The Monkey Link: A Pilgrimage Novel

by Andrei Bitov

Traversing through the former Soviet Union in the waning days of the Empire, a poet philosophizes on humankind's place in the world with two companions, a sober scientist and a drunken landscape painter.

Genres: Fiction, Russian Literature, Russia

373 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1994

About the author

Andrei Georgiyevich Bitov is the author of Pushkin House, Captive of the Caucasus, and The Monkey Link, among other works. He is a cofounder of the Russian PEN club and has received numerous awards and honors, including being named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. He lives in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

With this book, Bitov completes the hybridization of fiction and essay forms that he began in Pushking House, creating a creature every bit as weird, beautiful, and captivating as that hideous little Shakespeare-bird on the book's cover. To say that The Monkey Link goes "beyond" fiction is as wrong as saying that a fish goes beyond a lobster, or a man beyond a monkey: what the book does is use the lean conventions of essays to get rid of much of the usual fictional scaffolding, evolving a form as flexible and penetrating as a length of fiber-optic tubing. Strangely enough, Bitov's unwillingness to think (in the book at least) about the fictiveness of what he's writing lets him refocus his energy on detailing, digression, and observation: on the form and flow of his narrator's observations. I think it was Minsky (or Nabokov, or someone) who said that Russians repeated western genres, but repeated them "wrong," and that this was why their books were so crammed with genius (kind of like the "Wrong Olympics" that my uncle and I wanted to put on this summer, wherein medals would be awarded depending on how incorrectly competitors performed their events. I still like this idea). Bitov is strongly in the tradition of Russian wrongness, thank god, but in pursuing his intuitions with complete conviction he makes a "Booke" in the tradition of Burton or Melville: a pocket ecology made up of interlocking, structurally reflective environments, which, plugged into a patient reader's attention, breath like lungs and beat like hearts. In case you can't tell, I'm pretty amazed by it all. Well, it's amazing.

[Robert Wechsler]

I was very taken with the first of the three “tales” that constitute this unusual book. Everything worked for me: the quality of the prose, the voice of the narrator, the philosophizing, the ornithologizing. It’s a wonderful, original piece of intellectual entertainment.

I was not as much taken with the second “tale,” especially with the dialogue between apparently the same narrator and this annoying man he comes across and attaches himself to. I found it interesting enough to read, but got little out of it. As for the third and longest of the “tales,” I couldn’t get too far into it. Nothing about this more satirical piece appealed to me (or I just didn't get it), and the joys of the first “tale” no longer made me believe I would find the same joys here. But I highly recommend the first “tale.”

[Jimmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The spiritual meaning of a scientific discovery lies not in broadening our sphere of knowledge but in overcoming its narrowness.

The first section--Birds (Catechesis)--was so good. Full of philosophy and mystery, creating a world in which ideas seemed just out of reach and still open-ended. I loved how the paradisiacal setting itself could not exist in real life, but was an idea of a place, a place that defined itself by how it acted on the people there. The writing was fantastic and weird.

There is a happy regularity in the fact that the truth recedes as you draw near to it, and if you are really dying to get at it, you will have to content yourself with assorted litter picked up along the road. [...] How rapidly we come to know the non-essential! The essential, even now, is almost as remote and as close as it ever was. p. 18

So what happened after that? Maybe the author drew too close to the truth, and was left with only assorted litter to pick up? Because it started reading like pages of environmentalist drivel. His agenda was driving his writing, and what came out was crap. The novel lost all sense of being a novel, characters popped up out of nowhere and receded again, the action devolved into meta-meta-meta nonsense, many scenes didn't even have a setting, and my eyes just glazed over at pages and pages of dialogue concerning the place of nature and man and art. It made me wonder if he wrote the first section and saw that it was good... then decided "I've got to make this into a book" so he extended it beyond its natural boundaries (which itself is interesting since the first part is partially about boundary lines).

Such a pity. This was definitely 5 stars in the first 60 pages. Afterwards, it was hardly readable. I stopped around page 256. I usually don't rate or review things I didn't finish, but this seemed so close.

[Teijo Paananen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Merkillinen romaani. Kulkee pitkin absurdistanilaista rantaa surrealistinen sadeviitta päällänsä. Matkantekoromaaniksi sanotaan, päänsisäisesti varmasti. Ehkä tämä on myös satirisoitua jälkikirjopesua Neuvostoliiton ajoista, mielettömästä Afganistanin sodasta (kirja ilmestynyt 1993). Ja keitä apinat ovatkaan, miksi heitä odottaa? Kukin tulkitkoon omalla kulmallaan, on varmaan kirjailijankin ajatus.

Aika raskas lukukokemuksena, piti pinnistellä, että sai kahlattua loppuun. Mutta joku merkillinen lanka piti kuitenkin kirjan kourassa.

Bitov näkyy kuolleen viime vuoden joulukuussa. Inttövepsistä löytyi niukasti suomeksi tietoa tästä kirjailijasta.
(Luin kirjan kyllä suomeksi, ei vain löytynyt tältä alustalta suomenkielistä versiota.)

[elderfoil...the whatever champion]

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