Translated material
Strangers are nearby
Albert Sánchez Piñol is an ironic anthropologist from Catalonia, who previously studied pygmy culture and African dictatorship, and then unexpectedly wrote a book that became a world bestseller and received the OJO Critico de Narrativa award. Critics immediately rushed to compare the 37-year-old Pignol, some with Daniel Defoe, some with Kafka, some with Peter Hegh, but most often with Coelho. The fact is that the Catalan, carried away by Levi-Strauss, stepped on shaky literary ground: he took on a mystical plot, which, with the slightest error in calculations, can collapse with a terrible crash, and only the dust formed after the accident can obscure the reader’s eyes for a short time. Mysticism is popular now, evidence of this is the widespread charlatanism of Coelho and the talented speculations of Murakami. But it is in this genre, more than in any other, that a plot structure designed with millimeter precision is important, which would allow parallel worlds to intersect and motivate the presence of non-traditional dimensions.
Piñol, who had previously studied African culture, and therefore was briefly familiar with both black magic and Voodoo rituals, discovered a rare gift for logical justification of seemingly complete mutota. The Catalan is able to encode the entire content of the novel in the first paragraph, and then lead the reader by the nose for a long time through fantastic labyrinths and false passages, in order to demonstrate at the very end the mathematical predictability of the initially given theorem. Piñol also has an amazing ability to detect “common places” and use them competently. It’s not for nothing that his novel is compared to dozens of others; the feeling of something very familiar doesn’t leave even for a second, and it’s this that initially keeps us from throwing this little blue book into the dustiest corner of the apartment.
A young man arrives on an uninhabited island off the coast of Antarctica. The hero, a former IRA fighter, retrained as a meteorologist in order to reflect on his past life in his spare time and while away the year away from political battles. Upon arrival, it turns out that his predecessor has disappeared, and the only inhabitant of the island, the lighthouse keeper, is silent as a fish. On the very first night, the “water” theme continues: the meteorologist’s house is attacked by crowds of aggressive webbed humanoids that have emerged from the sea. There is no connection with the outside world, and you have to somehow cope with all this alone: with monsters, a mad caretaker, the weather forecast and the further course of the plot.
A good sense of self-irony does not allow Pignol and his hero to get confused in this “heady silence.” The reader is first saved by allusions to “The Antarctic Diary” by director Pil-Sun Im, whose heroes followed the paths of their predecessors and safely survived a picturesque wide-screen nightmare. Later, having felt the limits that are built between the real and the fantastic, and having become convinced of their reliability, the reader goes in search of other associative solutions, of which Pignol reveals a great many: from Lucian’s “True History” to the universal plots of pagan mythology, sirens, watermen and other recognizable evil spirits.
The ending of the novel, despite all the thoughtfulness of the “last step,” still leaves a feeling of dissatisfaction. However, as Pignol says, the final frustration is part of the plan, since In Silence is only the first part of a future trilogy. The second has already been written, but has not yet been translated. And the common feature of all three novels is that fantastic monsters are present everywhere. In the first novel they emerge from the water, in the second they crawl out of the ground, and in the third they fall from the sky.
Tahiti Yamada. Summer with strangers. Translation from Japanese by A. Zamilov. M.: Eksmo, 2006.
Here's another successful mystical novel that we can safely recommend to anyone who is finally tired of Murakami. Yamada is older than Haruka Mu, and worked for many years as a screenwriter on television, which left an imprint on his writing style: the plot is presented in “cinema” language, which is stingy with adjectives, allowing the reader to complete the appearance of the characters and the location of the action. The hero of “Summer” is a TV man in his forties, who went through a midlife crisis, as a result of which he divorced his wife and moved to an uninhabitable office skyscraper near the highway, where he got into a lot of trouble.
Yamada's novel fits into the traditional Japanese genre of "ghost stories", which are usually told in the height of summer, "so that the sweat of horror is not visible on the clothes." In fact, at the end of August in Japan they celebrate the holiday of remembrance of the souls of deceased relatives, during which it is customary to take a vacation and return to the parents' house. “Ghost tales” are an invariable attribute of this celebration, since it is believed that at this time the boundaries separating the world of the living and the dead are temporarily erased.
The hero of “Summer with Strangers,” experiencing sudden loneliness and the discomfort of living in a house empty at night, goes for a walk in the area of his childhood and meets his long-dead parents there. The date turns out to be surprisingly pleasant, after which life gets better: orders arrive in batches, work is going well, the dark house is not scary, and besides, an attractive mistress appears in all respects, with only one strange thing - she does not allow herself to be looked at from the front.
In Yamada's novel, as before in Murakami, what is most captivating is the familiarity with which people cross the boundaries of worlds. Where the European has a predictable "fear and trembling", the Japanese have a lively conversation over a can of beer, as if dining with the dead was part of the daily routine. But the reader will not find the recognizable melancholic intonation of the hero Haruka Mu in “Summer with Strangers.” Yamada's hero is a man of a different generation; reflection is not his element. But this stingy, harsh manner has its own charm; the nightmare here does not come in soft slippers, but comes unexpectedly and sharply grabs you by the throat. And the horror itself is of a special kind: the problem is not that you are communicating with the dead, but that absolutely nothing connects you with living people. So Tahiti Yamada, in his own way, plays out the theme of the illusory nature of modern megacities and the phantom pains from which their inhabitants suffer.