Whilst on a train journey across Kazakhstan, the narrator meets Yerzhan, a twenty-seven year old itinerant peddler and virtuoso violinist who, strangely, has the looks and build of a boy of twelve years. After overcoming his initial diffidence, Yerzhan starts to recount the tale of his childhood. He recalls growing up in a two-family settlement on a lonely, remote railway outpost in the Kazakh steppes, close to a top-secret “Zone” where Soviet nuclear experiments were carried out. He tells of his precocious musical talents on the dombra [lute-like folk instrument] and the violin, and his equally precocious love for his neighbour Aisulu. Chillingly, he recalls a fateful day when, during a school outing to the “Zone”, he waded into a radioactive lake to impress his classmates. Did the poisonous waters stunt his growth or was some other-worldly spell cast on him?

I suppose Hamid Ismailov’s novella might be regarded as a work of “magical realism”. I would prefer to describe it as a modern-day fable or myth. For what is mythology, if not an attempt to describe and explain the world through stories and symbols? In this case, Ismailov conjures up images of terrible beauty, by means of which he evokes daily life in the Kazakh steppes at the height of the Cold War. Andrew Bromfield's sensitive translation from the original Russian retains a poetic feel to it, as if the prose were permeated with the strains of Yerzhan’s dombra.

A haunting coming-of-age novel about a boy who does not come of age, this is my favourite amongst the Peirene Press publications I have had the pleasure to read.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2018/09/hamid-ismailovs-dead-lake.html ( )

Whilst on a train journey across Kazakhstan, the narrator meets Yerzhan, a twenty-seven year old itinerant peddler and virtuoso violinist who, strangely, has the looks and build of a boy of twelve years. After overcoming his initial diffidence, Yerzhan starts to recount the tale of his childhood. He recalls growing up in a two-family settlement on a lonely, remote railway outpost in the Kazakh steppes, close to a top-secret “Zone” where Soviet nuclear experiments were carried out. He tells of his precocious musical talents on the dombra [lute-like folk instrument] and the violin, and his equally precocious love for his neighbour Aisulu. Chillingly, he recalls a fateful day when, during a school outing to the “Zone”, he waded into a radioactive lake to impress his classmates. Did the poisonous waters stunt his growth or was some other-worldly spell cast on him?

I suppose Hamid Ismailov’s novella might be regarded as a work of “magical realism”. I would prefer to describe it as a modern-day fable or myth. For what is mythology, if not an attempt to describe and explain the world through stories and symbols? In this case, Ismailov conjures up images of terrible beauty, by means of which he evokes daily life in the Kazakh steppes at the height of the Cold War. Andrew Bromfield's sensitive translation from the original Russian retains a poetic feel to it, as if the prose were permeated with the strains of Yerzhan’s dombra.

A haunting coming-of-age novel about a boy who does not come of age, this is my favourite amongst the Peirene Press publications I have had the pleasure to read.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2018/09/hamid-ismailovs-dead-lake.html ( )

Via the framing device of a tale told on a long train journey across Kazakhstan, The Dead Lake tells the story of Yerzhan, a virtuoso violinist raised on the steppes whose body has been perpetually stunted thanks to the repeated nuclear testing carried out by the U.S.S.R. near his childhood home. Hamid Ismailov's novella reads like a folk tale, and his conjuring up of the rhythm of life in the vast grasslands of central Asia, with its continuities stretching across centuries, was for me one of the most pleasurable parts of The Dead Lake. The other was his framing of the nuclear testing as a nameless, mythical horror—inexplicable events whose full ramifications are clearly not understood by Yerzhan and his family at the time.

I never found myself warming to any of the characters, though, and particularly not the central character, Yerzhan. His fits of angry, jealous possessiveness towards his childhood sweetheart, Aisulu, were offputting, especially in a work which otherwise concentrates more on allegory than emotion. ( )

I came to this book having listened to a documentary about the Soviet nuclear testing site in Khazakhstan and the long lasting legacy of that.

The story is of young man of 27, Yerzhan, who looks to all the world like a 12 year old boy and his childhood on the steppe with a tiny and remote two family community. They live in close proximity to the Zone, the testing site (one character works there), the periodic 'earthquakes' terrify Yerzhan and the many references to a world war provide a sense of apocalypse. One day he and his schoolmates are taken on a tour of the facility by the father of his neighbour and love. On their return they stop at the Dead Lake where Yerzhan steps into the radioactive water. The effects are not immediately obvious, but he stops growing and becomes increasingly desperate as the children around grow bigger.

Aside the darkness and sense of doom that pervades the book, what is striking is the description of the steppe as a landscape and as a home, which adds to the other worldly feel of the story.

Ismailov handles an appalling topic with great skill and leaves you with a powerful impression within this short novella. ( )

Una evocadora parábola sobre las secuelas de la guerra fría en las remotas regiones de la antigua Unión Soviética. ( )