KLASSEN ON BOOKS - March 2015 - By John Klassen (Reviews)
John Klassen
Gary Shteyngart
Shteyngart was born in Leningrad (1972) and moved to the USA at the age of seven. His novels, which have received various awards, include The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002), Absurdistan (2006), and Super Sad True Love Story (2010); he published a memoir, Little Failure (2014).
Absurdistan
Political-economic-social satire in the style and substance and laugh-out-loud humour of Jonathan Swift is alive and well in Gary Shteyngart. The story spins around the life of Misha Vainberg, a young, fat, very rich Russian Jew who finds himself in the imaginary country of Absurdistan, a former Soviet republic descending into civil war. The conflict divides the people along ancient lines of animosity between the Sevo and the Svani groups that in the past fought a three-hundred year war because of profound theological differences pertaining to the direction of the lower bar, the footrest, on an Orthodox cross. Into this heady mix are thrown the machinations of various elements of the Russian mafia and politicians fighting for control of crime and the economy, pervasive corruption at all levels of politics and society, starry-eyed USA officials grooming the country for its instantaneous switch to democracy and respect for human rights, the deeply controlling tentacles of Haliburton (known to the locals as Golly Burton) restructuring the world in its own image and financed by open-ended contracts from the USA.
Misha is hapless, engaging, self-centered, and lacking in self-confidence. He wants to do good things with his money and his life, but is hampered by his family history, his circumstances and his naivety in trying to understand the world around him.
Very little escapes Shteynart’s sharp eye and sharper wit. On modern society in the West:
“At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicate white arms. All those Introduction Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those symposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self-Expression. And it wasn’t just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze. I’ve been to parties in Brooklyn when men and women in their mid-thirties would passionately discuss the fine points of The Little Mermaid or the travails of their favorite superhero. “
This is a rollicking, perceptive, sharp, fun novel. A treat to read.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Vargas Llosa (1936-) is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist, college professor and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2010. In announcing the award, the Swedish Academy referred to his, “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individuals’ resistance, revolt, and defeat”. All of these elements feature prominently in the book under review.
The Feast of the Goat
This is a brilliant book. Set in the Dominican Republic around the assassination of Trujillo, the brutal dictator who ruled and terrorized the DR, 1930-1961. The story of the assassination is well-known. Vargas Llosa builds the tension by interspersing the viewpoints of the assassins who wait on the highway for Trujillo to appear and the personal histories that led them to this point; the modern-day visit by Urania Cabral, daughter of one of Trujillo’s closet associates, Senator Cabral, who fell out of favour shortly before the assassination and with whom Urania has refused all contact in the thirty-seven years that have passed since she escaped DR to go to school in the USA; Trujillo himself as he ages (he was 70 at his death) and finds that he cannot control the aging process as he could the life and death of countless victims; and a number of other key players such as Blaguer, President under Trujillo and man who continued to play a substantial role in DR politics well after Trujillo, and Abbes Garcia, head of the dreaded secret police; plus various generals and members of Trujillo’s family.
It is a wide cast of characters, but the integration of their representative roles in the operation of the regime is seamless, as are the themes that Vargas Llosa explores in consideration of complex relationships and even more complex psychologies. This novel is insightful in its touching upon the sociology and mass psychology of repression; the individual psychology of persons caught up in the corruption of power and influence; the fear and terror and tension of living under such a regime; the lives of those who profit from such a regime, ranging from sadistic murderers to the more complex psychologies of intellectuals who are clear-eyed opportunists, or who spin dense webs of self-deceit; how it is almost impossible to maintain any moral stance once one’s soul is sold to the system that is insidious in how it corrupts and co-opts people at all levels; the much deeper moral question of risking the lives of countless innocent people by your own action, however “justified” that action may seem; the long-term effects of such a system on society and the scars, physical and psychological that individuals carry; the sheer courage and commitment required to oppose such a regime when the penalties, if discovered, make one pray and plead for a quick death that is seldom granted.
Vargas Llosa also explores, in the aftermath of the assassination, how no course of events is pre-ordained but is determined by the actions of individuals. The assassins had acquired the support of General Roman, the Head of the Armed Forces who was to play a key role in mobilizing the military and arresting the key players in the Trujillo government as soon as he knew Trujillo was dead. But he was indecisive, he wasted precious time, though he “new with certainty what he ought to do and say at that moment, he didn’t do that either”. The tension is palpable and you can only feel anguish as the opportunities ineluctably slip away. The regime’s players were able to regroup and take command and for General Roman, the result was four months of incessant, hideous torture.
Trujillo was a monster. Under his rule there were improvements in the economy, public finances, and general well-being of the people, but it was accompanied, and buttressed, by torture, murder, corruption, theft of government revenues in the hundreds of millions. Trujillo, aka the Chief, the Maximum Leader, the Benefactor, the Father of the New Nation, Generalissimo, the Restorer of Financial Independence, ruled through terror and whimsy and constantly setting factions or individuals against each other, grinding people down to the point where prominent men would hide their wives and daughters lest they catch his lecherous eye and he would want to have sex with them, as he often did and then threw it back in the face of the husband/father in public humiliations.
Vargas Llosa is fascinated, as should we all be, with the fact that these “structures of power are not alien creatures from another world. They spring from the depths of the human soul” (as described in a recent essay on Vargas Llosa). This is both the horror of the situation, but also the basis for hope.
Tags: John Klassen