Don’t credit this review. It was assigned to me because I’m “Russian,” and so is the book in question, “The Lady of the Mine,” the sixth by the Russian novelist Sergei Lebedev. I was born in the U.S.S.R. and have devoted a part of my literary career to its concerns, so the idea is that I may be able to provide a more informed assessment of the book’s merits.
Usually, such a background counts for relatively little that an internet search can’t supply. Perhaps not so here. Lebedev’s novel, which takes place during Russia’s covert invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, regularly tosses off references like this one, which points out why a character during the Soviet period has no choice but to obey his superiors: “He was unmarried, his grandfather was missing in action in the war, and his father was married to a priest’s granddaughter.”
(To explain: In perverted Soviet logic, a soldier who had gone M.I.A. in World War II was presumed to have been captured and recruited by the Nazis — which meant that any family member was guilty by association. The Soviet state regarded single adults as nonconformists in training, and even laughably distant religious connections were disqualifying in such a militantly atheist country.)
Readers can look up the O.G.P.U. and the Makhnovists, or even what a character might mean when he sputters, “Maidan! Junta! Coup! Banderites!,” but this? Kudos, of a kind, to the publishing team for not providing context. It reminds me of authors who decline to italicize foreign words because they feel it others that language (though our comprehension is othered in the meantime). Anyway, you may need a live “Russian” while you read this novel. Do so, perhaps, at your local banya. I mean banya.
So I feel more useful this time around. All the same, I can’t help thinking that you would have been better served by a reviewer with stylistic rather than genetic affinity for the material. So let me at least declare my bias: Books like this drive me crazy.
Lebedev’s novel, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, centers on a coal mine in eastern Ukraine with a secret everyone knows: There are Jewish Holocaust victims buried in it. The story trades hands between Zhanna, whose mother, Marianna, the recently deceased forewoman of the mine’s laundry, had vague purifying powers that went beyond literal stains; Valet, a local thug who, after being banished by Marianna for killing a tramp, has returned home as part of Russia’s invasion and lusts after Zhanna; Korol, a Russian general who once surveilled Marianna and remains obsessed by her; and, most campily, the Engineer, who designed the mine over a century earlier and is given to speaking, alternately, as the mine and as the dead Jews, making pronouncements like “I am coal. I am slowly transforming” and “I am the shaft.” If so, we are the shafted.
“The Lady of the Mine” is the type of novel that gets called “atmospheric.” Sometimes that can mean “nothing much happens.” There is no action too minor to interrupt with endless smoke rings of reflection. I had to read the book twice to understand what was going on. It proceeds virtually entirely in summary.
We never learn what greater power, if any, Marianna had: “Zhanna … couldn’t find the words to name her mother in her true essence, which few knew, some guessed, but almost everyone felt.” That goes for us, too. Of course, such a mystery gains power from the withholding, but in the name of what? If I write a novel that constantly mentions a neighbor who sews, will you be swept away by it as a parable of mending in a broken America though I say nothing further?
This inertness characterizes the novel. Korol has returned in part so that Marianna can finally account for her secrets, but she’s, well, dead. At another point, a surface-to-air missile takes out a passenger airliner, something that really happened — but the attack is as purposeless here as the tragic original event, other than to remind us that Valet, who surveys the wreckage for valuables, is a degenerate.
In what is surely meant as a climactic conclusion, Zhanna turns into a garishly painted doll for a sexually charged night on the town, behavior for which the previous pages have hardly prepared us. We are even less prepared for the fact that she readily surrenders to one of the other main characters, or that such Beria-like pickups are part of what gets this man going. (Go to the banya and ask someone what I mean by that Beria reference.) The way their encounter ends is as random and meaningless as the rest of it.
I understand — the lack of substance and resolution is the point. In this part of the world, the successive victims — of Imperial Russia, of the Nazis, of the Soviets, of the new fascist Russia — have no justice, and power is never held to account. However, even though the novel omits basic factual knit, it also explains gratuitously. The Russians, we are told, “hadn’t realized it yet, but they had turned into those whom they considered their worst enemy … the Nazis.” Even newspapers don’t bother spelling this kind of stuff out.
The tension between Lebedev’s style and my reading preferences does prompt a useful question: What is fiction for? The literary fashion today seems to be with Lebedev, though it has a long history. “I know there are readers in the world … who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last,” Tristram Shandy lamented in his endless autobiography. Clarity, to say nothing of a chugging plot — i.e., “people you care about and the problem they’re trying to solve,” as a young writer I know put it when she was 7 — is seen as suspect, an imposition of artificial order on an orderless universe. Lebedev is more in line with the lessons of modernism and postmodernism than literary yarn-weavers like yours truly.
We are like the bickering opposition to an amused autocrat, and our schismatic faith is that of an ever-smaller number of readers. But the same is currently true for democracy, maybe. We copy out the sacred manuscripts in our vaults, shining the light each in our way and praying that the world will notice.
The post A Novel Unearths the Dark Secrets in a Ukrainian Coal Mine appeared first on New York Times.
