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.)

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.)