Translated material
Three C's for suicidal girls
Relatives of 18-year-old Yulia died in a plane crash over Africa, having managed to send her a farewell SMS message: “We are falling. Love you. Do what you want. Dad". As an inheritance, the heroine received a luxurious house in a prestigious area of Oslo, Polish guest worker Krzysztof, an astronomical bank account and post-traumatic depression. Following the advice of a psychoanalyst, the girl begins to keep a diary (not online, but a paper one), on the pages of which she hatches a plan to commit suicide. Future suicide scenarios range from category B trash horror films (“I spent almost two days lying behind an old tractor in the corner of a chicken coop, at the very epicenter of the bird flu epidemic. As soon as the men in white leave, I lure the chickens to me with grain, and when they come closer, I catch them by the legs and caress them, squeeze them and teach them to cough on me.”) to sophisticated political thrillers (“Perhaps if I draw a picture of Mohammed and print the drawing, some fanatical Muslim will kill me.”). The first attempt - to hang on a hook in the finale of the school Christmas play - ends in failure. The young lady ends up in the hospital, where she is quickly revived. Having suffered alone, she goes on a long air trip. The trajectory of her movements around the world - Copenhagen, Brussels, Bangkok, Seoul, Frankfurt, New York, London - resembles the flight of a mad fly. At first she does not go out into the city, limiting herself to the airport building; later hangs out for several nights in a faceless hotel room, and in Seoul even manages to have a short-term romance with an Olympic-winning speed skater. Now she is obsessed with the idea of a plane crash and is ready to fly until some plane finally collapses under the weight of her problems. But a passenger on a London-New York flight, suffering from chronic aerophobia, shares with her a ruthless statistic: “It turns out that for someone in a family to die in a plane crash, 29 of its generations must fly every day.” Having reached the Canary Islands, Julia finds out that she is pregnant by a Korean speed skater, and decides to no longer trust her life to representatives of reliable airlines, and she takes the helm of the plane.
In essence, the plot of "Mulei" boils down to the simplest road movie, but Lou has never been known as an inventor of new moves. The charm of his prose always boiled down to simple-minded mumbling. His characters formulate their thoughts and observations using very primitive syntax (in the manner of the little bunny Ushastik from the famous Soviet animated series): “It seems that all the planes have flown away today. Soon I’ll risk going downstairs and peeing in the flower garden. Lying in the shelter of storage tank number seven leaves a lot of time for thinking. For example, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t have my period in April.” This style of naive writing of his turned out to be very infectious: half of the Russian-language LiveJournal is now filled with such “Luinisms.” Erlend Lu generally likes to present himself as a translator of the most general ideas, a kind of Norwegian Grishkovite. Another thing is that before his kindergarten maxims led to the fact that the main characters, having suffered and suffered, found some original way of survival in this meaningless world - they went to live in the forest, abandoned social life, entered into a criminal conspiracy with wild animals . The heroine of “Muleya,” although she pleases the reader with incredibly funny passages and composes dark tales about “the sun and Satan,” she ends her story as befits a girl from a good family - she gives birth, gets married, buys a house, and her father’s donates millions to a charitable foundation. And if before Lu used his naive writing, criticizing ordinary people and consumer society, and in such a degenerate version his satire seemed original and effective, now he nestled quite comfortably in the system of traditional values. So, in a sense, the ending of “Mulei” comes down to the archaic formula of the three saving “Ks”: Kinder--Kuhen--Kirhen. Unless this novel was written on behalf of some foundation for helping those obsessed with suicide.