To Be Read...

Wave of Terror, by Theodore Odrach

Ivan Kulik is the young headmaster of the village school in Hjalby, near Pinsk. Kulik believes himself to be Ukrainian, and teaches his pupils in Ukrainian, but it is becoming fashionable amongst the emerging middle classes, those who want to differentiate themselves from the moujik peasant past, to speak and act as Russians.

It is 1940, and the region has been liberated from oppressive Polish rule by the Red Army, and the Soviets decree that it is now part of the Belorussian SSR. (Naturally, this means teaching in Belorussian, a language almost none among them understands).

The book begins with villagers dividing up the proprty of the feudal Polish landlord but it is quickly apparent that the new order is corrupt, with new civic bullies grabbing the spoils and ingratiating themselves into the Soviet system.

So Kulik finds himself walking through Pinsk, along Lahishenska Street: "A lovely broad, treelined avenue with shops restaurants and government buildings, army trucks, armored cars, tank units. Everywhere, on building walls, on fences, in entranceways, were pictures of Stalin."

Some, including the beautiful but selfish Marusia, welcome the changes. At one point she is embarrassed by her arguing parents:

They were going at each other in Ukrainian! Why couldn't they do it in Russian? And why did they have to use such dreadful phrases as 'May you get cholera and die' or 'You old scarecrow in a pea field!'"

Pulling the covers over her head she felt overwhelmingly embarrassed and distressed. She envied her friends whose parents were able to maintain well-balanced arguments in Russian without using even the slightest Ukrainian word. Why couldn't her parents do the same? She vowed to herself that when she was married all her arguments with her husband would be in Russian and Russian only.

But these are brutal times. Marusia will come to the attention of the NKVD thug Sobakin. The villagers have seen Sobakin kill an old man with revolver blow: "Well, well, it looks like I have found myself another subversive."

Kulik is quietly defiant.

What had happened today was a sign of things to come. The people in this small out of the way place were falling victim to a huge complex organisation they couldn't even begin to understand. They knew that something terrible was happening to them. If this was the beginning, what would life be like tomorrow, after tomorrow?

 The novel ends before tomorrow comes - invasion by the Nazis - but the relentless, remorseless change of shifting borders and totalitarian power makes and breaks lives.

The circumstances are terrifying, but Wave of Terror is warm and often amusing. The shadow of the NKVD prison where Sobakin and his like inflict beatings and worse hangs heavy, but Odrach brings to life a vivid range of people he clearly holds in great affection.

Ordrach was born near Pinsk in 1912 and the novel, translated by his daughter Erma draws heavily on his experience. It is a very powerful read, but somehow manages to be nowhere near as bleak as its title and circumstances would suggest.

One of the more colourful characters, Dounia, the focal point of a scandalous menage a trois, is for reasons that suit her suitors, proposed as candidate for Deputy. She teaches in a school, and draws on this when making her nomination speech, telling the audience:

"A teacher, dear people, is like an ant that pulls a weight greater than itself. Grammar, arithmetic, geography and so on, must all first be absorbed by the teacher and then deposited on the heads of the pupils. This mission is a very difficult one because your children, as we all know, are all morons."

The Investigation, by Stanislaw Lem

The Investigation is a crime novel, set in London. Or maybe it isn't.

Certainly it concerns a police inquiry, but whether a crime has been committed is uncertain. And it does appear to be set in foggy London - the police work from Scotland Yard - but it is not necessarily a familar London. 

Lem is best known as a science fiction writer, the author of Solaris, and it is just possible that The Investigation is also science fiction in that it is apparently set in the future, but this is an assumption based on just one clue - it was published in 1959 but a character remarks that moonwalks are now common place. (Then again, the chief inspector has a small portrait of Queen Victoria on his office wall).

If this is a disorientating intro to a review, so be it; The Investigation is a disorientating book. For some reason, corpses in mortuaries are being moved, even dresed in odd clothes . In Shaltham a body turns over in its coffin, others disappear from the mortuary in Spitoon, and the dissecting room in Lovering medical school. A baffled police force calls in the baffling Dr Harvey Sciss. Sciss is  "standoffish, nasty, absolutely devoid of tact," a logician who favours a statistical method of investigation ... almost never before used.

As Lieutenant Gregory says: "In my opinion this is a lousy case. There's something about it... something peculiar. It's not that it's difficult, but there are details that don't fit... not for material reasons but because the only connecting links are all psychological nonsense. It all builds up to nothing and leads to a dead end."

I bought The Investigation after reading an excellent In the Spotlight essay by Margot Kinberg, and we went on to have intersting exchange about what I at first thought were idiosyncracies in Adele Milch's translation, but now think may well be deliberate.

The police travel in an Oldsmobile, others in a Buick. One of the officers has the rank of Lieutenant, and they routinely carry pistols, definitely not the case in my London of 1959. I rather like the way Lem seems to have seized on London for its fog and the resonance of Scotland Yard, without much carrying about realism.

I wasn't as thrilled by The Investigation as Margot, but it is well worth reading. How could you not enjoy a book set in Spitoon, Engender and Dipper, and one of the characters is called Sergeant Calls, which I take to be a JB Priestley joke?

Death and the Penguin, by Andrey Kurkov

Eastern European Challenge - 4/12 Ukraine ****

It is hard to mix menace and humour, but, then again it is hard to be a hack writer in Kiev, who is "unlucky with his muses" and whose only friend is a penguin.

Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely. But Misha had brought his own kind of loneliness and the result was now two complementary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than of amity.

Viktor is trapped in a rut between journalism and meagre scraps of prose. He writes short stories which he tries to sell to newspapers, but even Capital News declines his efforts.

"It might get in on a Friday," says the elderly assistant editor. "You know - for balance. If there's a glut of bad news, readers look for something neutral."

But two days later he is visited at home by the mysterious editor of Capital News. "This is highjly confidential. What we are after is a gifted obituarist, a master of the succenct. Snappy, pithy, way out stuffs the idea."

He is to write, anonymously, "obelisks" for the not yet dead. The trouble is, once he has written about them, highlighting certain prescribed incidents and qualities, they don't stay undead for very long.

The first hint of trouble comes with a visit from Misha (helpfully referred to as Misha-non-penguin), who orders an obituary and is prepared to pay "at least double what the priciest whore charges." Viktor is sucked into a world of gangsters, where life is cheap - and black and white Misha is hired to attend funerals as the ultimate status symbol mourner.

Kurkov talks of writing about life in a country which is younger than most of inhabitants, and the tensions and absurdities of nascent Ukraine lend themselves to the surreal, delivered with ample humour that shrouds something much darker.    

Short interview with Andrey Kurkov

War With The Newts, by Karel Čapek

The first contact comes when divers off Sumatra encounter black creatures "the size of a ten year old boy", who will trade pearls.

It is soon realised that these creatures can be made to use tools and work. Within a short time, technology, industrialisation and the world economy is dominated by the newt trade. They are a useful commodity and no-one seems to consider that creatures that can learn to speak might have other sensibilities. 

The newt population grows at enormous speed, and their need for living space drives them to war against the humans. 

This is the basic plot of  Karel Čapek's wonderful 1936 novel, War With The Newts.

As is obvious, this is a highly allegorical work, which operates on a many different levels. There are, for example, clear references to the slave trade, to the imperialist tensions of early Twentieth Century Europe, to the Nazi demands for lebensraum, and the totalitarian oppression promised by Stalin's Russia. There are also, no doubt, reflections, on contemporary Czech politics, but disappointingly, there is no explanatory essay in this Penguin Central European Classic

It is told in a many different ways, from straight narrative to newspaper articles and scientific papers, with sections heavy in learned footnotes, others driven by conversations and incidents of high farce.

Early on, Thomas Gregg, a keeper at London Zoo, is surprised when a Giant Japanese Salamander begins to talk. Rather disturbed by the conversations, Gregg decides to divert the newt, Andria Scheuchzer, by giving him a newspaper, in which he reads about crime, horse-racing and football.

A learned professor writes a 16-page article for Natural Science, in which he concludes that:

Andria Scheuchzer can talk, even if inclined to croak; it has a range of about four hundred words; it only repeats what it has heard or read.

... this same salamander can read, but only the evening papers. It is interested in the same things as an average Englishman, and it reacts to them in a similar way,that is in the directon of established general views. Its mental life - if it is possible to speak of such - consists merely of ideas and opinions current at the time.

A brilliant book - highly recommended.