Venushaar

by Michail Sjisjkin

Other authorsGerard Cruys (Translator)

Paper Book, 2014

Status

Available

Call number

2.sjisjkin

Genres

Fiction

Collection

RUSLAND

Publication

Amsterdam Querido 2014

User reviews

LibraryThing member hemlokgang

This is one of those books that starts off with a bang and then slowly fizzles. Initially, I would liken the reading experience to be very similar to reading Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" or "Midnight's Children", which requires an ability to give oneself over to the stream of consciousness of the

novel in order to absorb the themes and to see patterns. In this case, by midway through the book I was there and did not enjoy the rest. The themes are powerful ones in this novel set in the Swiss office for interviewing people requesting refugee status. They include: the savagery of mankind, love, development of numbness to savagery after hearing and seeing too much of it, and how life fits with scripture. Quite an interesting collection, but again, the book fizzles for me. Darn!

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LibraryThing member le.vert.galant

There are many fine things in this book, however the separate strands didn't cohere for me.

LibraryThing member stillatim

Rather a disappointment. I liked the essays in 'Calligraphy Lesson,' though I wasn't so keen on the stories, and that should have suggested to me that I wouldn't want to read 500 pages of 'story.' Well, I tried. Others have praised the prose, but I wonder what they were reading: Shishkin do the

police in different voices, and he do them so good (here, an interpreter for Russian/Slavic refugees; a singer first as a young girl, then as a woman, then as an older woman; the refugees themselves; and some more distant third narration). But that's not the same as writing well simpliciter. It doesn't help that the book's great climax is in my least favorite literary style that is actually a style, that of stuttering fragments:

"A Jew races on the Corso. Now you, you damn kikes, you're going to know how our Lord was crucified! A christened kike is a sated wolf. Man out back, kike in the shack. Man is the Holy Sepulcher; he must be freed. Mary herself indicated where to build the chruch, and in the middle of August, snow fell on Esquiline. After the free the fallen leaves stiffened. Triton went crazy, like an angel trumpeting through the Eustachian tubes: Arise, arise, why are you sprawled out here!"

This is a common enough tactic in English, and I'm too old to bother trying to read it anymore, unless it's in Joyce, who gets a free pass for originality (compare, unfavorably, Joyce Carey, or Eimear McBride). And of course, in Joyce, and for it being one option among many. The same is true for for Shishkin, but the first 450 pages of Maidenhair aren't quite as rewarding as the non-stuttering pages of Ulysses. I'll take the long-line of the modernist prose tradition, thanks.

Maidenhair's other problem, from my humble corner, is that I'm also done reading books that give us narrative fragments and then expect us to connect said fragments together. That doesn't mean I'm done reading difficult books; it means I'm done reading books in which the difficulty is invented by the author for no real purpose, rather than actually inhering in the topic or approach of the book (see also: Dodge Rose). I'm most particularly of all done reading books in which the payoff for all that laborious connecting is something as daft as "Life sucks, mostly, but love is good." Thanks, Mikhail. I never would have know without you.

That said, Shishkin is trying to write good books, he wants to write important books, he has good ideas (assimilating the refugees' stories to literary myths was a great one, though the execution wasn't so perfect), and he cares about literature and the literary tradition. So even though I'll never try to read this beginning to end again, I'm glad to have it, and I'll flick through it from time to time.

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