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.

While he possesses a scribbler’s mania for poetic detail, he has no time for contemporary writers, for Freud or post-modernism, for sex or violence. “Nowadays,” he says, “a hero has to be neurotic, cynical, impatient to share his unsavoury obsessions with us.”

Similarly disillusioned with modern France, Shutov begins to dream of a Russia he has not seen in decades, a place where he believes that a literary life still exists. On a whim he returns to St Petersburg in search of a former lover. It is the eve of the city’s tricentenary, the streets are alive with celebration, but home is nothing like he remembers.

Hiding from the pomp and fireworks, Shutov encounters Volsky, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War in danger of becoming just another unknown soldier. Volsky’s story is that of Soviet Russia, small moments of intimacy heightened by a shared experience of war and state-sponsored terror.

A genuinely moving depiction of love and loss, Volsky’s is a life which nonetheless feels quite familiar, and worse, less urgent then the legacy of Shutov’s own military service. The younger man often alludes to time he spent in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but although this might have solved the imperfect, bipartite structure of the novel, Makine never chooses to explore it in any great detail. Born in Siberia in 1957, Makine, like Shutov, has lived in Paris for over 20 years. Despite his linguistic gifts, he found himself having to pretend his first books were translations from Russian manuscripts as no publisher was willing to believe a foreigner could write so fluently in French. It was an experience he would later fictionalise in Dreams of My Russian Summers, his 1995 breakthrough novel.

Consistently lauded, his writing has often been compared to high literary antecedents such as Chekov, Proust, and Nabokov. However, it is fairer to see him as carving out his own space at the confluence of the rich French and Russian traditions. Certainly he has derived a poised, lyric intensity from the best of both, an elegiac tone which is captured by Geoffrey Strachan’s sparse translation.

Sharing nothing of his creator’s acclaim, Shutov is instead a minor novelist. When he is asked to appear on a television culture show it is a shock, and while the experience forces him to face the nonsense of celebrity writers and reject it quite publicly, the perceived emptiness of modern literature is only half of his problem. His isolation, personal as well as cultural, is nearly impossible for him to surmount.

Volsky’s tale, with its clear, powerful through-line, is everything his is not, though this only underlies the central problem of the novel. Volsky’s history is never conveyed to Shutov so much as it is a separate novella embedded within the other man’s story.

Graceful and considered though the writing may be, Makine’s novelistic architecture fails here insofar as the two halves of the book lack anything approaching the necessary narrative cohesion. The result risks the reader feeling cheated, their investment in Shutov betrayed by his disappearance from most of the book after the 100-page mark. That said, Volsky’s story does succeed as a thematic counterpoint to Shutov’s self-indulgent ennui and, to an extent, his search for meaning in art. Volsky’s is the most meaningful of the two arcs, seeing the old man participate in the defeat of the Nazis, finding and losing love, suffering imprisonment during the monstrous Soviet era and eventually achieving fulfilment as a special needs teacher. At no point does he seem unhappy, just a little overtaken by the speed of change in contemporary Russia.

Shutov, by contrast, is never more than a nostalgic pilgrim baffled by modernity gone mad, a “mixture of American razzle-dazzle and Russian clowning”.

He believes Russia has reached the stage of irony, first copying western fashions and then delighting in their pastiche. A borderline crank, the saddest thing about Shutov is that he will never truly be satisfied.

Juxtaposed against this is Volsky’s much more practical, much more rewarding and “completely ordinary” life. His is a didactic thread in which Makine seems to be saying that, when times are hard, we must make our own happiness. True though it may be, it is a surprisingly prosaic insight for a novel, even one that feels more like two finely written long stories sharing the physical space of one slim volume.

Dr Val Nolan lectures in contemporary literature at NUI Galway.