Sukhbat Aflatuni “The Ant King”

A novel about how it is equally impossible to escape into a fairy tale and escape from a fairy tale.

Under the pseudonym Sukhbat Aflatuni hides a writer, poet, literary critic Evgeniy Abdullaev from Tashkent. Last year, his novel “The Adoration of the Magi,” published in the magazine “October” from 2011 to 2015, was included in the long list of the “Big Book” and, without waiting for the results of the award, was published as a separate volume. At the beginning of 2016, on the wave of interest in “The Magi,” RIPOL Classic published another novel by Aflatuni, “The Ant King.” Unlike the previous poetic saga, which spanned half the world and a century and a half, this lean and initially deliberately simple novel seems to have been written by another person.

“I stretched my fingers to improve morning brain activity. One, two. I got up and turned off my mobile phone. Bathroom. Face, teeth, shower. Again Leshkin's socks are on the washing machine! I told the idiot, put it in the car. She sat down, leafed through the magazine, and washed it away. She combed her hair and took the hair off the brush. Two gray-haired ones. Call Mana at the salon. Just some more socks!”

“The Ant King” consists of two parts, dotted together by recurring characters. The first part, “Warm Summer in Bultykh” (in 2013 it was published as an independent story in the magazine “Friendship of Peoples”), tells the story of the architect Lena, who faces unexpected troubles with the threat of either prison or even murder. Running away from her problems, the heroine embarks on a strange psychological game in the spirit of Tom McCarthy’s novel “When I Was Real”: she tries to reconstruct the events of more than twenty years ago - the last happy summer of her family.

The main character of the second part is Lenin’s husband Mikhalych, who is driving his mother along a snowy road to a mysterious place with the creepy name “gerontozoria”. Starting as a boring, but seemingly important joint journey of distant relatives, the road story is suddenly filled with bizarre evil spirits, fairy tales and children's songs with a second bottom, magical helpers and real dangers. Because of the second part of “The Ant King” it is impossible not to compare it with Vladimir Sorokin’s “Blizzard” or Mamleev’s prose. But, to Aflatuni’s credit, the comparison does not make his text secondary, but, on the contrary, convincingly proves that good Russian writers are not yet extinct.