Asar Eppel

Crushed Satan

To the dilemma, which of the questions "How?" or "What?" - It is the main one in relation to a literary work, most modern writers decide in favor of the latter. The time of modernist experiments passed, and the plot reigns on the domestic literary Olympus. Those who did not enjoy the obscure wide public in time with opus, we are mercy in the “semiratura” or, even better, to the tiny non -profit publishers specializing in this kind of Zaumi. Serious book producers, regardless of the degree of their intellectual arrogance, prefer literature, as they said in Soviet times, “readable” - in other words, retold, plot.

The rare happy exception to this rule is Asar Eppel. Its prose is a beautiful, complex, metaphorical and practically unsuccessful reservoir in solid publishers and is in constant demand among readers. The current book of Eppel Satan, published in the St. Petersburg Publishing House Symposium, continues the epic narrative of the strange inhabitants of the nameless non -accelerated street somewhere on the Moscow post -war outskirts, begun in the collection of stories of the mid -nineties - “Herbal Street”. Eppel's reserved world is either Vladykino, or Otradnaya - lives according to its own laws, with its joys and sorrows.

A boy from “ink of a rustic childhood” admires a stolen import self -registration, not daring to apply it for its intended purpose.

The Malacholny Vadya from the story “Fuck”, not noticing that his puffy daughter -in -law has long been languishing on it, for years it makes a bicycle from the details found in the landfill. The first, by the way, is experiencing the death of his father, death on the recent grassy street - a large Jewish family in the story “Disariation”.

The hero of the story, endowed with unimaginable dimensions, is indulged in the gloomy debauchery by the male dignity “Castrillar!”.

All these stories are intertwined, creating the very fascinating-decorated unity of time and place that the authors of the era of classicism so appreciated.

However, trying to state the content of the Eppel stories at least naive. The deliberately fuzzy, barely intended plot in them serves just a conditional frame that supports the air-light, flowing and sparkling tissue of the text.

It is for the sake of this hard -to -vibrant flying substance of Eppel that it is worth reading. And to read it, believe me, is worth it.

Galina Yuzefovich