The Winter Queen

Book 3 of the Russian Reading Challenge: Boris Akunin's The Winter Queen, the first in a series of mysteries set in the final decades of the 19th century. Akunin started publishing in Russia about 10 years ago, and gained massive popularity in a hurry, and TWQ first appeared in English in 2003. (At least a half dozen other Akunin titles are also available in translation.)

The book's protagonist is Erast Fandorin, a very young clerk in the Moscow police department. He is eager and curious, traits that lead him to investigate a simple suicide that proves to be anything but. The mystery has a variety of twists and discoveries, and while it's not particularly challenging, it is awfully fun. (I'd like to hear what others think of the ending though.)

A couple other aspects of the novel that I found noteworthy:
The suicide is a case of "American roulette," better known to most of us as Russian, and it prompted this observation by a rakish count: "It's stupid but exciting. A shame the Americans thought of it before we did." This led me to wonder about the origins of the term, and mini-research (Wikipedia, of course - and in Russian) suggests that Akunin is alone on the American origin thing, although there doesn't seem to be much evidence attaching it to Russia either. But it was still funny to me. (Also, a similar game of chance with gunplay is mentioned in Lermontov's A Hero of our Time - per Wiki the only instance of R.R. in Russian literature - but it's hard to call it quite the same thing, upon rereading the story.)

Aspects of the characters reminded me a great deal of Dostoevsky, particularly The Idiot, although also Bros. K. Fandorin has a shade of Myshkin-esque innocence to him, and he is also drawn to two distinct types of beauties. One is pure and fair, and of good family; the other is dark, corrupted, but utterly beguiling. And the latter has a train of roguish followers. Maybe I'm making too much of it though.

All in all though, an excellent challenge selection.

crossposted at RRC

I have no self-control

Books that I have acquired on or since Christmas:

Fire in the Blood, Irene Nemirovsky
Man Walks Into a Room, Nicole Krauss
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

I have already read Bros K, so this is only for my library, but for the other five, any bets on how many will actually get read in 2008?

Re-discoveries, Russian style (part 2)

One of my favorite things about Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden is saying Baden-Baden out loud. And that really proves what a big dork I am b/c there is so much to like about this novel.

I first learned about it sometime in the fall of 2001, when Susan Sontag wrote about it in the New Yorker. It was a lost novel, written in the 1970s Soviet Union in secret. Sontag gushed, and provided the introduction for the English translation. (Kudos to the translators, Roger and Angela Keys, who must have had their hands full, but more on that later.) I haven't read much Sontag, so couldn't know whether our tastes aligned, but this was one of the best book recommendations I've ever gotten. (That same fall, the New Yorker also turned me on to Orhan Pamuk and My Name is Red - there must have been some sort of perfect storm of literary taste-making.)

Tsypkin - more or less - is one main character of the novel; he's on a train to Leningrad, reading the diary of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's wife Anna. At the same time, Fyodor and Anna are traveling to Baden-Baden, Germany, to take the waters. Also, Dostoyevsky falls prey to a gambling addiction, a humiliating run-in with Ivan Turgenev, and some epileptic fits. It becomes painfully clear how difficult - and yet still rewarding - it must have been to be Anna, amanuensis and caretaker. Reading the final pages of the book (in the sunshine out behind my Berkeley apartment - memorable for whatever reason), tears came to my eyes. I was in love with this book.

Like Dostoyevsky, Tsypkin shows a great eye for detail, demonstrating the Russian realism that was warped into Soviet socialist realism. And as is much easier to do in Russian than English (but done, thanks to the Keys's), he employs run-on sentences and paragraphs, building clauses upon one another for a rich layered effect. Plus Tsypkin - most likely typical for any thinking Soviet citizen of his era - is keenly aware of the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the sublime.

To sum up, Summer in Baden-Baden is extraordinary.