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Do Not Say We Have Nothing

2017; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 91; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2017.0304

1945-8134

Amy Lantrip,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

What are its objectives? Who is running it? No one knows. Few care. When faced with absurd or nightmarish events, their mantra is “The Experiment is the Experiment.” Andrei is a thoughtful, decent man: he tries to be just, to do what he can to “put things right.” But he is so indoctrinated into the reigning ideology that he’s unaware of its soul-destroying meaninglessness . Until he embarks on “the great expedition to the north.” As counselor to the president, Andrei leads a handful of soldiers and a gaggle of functionaries into the unknown to find “the beginning of the world.” Although ravaged by disease and deprivation and gripped by existential despair, Andrei forges ever deeper into the wasteland, a lifeless desert dotted with ruins of ancient cities. This desolate landscape externalizes the ideological void within Andrei’s mind, and his increasingly desperate trek incarnates his spiritual quest for meaning, for a reason to go on living in spite of what he has learned about the destructiveness of humankind and the futility of all he has tried to accomplish. Upon completing The Doomed City in 1972, the Strugatskys believed its social criticism and philosophical content rendered it unpublishable. When finally published in Russian in 1989, it rapidly gained a reputation as their magnum opus and a masterwork of the philosophical tradition in Russian literature. Now, twenty-eight years later, we have this splendid English translation, and it astonishes. After the dystopian darkness of The Doomed City, The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn seems radiant. Unique among the Strugatskys’ works, this novella is a jeu d’esprit. Its subtitle, “One More Last Rite for the Detective Genre,” echoes that of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge (1958). But while Dürrenmatt sought to deconstruct the detective story into oblivion, the Strugatskys are playing with the genre. Beginning as a classic locked-room murder mystery, the novel morphs into a tale of the supernatural (maybe), then into a gangster thriller, and finally into something deeply strange. Red herrings and MacGuffins abound; parody, absurdism, and surrealism run riot. But the Strugatskys never lose control ; they even interweave philosophical themes about identity. Though comparatively inconsequential, The Dead Mountaineer ’s Inn is as much a tour de force as The Doomed City, and it’s great fun to read. Michael A. Morrison University of Oklahoma Madeleine Thien. Do Not Say We Have Nothing. New York. W.W. Norton. 2016. 473 pages. Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, Do Not Say We Have Nothing is Madeleine Thien’s third novel. The story follows a family in China during the many antirightist campaigns, the Cultural Revolution , and the Tiananmen Square protests. This period of turmoil consumes the lives of the characters, and they experience separation , denouncement, and even violence. Thien tells the story of this family through a young girl named Marie living Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 73 Samuel Ferrer The Last Gods of Indochine Signal 8 Press American-born Samuel Ferrer achieves the unlikely in this impressive debut novel, writing believably from the perspective of two narrators separated by six centuries with a rich Southeast Asian landscape as the backdrop to this ambitious story. The first novel written by a non-Asian to be nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize, The Last Gods of Indochine demonstrates Ferrer’s fascination with history and culture from cover to cover while delivering a gripping narrative. Cho Oh-Hyun For Nirvana: 108 Zen Sijo Poems Trans. Heinz Insu Fenkl Columbia University Press Writing from a monastic retreat in Korea, Cho Oh-Hyun uses the sijo form, a fixed syllabic poem with more than one thousand years of tradition, to explore metaphysical, historical, and personal themes throughout this volume. While some of the poems embrace the kind of open-ended imagery commonly associated with Buddhist poetry, Cho innovates in this volume with narrative techniques that engage the senses and the imagination. in Canada during the 1990s. An older girl from China, Ai-ming, comes to stay with Marie and her mother. When Ai-ming tells Marie about her family, the story begins to unfold. The mysterious Book of Records supplements the tale. The Book of Records is a multichaptered...