Tatyana Tolstaya

Do you like zany, hallucinatory prose? I don't, I'm a big partisan of Realism, Magical or straight up, but I read this novel anyway. Set hundreds of years after a nuclear holocaust in a village in a spot that used to be Moscow, people have built a social order based on mice and tyranny. Oldeners have survived the blast, which rendered them immune from natural death, but they do nothing useful, just wait around for society to evolve and engage in old arguments. People born since have a variety of radiation- related Consequences, and never understand what the Oldeners are talking about. Cultural memory has suffered a complete break.

Benedikt, our hero, is a simple Golubchik who has a fortuitous marriage into a powerful family and through this means comes into contact with books from the pre-nuclear blast. He falls head over heels for them and reads through the whole library of thousands of surviving volumes.

But lest you think all this reading elevates or improves Benedikt... no. Lacking all the cultural memory needed to place these works in context, they are just collections of words. There is no difference between a Brothers Karamazov and an issue of a knitting journal.

So it is clear then that books, ripped clear away from their cultural context, no longer function for the cause they originally sprung out of. Here I feel for Benedikt, as I think I as an American reader of Tolstaya's novel share a degree of trouble with him. The novel, in the midst of its inventive flights of prose, frequently references Russian poetry and touchstones I don't know, and the whole thing can be seen as a satire of Russian society from feudal through Soviet times, of which I only have the average piddling understanding of a member of the educated American masses. I no doubt missed a lot that an educated Russian wouldn't.… (altro)