A Russian train that makes no stops, the Yellow Arrow has no end and no beginning, and its destination is a broken bridge.
This is the weekend I am supposed to be finishing Zamyatin's We and a series of Shalamov's Kolyma Tales. And I'm reading those, I promise. But then I got the last of my Amazon order yesterday (which included my gift-to-me hardcover box set of the Hunger Games trilogy), and found this tucked away inside:
According to the Times Literary Supplement, "Pelevin is a Russian David Foster Wallace, Will Self, Haruki Murakami." I can totally get on board with (ba-dum!) the Murakami reference.
I mean, it wasn't a surprise; I did order it and pay cash (credit) money for it, after all. I was surprised at it's length, however, or lack thereof (it is, like, hand-sized, and less than a hundred pages), so I started reading it.
And then I finished it. It's quick as quick, and very compelling, so if any of you want a taste of contemporary Russian literature (this was published in 1993), take a look: The Yellow Arrow.
From the back cover: A Russian train that makes no stops, the Yellow Arrow has no end and no beginning, and its destination is a broken bridge. Andrei, less and less lulled by the never-ending hum of the wheels, begins to look for a way to escape. But life in the compartments is going on as always: Indifferent to their fate, the passengers carry on as usual – trading in nickel melted down from the carriage doors, attending the Upper Bunk avant-garde theater, leafing through Pasternak's Early Trains, or disposing of their dead through the compartment windows.
[a rundown of details for me to remember for the exam, and a comparison to The Giver, after the jump]
Author: Victor Pelevin, current golden boy of Russian literature in translation ("Pelevin's quasi-parodic mysticism and skill at bringing low philosophically highbrow plots have made him a bestseller, with a growing reputation outside of Russia" - Caryl Emerson).
His other works, both short stories and longer prose, all have that grotesque, contemporary magical realism feel to them that Haruki Murakami is so good at. See, the bizarre allegory of the ridiculousness of constructed societies in the short story "Hermit and Sixfinger," or the commentary on how privatization has ruined modern societies in the longer novel, The Book of the Werewolf.
Fun fact – I read his short story "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia" years before I knew who he was, and the sense of the story, if not the details, have stuck with me and molded my sense of contemporary Russian literature since. More fun for me, I think, than anyone else, that fact.
Date Published: 1993
Main characters:
- Andrei, the hero, who is something of a mystic, and learns to think of himself as being a passenger (and thus, move to the level beyond passenger-hood, to self-consciousness) from Khan, and who, if passively, looks for a way to escape into the "out there" before he is dead.
- Khan, the real mystic, and Andrei's friend, who he either met for the first time the first day he climbed to the train's roof, or else who is a childhood friend who knows the rest of Andrei's old crew (as implied by Andrei's artist friend later)
- Peter Sergeyevich, Andrei's compartment-mate; Grisha, the speculator and trader of copper (ashtrays) and nickel (doors); the conductor
According to Caryl: Viktor Pelevin toys with Stalinist ruins and denies any political intent. But he is not, in the brutal corporeal way, […] a "materialist." Like the mystical Symbolists of the 1910s-20s, Pelevin builds his works "on the windowsill" between different worlds. His technique is one of constantly switching perspectives, back and forth across the borders of the sill. […] Influenced by the philosopher Nicolas Berdayev and the Symbolist poet Alexander Blok, Pelevin has pursued a single question, to which the politics of post-communism contributes only tangentially: what is reality, and where must one stand to access it? He gives the reader very few clues, and none at all from his personal biography.
Pelevin's work has been described as a "satirico-philosophical fantasy" as well as a "mix of super-science fiction and harsh realism." […] Life and death in their physiological dimension are not easily distinguishable in Pelevin's later work [as they are in Omon Ra and The Life of Insects]. A devoted Buddhist, Pelevin gives us on lucid Eastern Parable, The Yellow Arrow, in which a sealed train carrying a cross-section of late communist society is heading toward a ruined bridge. The hero, who manages to crawl up to the roof of a train car and look around (passengers are allowed to do this, but most aren't interested), suddenly "wakes up." This interrupts the Chain of Being. The train stops, time stops, bubbles are suspended in a glass of liquid; he gets off and walks into a dusty unmarked wilderness.
If this was an American YA novel, what would it be?: EASY. Lois Lowry's The Giver.
I don't care if there are no trains in that world, the main question is still about what is real and how to access it, and the image of Jonas walking off down a snowy embankment in the climax there pretty well mirrors Andrei walking off into the wilderness here. I am pretty sure they both died. Or else they both lived. Or else they both were actually in dreams, and then woke up. Point being, I think in both cases, the results were the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment