Normality is the new humanity

Review of the novels “Mr. Koenigsberg, who knew how to love”, “Nökk” and “The Seventh Day”

“Novaya” resumes the “Books of the Week” column - small digests of excellent new book releases that have been published recently. In today's article, columnist Max Volodin talks about a novel about Mr. Koenigsberg, who lives by the rules. And also about a family saga that leads the reader to an almost therapeutic conclusion: even the “greatest” story recedes before the past of one family, where one can find the source of both disappointment and hope. And - about a Chinese novel about a traveler by rail, but in fact - about how, instead of a bright future, a new, quasi-socialist reality has arrived in China, where familiar landmarks are lost and the dead can get lost between worlds.

A review of the novels “Mr. Koenigsberg, Who Knew How to Love” (from NoAge), “Nökk” (Phantom Press) and “The Seventh Day” (Foreign Literature) is in our material.

Juan Jacinto Muñoz Rengel. "Mr. Koenigsberg, who knew how to love"

• Translation from Spanish: Ksenia Kazak

• NoAge Publishing

I’ll use a textbook cheat sheet from Russian literature: this book is a story about a little man, a variation of which, it seems, is the so-called “man in a case.” This is roughly what New Yorker Mr. Paul Koenigsberg is like, living by the rules. If he gets tired of them, he does not break them, but comes up with new ones. He is normal down to the tips of his fingernails, and the reader spends the entire book waiting for some kind of catch in order to see him from the other side. However, there is no catch, the hero really is like that - and became like that because of childhood conflicts and a tyrannical mother. Because of all this, he found the only way not to lose himself - hypernormality. There will be no “arc” in the sense of character development for Paul Koenigsberg - and this also seems normal.

But there is one “but”. He doesn't like his job, but he wants to see one of his colleagues as often as possible. If this is a fixed idea, then it is a very human one.

A turning point in a story written with gentle irony, but without a catch, still comes. At some point, aliens find themselves on Earth (“attacking” would be too strong a word: we don’t even know how exactly they end up here, imitating people). But the Earthly government and other government institutions are collapsing in much the same way as we are used to seeing in endless films and TV series about alien invasions. The earth was empty, the aliens became our doubles, destroyed almost all the trees and, it seems, poisoned the water.

Each and every survivalist turns out to be doomed very quickly - except for Mr. Koenigsberg. He not only survives, but also retains the ability to love. As well as your rituals - even going to work every day.

How can one not recall Brodsky’s idea that the safest thing to do is “to worship the given with its short roads” and “poor standards”, to observe the same rituals, even without seriously thinking about their origin.

Of course, the novel is metaphorical almost to the point of allegory—almost hauntingly in some ways. The images are simple and recognizable: our world is like an office job that is not taken seriously - and therefore no one is ready for an alien invasion. Against the background of these events, Mr. Koenigsberg shows his main and best quality: normality, which suddenly becomes almost synonymous with humanity (and with which there are still problems in Russia and in Russian literature). And it turns out that habit carefully preserves pieces of the former world, even if the hero does not realize it.

Nathan Hill. "Nökk"

• Translation from English: Yulia Poleshchuk

• "Phantom Press"

Another great, complex and wonderful American novel. This time about family - which is important, because family sagas are still lacking in Russia. Family history as the history of a country is perhaps the most important trend in the modern historical novel and work with historical memory and trauma.

The plot spirals from the present to the past - close enough that its participants were still alive and could talk about themselves, their affairs and days, explain themselves and be (mis)understood. Each round of action absorbs more and more new people - something like a funnel into which the present is drawn. The author deconstructs these connections between three time layers (1968–1988–2011) to come to an almost therapeutic conclusion: even the “greatest” history recedes before the past of one family, where the source of both disappointment and hope can be found.

The novel begins with a theme that has become one of the leitmotifs in modern American literature: the radicalization of politics. At a meeting between a conservative presidential candidate and voters, a woman throws a pebble at him. Miraculously, she is not accused of terrorism, but the American media immediately seizes on her story. The episode serves as a trigger for her son to finally figure out why his mother left home long ago - and what secrets her past holds in the seemingly harmless “autumn of love” of 1968.

The traditional family novel began in reverse: from ancestors to descendants, in order to show how certain qualities and character traits would manifest themselves.

Now everything is different, and the heroes prefer to find and explore the roots of their own traumas in the past. And here we have a lot to learn from the Americans with their attention to this very trauma.

It’s probably already clear that Nökk is a historical novel. About memory, about how and what creates relationships in the family, and they, in turn, are reproduced in new generations. The book is oversaturated with a huge number of signs of the times - ours and not only. From “World of Warcraft” and a student who is ready to accuse a teacher of harassment for the sake of a test, to the fact that in the modern United States politics is heated to such an extent that almost any disagreement can be presented as an act of terrorism.

And there is some bitter irony in the fact that the author builds a bridge between modern events and 1968, when the hippie era was coming to an end and a completely different one began. The Chicago protests of that year serve as a boundary beyond which the further the political (however you understand it) becomes blurred. The great poet Allen Ginsberg calls for meditation and universal love, while police batons flash around him and tear gas swirls, and the classic American television Walter Cronkite commits professional suicide by calling police officers bandits and murderers on live television.

This immersion in history and an attempt to understand the agenda are far from the main advantages of the novel - this is a text also about art and love. It is beautifully written, beautifully translated, and offers a fragile hope: if the characters can understand their past, they have a chance for the future.

The narrator is elusive in a good way, slightly ironically distancing himself from what is happening - and giving us the opportunity to think about the extent to which we ourselves are responsible for our own story.

Yu Hua. "Seventh Day"

• Translation from Chinese: Julia Dreyzis

• "Foreign Literature"

The plot seems easy to retell. The hero - who is also the narrator - dies, but does not immediately realize it. Having realized, he wanders between the worlds of the living and the dead, remembering his life, meeting his ex-wife, meeting new people. And in the end, trying to find his dead father. It’s probably already clear that this novel is growing in depth.

Western readers - including Russians - read this as an allegory. But how to understand it? "The Seventh Day" was written in 2013, when overpopulation seemed an infinitesimal solution to China's problem, so one might think that the story, with its large, if not detailed, afterlife would be a sad but compelling metaphor for demographics. But not only that.

One of the key images of the novel is the railroad. For China, this is the main mode of transport, closely associated not only with modernity, but also with Western civilization. And of course, this is movement from village to city. The main character is born on a train, and his childhood is spent next to trains and the railway station. But he goes on his first (and involuntary) journey only at the age of three, when the trip by rail already takes on a symbolic meaning: his adoptive father is thinking about taking the boy to a village nearby - and leaving him there to start a new life himself. In turn, going in search of his deceased father, the also deceased hero makes the opposite movement from the city to the village, so that the trip itself turns out to be almost more significant than the search for a home.

The novel also contains neat social criticism: Chinese officials (alas, like Russian ones) cannot cope not only with the housing shortage and unemployment, but even with the number of deaths. Meanwhile, the question of cremation or burial suddenly takes on class urgency:

the dead complain about their fate during life and about the difficulties of repose. But isn’t this a distorted reflection of the failure of the communist utopia, which forced people (or their souls) to exist in a kind of timelessness that reproduces historical trauma?

Instead of a bright future, a new, quasi-socialist reality has arrived, where familiar landmarks are lost and the dead can get lost between worlds. What is this if not an image of great and unrealistic hopes? The afterlife is described in the same utopian way: “A silent question was read on the puzzled face. I told him: go there. The leaves will wave to you. The stones will smile at you, and the river will meet you. There is no poverty, no wealth, no sadness, no pain, no hatred, no revenge... There everyone is equal in death. -What kind of place is this? “The Kingdom of the Unburied.”

However, the translator of the beautifully recreated novel in Russian (and an outstanding sinologist) Yulia Dreyzis thinks differently:

“Paradoxically, the surreal world of the Seventh Day turns out to be something deeply traditional: in Chinese folk beliefs, the world of the dead, or the kingdom of darkness (yin), appears as the polar opposite of the world of the living, or the realm of light (yang). At the same time, the limits of yin and yang are juxtaposed and interact with each other: as the saying goes, “what separates yin and yang is as thin as a sheet of paper.” The world of the dead is depicted as a more or less exact copy of the world of the living, and life after death continues with the everyday routine of everyday life - it is not without reason that the relatives of the deceased do not forget to send special afterlife money to the next world to cover the needs of those with whom they had to part.”

But the main thing still seems different. “The Seventh Day” is, first of all, a unique prose that reflects on death and life as universal themes, important everywhere and always, here and now.

Max Volodin