Translated material
In mass circulation
Now that Pamuk has become a Nobel laureate, a dissident and, they even say, a political emigrant, and his name has reached the masses, it’s time to release it in mass editions. As luck would have it, the “hit” “Black Book” was republished many times, as well as “My Name is Red” and “The White Fortress”. Having dug into the creative biography of the Nobel laureate, the publishers easily found “New Life,” a novel popular in Europe that had never been published in Russia before.
By the way, Pamuk was discovered by the Russian reader by the wonderful translator Vera Feonova, who during her lifetime translated all of his early works up to “Red,” but for some reason she bypassed “New Life.” Pamuk wrote this novel in 1994, immediately after thousands of readers around the world, having read his “Black Book”, woke up with approximately the same feeling that the hero of “New Life” experienced for a completely different literary reason: “Once I read book, and my life completely changed. While still reading the first pages, I felt such strength that it seemed to me as if my body was being torn away from the table at which I was sitting and flying away.”
In the story, a certain children's writer writes an “adult” novel for the first time, which literally blows the minds of readers. The main character, student Osman, having read this “revelation”, gives up his studies and sets out to travel around the country in the company of a girl, also a fan of the author, who in turn is looking for a friend, also one of the “admirers”. The further line of the plot is a fairly tangled tangle, where the motives of the “Black Book” are mixed (the hero is looking for a certain young lady all the way), the poetics of the “White Fortress” (as the journey progresses, the characters continually lose documents, change the “legend” and multiply doubles), and the opposition of Turkey to Western civilization and the identification of an incomprehensible sect seem to be sketches for the future “Snow”.
And although “New Life” is replete with a lot of caustic remarks on the topic of the peculiarities of the Turkish national character and the role of motor transport in its formation, it is worth recognizing that this is a kind of “Pamuk Light” - a lightweight set of characteristic plots, adapted for mass use. It’s quite suitable for a superficial presentation, but it won’t tear you away from the table and won’t deprive you of sleep.
Haruki Murakami. “Burn the barn.” Translation from Japanese by Andrey Zamilov. M.: Eksmo, 2007.
Publishers are also squeezing the last juice out of the remnants of Haruki Murakami's popularity. Burn the Barn is a collection of the writer's early stories, published in 1984 following Pinball 1973. Murakami is usually good in “small doses”, as evidenced by the frivolous collection “A Good Day for a Kangaroo” (1986) and “All God’s Children Can Dance” (2000), written after the earthquake of the late 90s. “Burn the barn” is not the case, since it represents a very eclectic entity, united according to an unclear principle.
The story “Firefly”, which opens the collection, quite resembles a mini-story and becomes boring already on the second spread, since the recognizable set of depressive characters - a childhood friend who committed suicide, an anemic girl, a nerdy neighbor - is not colored by any plot here, but an empty gundezh Haruki Mu with passages from the series: “But no matter how much I tried to forget everything, some kind of amorphous clot of air remained in me, which over time began to take on a distinct form” - in the middle of the already dull and devastating “zero” seems like some particularly sophisticated way of mocking oneself.
It’s much more pleasant to plunge into the atmosphere of the story “Burn the Barn,” whose hero, a young yuppie, amuses himself by arranging anonymous happenings - burning decrepit wooden structures, citing the fact that “I just want to,” and that’s it. Murakami knows how to put the most banal social neurosis into some completely paranormal form, so that the result is an artifact suitable for exhibiting in a museum of modern art. All other plot components - missing girls, jazz tunes and liters of beer drunk - do not play a special role.
Fans of the “Rat Trilogy” should read “The Dancing Fairy,” where, in addition to the recognizable techniques of “Sheep Hunt” and “Dance, Dance, Dance,” you can find a fantastic description of an elephant factory. “I’ll make a reservation right away: we are not creating elephants out of nowhere. To be precise, we “multiply” them. Having caught one individual, we separate the ears, trunk, head, paws and tail from the body and, through careful adjustments, we produce five elephants.”
The final collection of “Three German Fantasies” looks like Murakami’s “augmentation”. Confused notes on a German theme will not add anything to the overall picture, except perhaps a strange still life of “jug No. 36”, “pedestal A52”, “light bulb” and “erection”.