Bride & Groom by Alisa Ganieva, tr. Carol Apollonio

This is the second novel from Alisa Ganieva, a Moscow-based Dagestani author in her 30s, to be translated into English by Carol Apollonio and published by Dallas-based Deep Vellum (whose cover designs I love). It was released in Russian in 2015 and in English in 2018.

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I had a great time reading Alisa Ganieva's The Mountain and the Wall around Christmas 2015, and so this December I jumped at the chance to read the second of her books to be translated to English. After reading both books, I'm impressed by her genre-hopping skill, each time firmly within a literary mode; the earlier book was dystopian speculative fiction; this is a romance. (Literary romance is not something you see a lot of these days - or maybe the plotlines of the American and British ones I see don't appeal so I don't really think of them that way, just as blah novels about twentysomethings in Brooklyn or wherever.) Both of her books share a recognisable authorial voice, and are packed with details about both modern and traditional life in Dagestan, an area rarely covered in Western English news - which is what I find so fascinating about them - and also know how to create the kind of mood and suspense associated with their respective genres. Introducing tension into the story of a couple whom the reader knows from the start will get together, and making this felt by a reader who would very rarely pick up a romance novel is, IMO, an achievement. How it would seem, though, to regular readers of romance, I can't say.

Most of the novel is set in a community where arranged marriages are the norm, while its hero and heroine Marat and Patya - young Dagestanis who work in Moscow law and have been summoned home by their respective parents for matchmaking - both have a more secular, liberal outlook than others around them, without being outright rebellious. The general process, aside from specific Dagestani customs, will presumably be familiar to people from cultures where arranged marriages are prevalent. A motif of a veiled bride impersonating another, meaning the groom did not marry his intended, also in Orhan Pamuk's A Strangeness in my Mind, occurs in an anecdote told by one relative - I am not sure how common this kind of story or legend is and what that might signify about the originality versus folkloric basis of the novel to someone who knows the culture better. From a Westernised viewpoint the book makes an interesting juxtaposition of attitudes found in novels from very different eras - a contrast the main characters' experience too in living between different worlds and finding ways to fit partly into both. There is work in the legal profession in Moscow, the struggle with discrimination (his long search for a private apartment in Moscow—his non-Russian name had scared off all the landlords) and at the end of a long train journey, there are people like Granny:
the world in which she dwelt had absolutely nothing in common with ours. In her world people still lived in mountaintop castles with flat roofs, divided up the fields and the harvest strictly according to ancient rules, and sent their sons to the villages of conquered neighbors to feast at their expense; after murders they demanded a vow of purging from forty men and exacted fines measured in units of grain, copper kettles, bulls, and sheep. These reminiscences descended into some infinite depth of the ages, and it was impossible to believe that she had ever personally been a part of that strange life
and the less picturesque hometown:
A sudden gust of wind hurled a cloud of steppe dust at us, along with shreds of cardboard boxes that looked like dry crackers, a faint, simple melody from a distant tape player, and the dreary sound of cows mooing.
(Talking of cows, their sound is once transliterated as “Um-bu-u-u-u!” - which sounds so much more like the real thing than the English 'moo'.)
some steppe village surrounded by abandoned oil towers, or a roadside motel with scorpions rustling within its pitted, sunbaked adobe walls.

I've unfortunately only read one other novel focused in a relatively positive way on arranged marriages in a Muslim country, the chick lit-style Tender Hooks aka Duty Free by Moni Mohsin, which, although it contains a lot more about political events than British chicklit would, doesn’t consider issues with the same level of seriousness as Bride and Groom. As in The Mountain and the Wall, the growth of stricter forms of Islam is a significant part of the background - there are tensions in the characters' small home town between a traditional mosque and the newer Wahhabi mosque "on the other side of the tracks" - as is political and legal corruption, both in Moscow and Dagestan. (In a discussion thread about 2018 London novel In Our Mad & Furious City it was pointed out that very few contemporary British and American novels manage to write about Muslims without any plotlines about radicalisation. While it is overdone in English-language literature, from what I can make out about the reality of Dagestan, it sounds as though, there, is far more genuinely prevalent and influential, and more appropriate to include.)

It is a patriarchal culture, but Ganieva indicates that there were also inspiring women in non-traditional roles.
the late Mashidat Zalova, our literature teacher. She had been six feet tall, an old maid, polyglot, and passionate bibliophile… As the daughter of an enemy of the people, she could not be allowed to work in city schools, but our out-of-the-way suburb was no problem. Rumor had it that she had been wooed by Adik’s widowed grandfather, an architect and veteran of the Great Patriotic War… persistent in his attempts but she had foresworn family life and closed herself in with her dusty tomes and folios.

The Mountain and the Wall indicated the change from Soviet propaganda showing women doing work equal to men's, to more recent religious-inflected pressures, but some families in Bride and Groom value the education of intelligent daughters:
We got you into the top school, hired tutors, helped with university, and set you up with an internship. Could I even have dreamed of such a life? I worked from the age of twelve!”
at the same time as pushing them towards marriage and expecting them to take on a substantial share of household chores. One mother is a senior cardiologist - this is a world in which women like her are expected to do it all, work and housework.

The characters' frequent conversations about recently-imprisoned local bigwig and fixer Khalilbek, who is connected, spider-like, to almost everyone, may in theory be repetitive, but I thought it a realistic impression of how frequently people in a small community would talk about a recent major event. (Some authors might vary the topics more for the sake of it, even if that meant less verisimilitude). The Afterword - which I wish I'd read at the beginning, rather than when I was ¾ of the way through the book - sheds light on the religious conflicts, on Khalilbek and on recurring motifs, by explaining how Ganieva incorporated Sufism into the novel. (The connection she makes between Khidr, Musa/Moses and the Green Man is intriguing but instinctively looks to me like a stretch.) She mentions that there areallusions to Sufi poetry in the text; as I don't know these works myself I can't say how well the references come through in the English translation - but it would be very interesting to read a review of Bride and Groom by someone who has a good knowledge of these texts and of similar cultures.

Unlike The Mountain and the Wall, Bride and Groom doesn't have a glossary. In a way it could do with one - although there were benefits to looking stuff up online: watching videos of the dance the Lezginka, and seeing pictures and articles about the food (there is lots of food in this book, as you might expect from a story about weddings and visits to traditional relatives) and learning more about it, for example that adjika can be considered to be to Russians what salsa is to Americans, and that the Russian equivalent word for spicy also includes flavours such as garlic and vinegar as well as chilli (which makes more sense to me than the English). There are many details that connect regardless of notes: the almost perverse lack of glamour of modern psychics and fortune tellers; the reminiscences of grandparents with a tone familiar to anyone whose family had rural roots only a couple of generations back; parents who bicker in a way familiar from old TV shows.

Ganieva is one to read especially if you enjoy using novels for armchair tourism - in this case to an intriguing area very few people visit in person, due to long-term travel warnings.


(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review on Goodreads.)

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, tr. Natasha Randall

[4.5] Each time I've started reading A Hero of Our Time - and there have been three or four - it's been tremendous fun. This is partly due to the playful self-awareness and utterly modern attitude of the second and third sentences, which shine through in every translation I've tried, and in this version mention:
one valise of average size, half-filled with my travel notes about Georgia. The majority of these luckily for you, were lost; but the valise with the rest of my things, luckily for me, remained intact.

I know these days that 'postmodernity' is about as old as the novel itself (a look at reviews of [author:Steven Moore|16001]'s histories of the novel will help), but meeting phrases like these, sparkling out from the dust of 200 years, still brings nearly the same surprise and delight as I got twenty years ago from discovering [book:The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner|87580].

Despite my enthusiasm, each previous time I began to read A Hero of Our Time, I was waylaid by things I can no longer remember, and got nowhere near finishing the book. But now I have finished it, and straight away went back to re-read various bits and pieces. (There are few books I like enough to bother doing this. It's also a testament to it that I started again from the beginning so many times. I usually avoid doing this when picking up a book after a gap, so I don't have to read the same chapters again and can get to the end more quickly.)

Hero isn't like the typical Anglophone idea of a Russian classic: a giant, complex opera or symphony (i.e. a Tolstoy doorstopper). It's short, immediate, and full of escapades and scrapes: an old-fashioned boys' own adventure. (Neil LaBute's foreword to this Penguin Classics edition rightly compares Pechorin to Flashman, and dreams up a meeting for the two characters during the Crimean War, which I, for one, would really like to read.) Bring the expectations you'd bring to Verne or Conan Doyle, rather than those for high literature, and you'll get more out of it.

The British boys' own adventure isn't just an adventure story, though, it's a document of Empire, colonialism and imperialist attitudes, and the same goes for A Hero of Our Time in the Russian context. For some reason, it's very unusual in mass media to hear Russia (or the Soviets) described as a colonial and imperial power in the same way that Western European countries are - this understanding of the country seems mostly confined to academic works. Perhaps, because Russia was appropriating territories contiguous to its own borders - many of which it still rules - while Britain was spreading pink over the global map to the Americas, Asia and Africa, it just isn't as obvious to the general public. A few months ago, I was browsing [book:Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy|1181367]; I thought reading fiction would be an enjoyable and inexpensive way to learn a bit more about Imperial Russian colonialism - and there among the most significant works was Lermontov and A Hero of Our Time, so I picked up the book again, and found myself noticing sentences I would once not have looked at so intently: all these characterisations of 'Asiatics', Cossacks, warlords and their families. I might otherwise have read them with the same well-it's-not-great-but-it's-old resignation as I'd have brought to a 19th-century Londoner's stereotyping of locals during his journey to the north of England, and not filed alongside British Empire-builders' depictions of India with the Said-Orientalism toolkit etc. (Not that one couldn't also apply that to regional and class snobbery, actually.) My desire to hear more about the place and time, and the relative unfamiliarity (only, for comparison, having the memory of a few documentaries and newspaper articles from and about the 1990s-present) meant it was fascinating to an extent that similar stuff about the British Raj - a backdrop to dozens of novels, films and TV series since childhood - wouldn't be now.
(An interesting-looking book of stories about Russian colonialism from the Georgian side: [book:The Prose of the Mountains|28089291] )

As in British Imperialist literature, there are colonising protagonists who partly identify themselves with the colonised region and go native when it suits them (of course Pechorin can be mistaken for a Circassian), and there is a great aesthetic love of the landscape they've been sent to tame. Lermontov was also a painter, and it shows in the gorgeous extended descriptions of scenery. Natasha Randall's introduction says these can occasionally be repetitive, but I was enjoying wandering around in them way too much to notice.

In the last few years, I've read too many articles by women who identify with female supporting characters in fiction that has sexist male protagonists, and it's too current a subject to ignore in 2018 - so I should mention that the reader who identifies primarily with them here is unlikely to enjoy A Hero of Our Time so much. I'm not sure it would even be possible to identify with them in the first half - they are not so much characters as dolls or pets exemplifying desirable qualities of the era (there's also a Bond Girl), and the average contemporary Western reader has such a different background and emotional history that they are unlikely to truly fathom Bela, the kidnapped daughter of a Circassian warlord, and who has lived all her life in a culture in which such snatchings are commonplace, any more than Lermontov/Pechorin did. In the second half of the book (about social intrigue rather than derring-do), aristocratic Russian ladies from Moscow and St. Petersburg get more page time, and are evidently trying to negotiate their own emotions, and the double standards and conflicting expectations of their milieu and the Romantic period, where medieval courtly love style tendencies and expectations of respectable marriage coexist with a fashion for Byronic bad boys, and behaviours like pickup-artist style negging. I would guess that much ink has been spilled already on the similarities between Vera, Pechorin's former lover, and Anna Karenina.

LaBute - famous in the late 90s for his films about what's now called toxic masculinity - considers Pechorin to be a sociopath. And I have to say that certain of Pechorin's social manipulations, his nerve, and his occasional moments of introspection and doubt, closely resemble someone I used to know who described himself as a sociopath. I'm not talking serial killer bad (nor gloating at length over destroying people in the manner of Valmont in [book:Les Liaisons Dangereuses|49540], another character LaBute mentions) - more like Tony in Skins: an arrogant, clever, socially connected, player of games, sometimes very hurtful, and sometimes also useful and supportive when it suits. Given Pechorin's level of reflectiveness, you wonder how much of this arsery he might grow out of: possibly some, but not 100%. The energy and likeability with which Pechorin is presented shows realistically how such a person seems to acquaintances (of which they have a great many) until they do something too awful - and how they get on in life, in a way that the later tendency to present such personalities as sinister unreliable narrators really doesn't. (LaBute also does that thing, pretty much universal in New Lad-era media and later 20th century litfic, of presenting highly egotistical and difficult characters as universally, typically male, as if men's personalities did not, in fact, vary as much as women's.)

Randall, drawing attention to the psychological realism rather than to labels, compares A Hero of Our Time with [book:The Confession of a Child of the Century|16282313], another personal favourite of mine - although very different in its emotional intensity and not such an easy read - which is again remarkable in presenting the inner world of a difficult character without judgement, to an extent that modern works rarely do. The period when both books were written, the cusp between Romanticism and the fashion for realist fiction (a time also, importantly, before the codification of psychology and the rise of psychology-as-morality) seems to have been especially productive for this.

The lightness with which Pechorin's games are presented makes it clearer how he experiences them - they are not related with that heavy-handed insinuation that characterises later fiction about questionable individuals - and the narrative sometimes bestowed strange flashes of insight beyond the words on the page. I suddenly understood how hunting would be exciting because it would be different every time, moving through the landscape on different routes decided by another creature, different weather and sounds, not knowing where the quarry would go, different from the relatively fixed possibilities in, for example, gaming. Passages which could have been commonplace are elevated: something that in the hands of many later writers would have been a dyspeptic, predictable rant against astrology is here a poetic consideration of how 'we' see ourselves compared with how our ancestors saw themselves and their lives.

The structure is odd - the book ends abruptly, inside a framed narrative, and it's understandable that some readers would knock a star off for this, but the aytypicality of this in a 19th century novel felt interesting in itself. It helped to understand that this is actually a collection of short stories about one character and his world, previously published separately - it was even suggested that Lermontov might have written more about Pechorin had he lived longer - and the introduction's listing of the sequence in which the episodes happen prompted me to look over them again in that order for an altered perspective.

Even the title has more to give than I expected. A hero as in a (potential) war hero; a hero as in a Byronic hero (not necessarily approved of by those in the 19th century establishment who esteemed of the former), the implied question mark at the end - these could be obvious from reading the blurb. A facet added by contemporary Western life (especially outside the US) where warfare has not been part of most people's lives for a couple of generations, is the suspicion in some quarters of those who have killed or are prepared to kill repeatedly in the armed services: might it actually require a dark-triad sort of antisocial personality? Is that what a lot of 'heroes', especially old-fashioned heroes, really are?

A Hero of Our Time is a classic partly because of its place in the history of the Russian novel, as a bridge from Pushkin to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the Golden Age - and I admit that a bit of my enjoyment was from seeing it in this light (it was probably good to read it after W&P, AK, C&P and EO) and in relation to English literature (having seen it argued that Constance Garnett's translations of later Russian greats effectively prompted the incorporation of the country's major writers into the English canon). But mostly I found it to be something which, having read most of the 'easy' English classics a long time ago, I don't really expect any more from books of this age: an enjoyable, light adventure story with intriguing character portrait.

(finished & reviewed Sept 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

The Mountain and the Wall by Alisa Ganieva, tr. Carol Apollonio

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.)