A tale of two halves

ANDREÏ MAKINE’S 11th novel is really two separate stories: one the tale of an emigré Russian author named Ivan Shutov, the other the titular life of an unknown man, Georgy Volsky, a wheelchair-bound occupant of a small room in a St Petersburg communal flat.

A dissident from another century, Shutov is a bitter, marginal figure banished from the chronology of his Motherland.

When we first meet him he has just been jilted by a woman young enough to be his daughter, a Parisian who considers him a clown only partially because his name derives from the Russian word for “joke”. In English translation, of course, his name carries a further, more accurate resonance: Shutov is literally shut off from people, from history and, crucially, from modern literature.