickly try to seize authority. The novel follows an extended network of friends and family trying to make sense of the chaos, concentrating on Shamil, a twentysomething rookie journalist. The viewpoint characters, with a few exceptions, are middle class moderate Sufis or secular Muslims who have more sympathy for local folk traditions or for Westernised pop culture than for the fundamentalists. We get a sense of how life was before (I'm not sure if it's a portrait of things as they are now, or marginally worse in some ways) and later of capital city conditions deteriorating as a self-appointed morality police of angry young men with guns pays more attention to enforcing the destruction of museums and the veiling of women than to getting electricity, water and rubbish collection running again - whilst residents with transport leave to hole up with relatives in remote mountain villages, or try to get to the Georgian border.
The introduction mentions that most Russian writing about the Caucasus known in English is essentially colonial, by the likes of Lermontov and Tolstoy. A few more books by authors native to the region have been translated recently – e.g. the Dalkey Archive Georgian Literature series – but this is apparently the first ever from Dagestan – albeit written mostly in Russian - to appear in English.
Some background knowledge about contemporary Russia will help when reading The Mountain and the Wall, but you don't need to be a specialist to get something out of it. What I'd read a few months ago in [book:Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible|21413849] helped orientate me around the book: Russian racism towards Central Asians [this interview with the author mentions how she used to get stopped by the police, and how Russian media coverage of the region has changed recently], the growth of fundamentalism in the region, and typical attitudes between men and women, in Russia and in the Caucasus republics. The Mountain and the Wall is steeped in the culture and vocab of its home country almost as much as [book:The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao|297673] is in the Dominican Republic. Ganieva's main Russian narrative is translated to English, but the Dagestani and Islamic words - foreign to the average European Russian - remain in their own language. Unlike the Junot Diaz, this book has its own glossary, but it's at the end, and there'll be a lot to look up unless you've got family from the region or you've studied it. People who know Arabic Islamic terms will be familiar with a percentage of the vocab (language origins - as there are several - are given for the glossed words), albeit some of the Arabic words are apparently used with slightly different meanings in Dagestan. Footnotes would have been more user-friendly than endnotes, as in some chapters, especially near the start, there are multiple terms to look up per page: it's the sort of situation made easier by keeping an ebook open on two screens (not great if you fail to resist distractions lurking elsewhere on the computer), or photocopying the glossary from a paper book. So although the narrative itself is very readable, the need for notes means this isn't exactly the ideal commuting book. Best read at home over a day or two, so you'll hopefully remember a few of the more commonly-used local terms and not need to look them up every single time they appear. There are too many new words for all but the most superpowered language learners to absorb in the time it takes to read a 250 page novel. (The glossary lists 125 terms, only 12 of which were already familiar to me.) Then, that pet hate of glossary users - when a word isn't in it, and you couldn't have known until you'd looked! That wasn't too bad here, better than in most glossed novels: maybe 85-90% of the words I expected to be glossed, were.
Another form of information overload for readers less familiar with the region is the number of language and ethnic groups mentioned in political conversations, at least twice as many as named in the main Wikipedia article on Dagestan. If you're not overly bothered, most of these could be treated simply as "group of people who think X, or live in Y", as the mentions are fleeting. Unlike an Estonian novel I'm currently in the middle of ([book:Radio|20802262]), in which the narrator often talks like a tour-guide and historian, The Mountain and the Wall isn't quite a standalone introduction to the region; there's a general foreword, but if you're the sort of reader who prefers to have some systematic information on what it means to be an Avar or a Kulyk or a Lezghin, you'll need to read beyond the covers.
That's a lot about the information content - which wouldn't cause the bat of an eyelid to friends who read the likes of Pynchon or A. Theroux on a regular basis - but directly after finishing the book, I felt like I'd done more work than for other novels of this size: more importantly, unexpected work. (I've written about this in detail so the effort isn't unexpected for anyone who's looked at this post, and to show it's not just a philistine reaction - “ but of course I won't have to do that” - as a shorter account could imply to a stranger.) Oscar Wao is the best comparison I know of, because similarly, The Mountain in the Wall isn't highly complex in its English vocab, experimental or tricksy. It may still satisfy seekers of the meta, as it contains multiple viewpoints, and some fascinating books-within-books. I loved the long 'excerpts' from a didactic Soviet novel for Dagestani teenage girls, and the works of a mediocre modern epic poet writing about traditional mountain life, even more than the main story - I'd have happily read the whole lot of both if they were there.
The Mountain and the Wall indicates a three-, or even four-way divide in the larger culture of Dagestan: folk culture (allied to moderate Islam); new fundamentalist Islam; Western commercial culture and fashion - with some sympathy for the folk culture/moderate side; and a probably forgotten Soviet atheistic culture opposed to all of the previous three. Ganieva hints that women may have had the greatest respect under the Soviets, at least in theory, although there were otherwise many drawbacks in the way the USSR attempted to cut people off from their history. Most significant characters have respect for the folk culture, especially material culture - and, being self-sustaining unlike urban Westernised tackiness [which word I dare to use because the author herself has described the capital, Makhachkala, as “backward and provincial”], it ends up as a refuge from the fundamentalists. The implication seems to be that this culture would be a very good thing if only women were equal within it, and there was less violence and feuding.
The depressing interactions between boys & girls out clubbing I more or less recognise from pre-university days. (As a witness only, because I was a teenage snob devoid of any sense of obligation to talk to anyone I found 'unattractive' or 'thick'.) There was a divide between the behaviour of most university boys - who rarely had any presumptions - and those before, albeit in a different town. Among these Dagestanis twenty-odd years later, the graduates behave just the same as yr boy racer type did, and probably still does, here with girls his own age. These scenes show that two-way problem where girls are trained to be coy and indirect, and boys to be persistent, and only a whole lot of different values and behaviour on both sides will change things. And this was an environment where I had no doubt the description 'street harrassment' was merited; this was not the occasional random compliment that floats away on the breeze, which in most parts of Britain I know is a very small part of the urban ecosystem, one that I take exception to certain popular quarters of the internet taking exception to. These Makhachkala girls barely have time to think whilst walking along, what with the barrage of aggressive catcalls and accostings. (And unlike some Northern & other working class girls in the UK, the young Dagestani women definitely aren't acculturated to give as good as they get or to whistle and whoop at boys as much as the other way round – that would, sadly, be shameful in their society.) And thus this sort of stuff goes, even more clearly than it had before, into the category of things I wouldn't want abolished completely but which there can, emphatically, be too much of (as well as the wrong sort of).
Whilst most of The Mountain and the Wall is set in the capital, there are also plenty of descriptions of traditional crafts (during Shamil's visit to the mountains to research an article) and customs (especially in the 'epic poem'). Hm, I might read some novels at least as much for ethnography as for stories... This is a fascinating book, and aside from the quibbles over the format of the notes, one I was delighted to have read. I feel as if I haven't actually finished it, because I still find myself looking up related articles.
(read and reviewed December 2015; the review on Goodreads.)
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