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The Year of the Comet by Antonina W. Bouis

2017; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 91; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2017.0178

1945-8134

Ali Kinsella,

Eastern European Communism and Reforms

The Borrowed manages to combine the pleasures of many types of crime story. One story will remind you of Ed McBain, another of Agatha Christie, another of Raymond Chandler’s evocations of the city. It is indeed rare for a novel demonstrating so much artistic skill, operating on many social and psychological levels, and with so much mastery of what might be called classical tropes to be so consistently entertaining. J. Madison Davis Palmyra, Virginia Sergei Lebedev. The Year of the Comet. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. New York. New Vessel Press. 2017. 245 pages. In his second novel, Sergei Lebedev explores the thrills and failures of the late Soviet Union through the eyes of a young boy. Both a coming-of-age story and the tale of a family cut off from its history, The Year of the Comet is a touching portrait of bonds that span generations. The boy’s parents, whose job it is to predict and assess cataclysmic risk, embody the chaos of the narrator’s youth, while his grandmothers —the only central characters with names—each represent a kind of stability and love: “The true right of parenthood belonged to Grandmother Tanya and Grandmother Mara.” The story takes place right at that moment in adolescence when the infinite goodness of things seems to have vanished but one hasn’t yet learned how adult reconciliation works. The complexity of a world filled with disappointment and doubt (as well as joy) is nearly impossible to comprehend through the black-andwhite lens of childhood. This youthful perspective is a useful device that allows Lebedev to implicitly critique the regime through the innocent remarks and observations of a child. This conceit is not without its price—Lebedev’s comments on the inherent differences between children and adults at times feel ungainly and forced, rather than profound. Here and there Lebedev struggles to shed his precocious adult-as-child voice and regain the charming naïveté that propels his narrative. For all his commendable attempts to dismantle the myths of the USSR, Lebedev never fully questions the basic premise that the republics were equal-member states or that all Soviet citizens had equal access to privilege and power. This is a minor theme, however, and the bulk of the novel remains a comprehensive depiction of the events and objects—so many objects—that comprised the fabric of everyday life in the USSR. All his relatives are permeated with the Soviet order. The older ones, whose lives predate the system, have a different relationship with this form of power. The novel captures their attempt to pass this certain freedom along to him, the youngest one, so that he may be born anew. Ali Kinsella Chicago Osama Alomar. The Teeth of the Comb and Other Stories. Trans. Osama Alomar & C. J. Collins. New York. New Directions. 2017. 96 pages. At his very finest, Osama Alomar is heir to Kahlil Gibran, whom he greatly admires, by way of the surrealists. Despite their apparent playful wit, Alomar’s deceptively slight short stories have teeth and bite. In spare, accessible prose, one encounters the painful and bitter poetry of exile running like a bloodred thread through this slim but dense collection of flash fiction—an allegorical literary form that, in the Arab world, dates back more than a millennium. This keening is to be expected, since Alomar is a Syrian refugee and author with a growing reputation in the world he left behind. “Censorship is the mother of metaphor,” Jorge Luis Borges shrewdly noted; and it is true that literature under restrictive regimes Roberto Echavarren The Espresso between Sleep and Wakefulness Trans. Donald Wellman & Roberto Echavarren Cardboard House Urguayan poet Roberto Echavarren’s latest volume of poetry explodes from its opening with the salacious force of Rimbaud, burrowing inside of conventions regarding gender and sexuality with an insistent imagistic surrealism. Wellman’s translation, formulated collaboratively with the author, ensures that Echavarren’s poetic frenzy (presented in the original Spanish in the second half of the volume) is not lost but finds new admirers in the transition to English. The Daily Assortment of Astonishing Things Interlink Books Through a series of short stories, novellas, and essays, the Caine Prize...