Wunderkind Erjan

by Hamid Ismailov

Durch die Weite der Steppe Kasachstans fährt ratternd ein Zug. In ihm begegnen sich ein Reisender und Erjan, das Wunderkind. Der Knabe spielt mitten in dieser vom Zug durchquerten Einöde so virtuos auf seiner Violine, dass nicht nur dem Erzähler Hören und Sagen vergeht. Doch die Musik bleibt nicht das einzige Wunder. Denn der Junge, der aussieht wie zehn oder zwölf, ist in Wahrheit bereits ein Mann von 27 Jahren; als Kind tauchte er allen Warnungen zum Trotz in einen nuklear verseuchten See. Hamid Ismailov versetzt damit das Blechtrommel-Motiv des Immer-Kind-Bleibenden in die Einöde des von 486 Atombombentests verseuchten Kasachstan und gibt ihm eine herbe Intensität von tiefer Schönheit. Zwei Welten prallen darin aufeinander: die Weite und Einsamkeit der Steppe Kasachstans und die moderne Welt außerhalb davon – der Zug, der diese wie stehen gebliebene Welt täglich durchfährt, die Atomtests, die wie eine unsichtbare Macht die Natur und die Menschen verändern, die Musik, die einen anderen Rhythmus in Yerzhans Leben bringt.

Genres: Fiction, Kazakhstan, Russia, Historical Fiction, Asia, Novella, Literary Fiction

152 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2014

Reviews

[Ajeje Brazov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il periodo che va dalla fine della Seconda Guerra Mondiale alla caduta del Muro di Berlino, é denominato: Guerra Fredda. Un lungo periodo dove le due superpotenze: USA e URSS si esaltano a far vedere chi ce l'ha più grosso. Sì, fanno a gara a chi fa l'esplosione nucleare più mastodontica, più potente, più devastastrice, più annichilente.
Ed é in questo periodo che si incentra questo prezioso libricino: una fiaba moderna, dove un ragazzo di nome Erzan conoscerà le ire nella Natura, quando essa é soggetta alle nefandezze umane. Ambientato in un piccolo paese sperduto nella Russia, dove il freddo invernale s'incontra con le leggende del foklore locale e dove il tutto é scandito dalle esplosioni degli ordigni atomici e dove le vite vengono inesorabimente troncate.
Il problema é che il Muro di Berlino é caduto da tempo, ma il pericolo apocalittico del nucleare non é svanito con esso, anzi...
Scrittura molto poetica, ricca di sfumature descrittive e di rimandi al folklore!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23XYj...

[Come Musica · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Ci si può liberare della propria anima nel crescere… ?”

“Ogni opera, incluso questo racconto, è un calco della vita che eternamente fluisce. Ogni creazione è come Eržan, cristallizzata nel suo sviluppo e fissata nella narrazione.”

[Ratko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Кратка, помало бајковита прича о дечаку Ержану који одраста у казахстанској степи, близу "Зоне" тј. места где се тестира совјетско нуклеарно наоружање (иако није именовано, аутор мисли на регион Семипалатинска, где се то заиста дешавало).
Због последица радијације, Ержан ће остати успореног и недовољног раста, а као контраст се даје развој његове љубави из детињства у прелепу девојку.
Тема је важна и има изузетно лепих описа казашке природе, као и појединих фолклорних елемената, но није ми баш ремек-дело.
4-

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story told during a train journey thorough the vast steppes of Kazakhstan by a violinist who relates his life in a small village near a nuclear test site simply referred to as The Zone, that had dramatic consequences in his life. Hamid Ismailov mentions that for forty years, during the cold war, in that populated region, the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site conducted nuclear explosions both atmospheric and underground. As a result, the twenty-seven-year-old Yerzhan’s growth was affected and he looked like a little boy.

The novella is centered in the destiny of two families with a similar past, tied together by circumstances that we learn as the story unfolds. Yerzhan, a normal looking boy, shows incredible musical talent at an early age. His grandfather teaches him to play the lute-like dombra, and his uncle gives him a violin and encourages him to take lessons. They both travel to a neighboring town where Petko, a Bulgarian violinist who had studied at the Moscow Conservatory (with the legendary David Oistrakh), becomes his teacher.

When uncle Shaken proclaims that his talented nephew will go to the conservatory, Yerzhan is terrified. Did they want to conserve him? “Like fruit in a jam and cucumbers in brine?” At seven he entered school, which meant he had to walk every day eight kilometers from his town and back. During a trip with his class they visited The Zone and stopped at The Dead Lake. Because of its calm waters, the children thought it looked like a fairy-tale lake, but they were strictly forbidden to drink the water or even touch it. Yerzhan took his clothes off and entered the lake, to the astonished eyes of his classmates.

The narrator goes back and forth between Yerzhan’s story and the train ride, describing the long grassland when his companion is asleep. The trembling earth as an ominous presence, leads always to The Zone, and the central place it holds in the village, its people and Yerzhan’s fate.

[Pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

En su largo viaje de cuatro días a través de la estepa de Kazajstán, el narrador conoce a Yerzhán un niño (¿un niño?) que hace prodigios con el violín, y luego de algunas aclaraciones, se comienza a conocer su historia.
En el apeadero del ferrocarril de Kara-Shagán, viven en dos casas aledañas a la estación, dos familias campesinas que se ocupan de los movimientos del tren según las instrucciones que reciben. Las dos familias actúan como una sola, y todos son tíos y abuelos. En ese hogar, en circunstancias prodigiosas nace Yerzhán. Y conoceremos su historia y peripecias, así como la de su familia ampliada, tan cerca de ese lugar temido y misterioso llamado “la zona”, donde al parecer se efectúan pruebas nucleares, hecho que excede la capacidad de comprensión de los campesinos. Y la conoceremos, en parte, a través de lo que Yerzhán le cuenta al narrador y por otra parte a las intuiciones y sueños del narrador, que completará la historia.
Una muy buena novela, muy bien narrada, ágil y profunda, de este autor, para mí hasta ahora desconocido. La novela se publicó en inglés como "The dead lake".
Hamid Ismailov (1954) nació en Kirguistán, aunque vivió toda su infancia y juventud en Uzbekistán. Hasta 1991, ambos países, así como Kazajstán, eran estados de la Unión Soviética.

[Ends of the Word · Rating 5 out of 5]

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/20...

[César Carranza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este libro fue una muy buena sorpresa, no conocía al autor, pero sin duda leería más de sus escritos. La historia va de la narración que un joven con un increíble talento para tocar el violín cuenta de si mismo. Como crece en la estación en medio de la estepa, tiene ese aire que tienen los libros de la región, una poder evocativo muy grande, combinado con la magia y el espíritu de la extensión, las historias transmitidas de su familia, son como se explica el mundo. Se entiende que cerca de allí se realizaban pruebas nucleares, los campesinos no tienen una manera de entender lo que sucede, se mezcla la modernidad con su espíritu, con su manera de entender el mundo.

Es un libro buenísimo, bastante corto y sencillo de leer, me gustó mucho, mucho de este libro me recordó al libro de Dzhan de Platónov, lo cual es excelente.

[Lauren]

"'Does anything make any sense?' And his question seemed to be addressed not to me, but to this train galloping across the steppe, to this blazing steppe spread out across the earth, to this earth, adrift between light and darkness, to this darkness …"

▪️ THE DEAD LAKE by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield, 2011/2014 from Peirene Press @peirenepress

For over 40 years, the Soviet Union conducted nuclear tests in northeast Kazakhstan at a site called "The Polygon" or Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (SNTS).

The Kazakh people initially welcomed the industry and the notice of the central government, and were told to expect "earthquakes"... Of course, these were not earthquakes, but 468 nuclear explosions over the decades, one of these the blast that created the crater Lake Chagan - the Dead Lake - that is still highly radioactive.

This historical backdrop is the setting for Ismailov's novella THE DEAD LAKE, about an unnamed narrator who meets a seemingly wunderkind violinist on a Kazakh train, only to learn that this "boy" Yerzhan is actually a 27-year old man in a pre-pubescent body, and the story that lead him to this train.

With many magical flourishes - I saw this described as a "Cold War fairy tale" - this is also rooted in the very real history of people who were unknowingly used as test subjects; whose lives, lands, and health of future generations were sacrificed for "progress" in an attempt to win the Cold War.

The novella itself was 3-star territory for me, but the history it lead me to learn more about will remain long after reading.

Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek writer living in exile in the UK, and has several works available in English translation from both Russian and Uzbek. The Dead Lake appears to be one of his lesser works, but I was very intrigued by the back story so it was the first one I picked up by him. I continued to dig and found a number of sources online about The Polygon and Lake Chagan, including a short VICE documentary on YouTube that visits the region and talks with several inhabitants of the Zone.

#RTW21 📍 Kazakhstan (setting)

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Il libro "La fiaba nucleare dell'uomo bambino" dello scrittore uzbeko Hamid Ismailov non è solo un racconto il cui realismo si tinge del mito e dei tratti onirici tipici delle fiabe; non è solo una porta aperta sull'affascinante quotidianità di una cultura poco conosciuta; è anche e soprattutto il racconto della Storia e dei suoi effetti sulla gente comune, le cui tremende conseguenze sono visibili ancora oggi. Grazie Utopia Editore per questa meraviglia letteraria che ci permette di stupirci, conoscere e sapere ✨📚

[Alisea Thenea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sovietsky Kazachstan počas studenej vojny, step, jadrové experimenty, neľahký život popreplietaný hudbou, realita popretkávana snom. Útly príbeh prerozprávaný vo vlaku otvára veľa otázok a aj tak dostatočne uspokojuje čitateľa.
Ďalšia kniha od inaque, ktorá ma potešila.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hamid Ismailov’s The Dead Lake is the first in Peirene's Coming-of-Age: Towards Identity series. It was first published in Russia in 2011, and as with all of the Peirene titles, this is its first translation into English. Andrew Bromfield has done a marvellous job in this respect, and it goes without saying that the book itself is beautiful.

The author’s own life is worth mentioning in this review. Hamid Ismailov was born in Kyrgyzstan, and moved to Uzbekistan when he was a young man. In 1994, he was forced to move to the United Kingdom due to his ‘unacceptable democratic tendencies’. Whilst his work has been translated into many European languages – Spanish, French and German among them – it is still banned in Uzbekistan to this day.

The Dead Lake, says its blurb, is ‘a haunting tale about the environmental legacy of the Cold War’. The novella has received high praise indeed; the Literary Review says that the author ‘has the capacity of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque realization of history on the ground’. Meike Ziervogel, the owner of Peirene Press, likens the novella to a Grimm’s fairytale due to the way in which the story ‘transforms an innermost fear into an outward reality’.

Its premise is absolutely stunning, and is at once both clever and creative: “Yerzhan grows up in a remote part of Soviet Kazakhstan where atomic weapons are tested. As a young boy he falls in love with the neighbour’s daughter and one evening, to impress her, he dives into a forbidden lake. The radioactive water changes Yerzhan. He will never grow into a man.”

The Dead Lake begins with a note from the narrator, which denotes the moment at which he met our protagonist, Yerzhan, upon a train. He tells his tale to the narrator, who remains unnamed throughout, and who punctuates it with his own feedback, recollections and imagined ending: ‘The way Yerzhan told me about his life was like this road of ours, without any discernible bends or backtracking’.

The story then centres upon Yerzhan himself, beginning with his uncertain birth: ‘Yerzhan was born at the Kara-Shagan way station of the East Kazakhstan Railway… The column for “Father” in his birth certificate had remained blank, except for a thick stroke of the pen’. His mother attests that his conception came as a surprise after she, ‘more dead than alive’, made her way into the deserted steppe to follow her silk scarf after it had blown away. Here, she states that she came face to face with ‘a creature who looked like an alien from another planet, wearing a spacesuit’. Since a cruel beating from her own father which was sustained after her pregnancy began to show, she has not spoken a single word.

Only two families live in the small way station named Kara-Shagan, and the sense of place and the desolation which Ismailov creates from the outset is strong. The use of local words, folktales and songs adds to this too, and all of the aforementioned elements help to shape both the culture of the characters and their situation in an underpopulated part of their country. The setting is presented as a character in itself at times, and this is a wonderful tool with which to demonstrate its vital importance to those who live within it.

As with all of Peirene’s titles, The Dead Lake is filled to the brim with intrigue from the very beginning. Yerzhan has been well crafted, and his childish delight in particular has been well translated to the page. When hearing his violin being played by a Bulgarian maestro of sorts, Ismailov describes the way in which: ‘the sound was so pure… even a blind man would have seen the blue sky, the dance of the pure air, the clear sunlight, the snow white clouds, the joyful birds’.

On a far darker note, the overriding fear of atomic bombs and the looming of a third world war gives the story an almost apocalyptic feel: ‘We are travellers, and the sky above us is full of enemy planes’. The Dead Lake is quite unlike anything which I have read to date. Ismailov presents a most interesting glimpse into a culture which is entirely different to ours. The novella is absorbing, and the entirety is so powerful, particularly with regard to its ending.

[Antonomasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dec 2014.
The joy of the steppe, the joy of music and the joy of childhood always coexisted in Yerzhan with the anticipation of that inescapable, terrible, abominable thing that came as a rumbling and a trembling, and then a swirling , sweeping tornado from the Zone.

Two families still living the ways of ancient Kazakh culture coexist alongside Soviet nuclear testing, one son a musical prodigy; I found the themes and the telling enthralling, and this is by far the best of the Peirene novellas I've read.

The others, to one extent or another, had that bloodless brittleness of style characteristic of much Eng lang literary fiction, and although they are pretty good, took many times longer to read than the concept "two hour books to be devoured in a single sitting" which is one of the press's ad straplines. By contrast, The Dead Lake feels expansive and relaxed. Dissident authors have acquired, among some readers, a reputation for being dreary (Ismailov's work is banned in Uzbekistan; he now works for the BBC World Service) but this was like being told a fascinating secret.

Or rather a traveller's tale from a place few Brits ever go. This takes the form of a nested narrative, the narrator meeting the violinist Yerzhan as he sells local ayran, a yoghurt drink, on his train. Yerzhan still looks like a twelve year old boy although he is 27... he stopped growing and ageing after he walked into a lake near the nuclear testing facility.

But the book is not only the story of that, it is of his life from birth. Modernity is always present in a way, for he lives with his grandfather who is the guard of a rural railway point, but the grandmothers, as their predecessors must have done for thousands of years, groom children for lice and tell stories of Central Asian folklore, such as Gesar. Horses are an essential part of every day life. Events such as nuclear explosions are framed in a subtly mythological way, which gives the feeling of a folkloric explanation, yet does not explicitly exclude the scientific.
nightmares of little silver planes suddenly turning into iron eagles and diving at him as if he were a fox cub, running across the steppe, unable to find a burrow or any kind of refuge from the rumbling, or the darkening sky, or the new sun rising in the black sky, or the mushroom

The story of Yerzhan's musical genius also addresses in detail a wondering I had (mentioned in this review of The Kalevala) about how things may have been for those of exceptional talent in both ancient and remote rural communities, and modern less-developed areas. Of his own accord, as little more than a toddler, he picks up his grandfather's dombra and copies what he's heard. His talent doesn't preclude his later being a fan of pop stars like 'Red Elvis' Dean Reed, whom he only hears about via his violin teacher, a dodgy Bulgarian who's been exiled to a building site some miles distant.

The account of how cut off from his peers he feels due to his failure to grow was beautifully told and lump-in-the-throat sad.

The final chapter includes a metafictional playing with different endings, but it never feels forced. It is simply the narrator wondering about gaps in Yerzhan's story (told "like a traditional steppe bard"), just as you might speculate about an interesting person you'd met briefly.

There are, if you wish, allegories evidently to be found here - but if you like a folk-influenced story that does not spare the grit, this is a wonderful book on its own merits.

[Eleonora · Rating 4 out of 5]

L’incontro con un bambino violinista prodigio e dall’ironia amara, che dice di essere in realtà un adulto di 27 anni, srotola una storia intensa e appassionante che evade dalle carrozze di un treno a lunga percorrenza delle steppe kazake. Sul tremore delle esplosioni nucleari che sconquassano il terreno, uccidono il bestiame e scatenano uragani nella steppa, si intrecciano le relazioni grottesche e senza filtri e i segreti di una grande famiglia centroasiatica e dei suoi vicini. Erzhan, l’uomo bambino, racconta la sua dolorosa storia che ha i tratti fiabeschi e apocalittici insieme della penna di Čyngyz Ajtmatov, ma che è anche una denuncia alle centinaia di esplosioni nucleari che dal Dopoguerra al 1989 sono state fatte brillare nel poligono di Semipalatinsk, chiamato da Erzhan la Zona, recintata e minacciosa.

Un libro solo in apparenza breve e semplice, ma che ha il profumo dell’universale. Amori celati, la noia del lavoro in una piccola stazione ferroviaria di transito, l’infanzia che si sgretola in adolescenza, grandi segreti e magie forse prodotte dall’immaginario del tengrismo, forse da un’immersione in un lago radioattivo, cambieranno per sempre la vita di Erzhan.

Una lettura evocativa e appassionante. Hamid Ismailov è uno scrittore uzbeco nato nel 1954 nell’odierno Kirghizistan, emigrato nel Regno Unito. Le sue opere, di forte critica al regime di Islom Karimov e alle sue violazioni di diritti umani, sono tutt’ora bandite nell’Uzbekistan contemporaneo e tradotte in molte lingue. Questo è il suo primo libro tradotto dal russo in italiano, per Utopia.

https://www.painderoute.it/libri-sull...

[Wiebke (1book1review) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an impressive tale of a young boy and his family living next to the railway station and a nuclear bomb testing area.
I was drawn in by the narration, trying to solve the mystery of the young man's history and the style of the narration.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ominous and timely, when you think about our own man-who-never-grew-up's plans to destroy our water.

[ولاء شكري · Rating 3 out of 5]

بينما يموت الرجال في الحرب،
وتبكي النساء،
تستمر الحرب بلا توقف.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

An astonishing tale tinged with sadness,recounted by Yerzhan to a stranger on a train journey, that is in part imagined by the listener.

Yerzhan grows up at a railway siding, where two families live, their lives more intertwined than appears on the surface. Every so often the ground shakes, another sun rises and everything is still. Then there is the Zone, that area where it is so silent, his ears ring.

Yerzhan learns the violin and is bright, but the real light in his life is Aisula, a light that gradually fades upon his reaching the age of 12, when he walks into the forbidden Dead Lake to impress her and from that day stops growing, destined to watch her pass him.

"And the thing that loomed over him like a visceral fear could happen in the middle of the sweltering summer, when sheep suddenly started bleating as if they were under the knife and went dashing in all directions, cows dug their horns into the ground and the donkey squealed and rolled around in the dust...And a slight rumble would run through the ground, Yerzhan's legs would start trembling,and then his whole body, and the fear would rise up from his shaking knees to his stomach and freeze there in a heavy ache, until the sky cracked over his head and shattered into pieces, crushing him completely, reducing him to dust, to sand, to scraps of grass and wool. And the black whirlwind hurtled past above him with a wild howl."

Full review here at Word by Word.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an astonishing novella which at 122 pages is full of lyricism and poetry, traditional tales, music and the modern day horror of nuclear testing. An intro tells the reader that from 1949 to 1989 468 nuclear explosions were tested in a test site in the Kazakh steppes. This story tells of Yerzhan a 27 year old man who looks like a 12 year old boy whom the narrator meets on a train selling yoghurt and playing his violin. He then tells the story of his and his families exposure to nuclear radiation. Part folk tale with magical elements it has a love story within it and a picture of the traditions of the Steppes. An excellent read giving a snapshot of a region the size of Europe devastated by nuclear testing. Yerzhan is a interesting hero who like Oscar in The Tin Drum is a man in the body of a child who in a chilling scene has bathed in the Dead Lake of the title, his love interest Aisulu who lives with the family next to his in two isolated huts on the side of the remote railway is also affected. I would recommend this book and given its length I am tempted to read it again before it goes back to the library.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hauntingly beautiful writing, even when reporting the horrific.
VERDICT: Dramatic short novel haunting in its juxtaposition of beauty and sadness.

My full review is here:
https://wordsandpeace.com/2015/03/30/...

[Juan · Rating 2 out of 5]

No me resulta sencillo adaptarme a las historias escritas por autores africanos (Achebe) de oriente medio (Uzbekistán, Kazajistán, etc.) o India y el lejano oriente (Naipaul). No siguen los ritmos narrativos occidentales a los que estoy acostumbrado y no sé disfrutarlos como quizás podría hacerlo. Esperé hasta el final pero su historia no me sedujo. Eso sí, descubrí al virtuoso violinista Leonid Kogan (https://youtu.be/GGdGXuVk-7E).

[MsElisaB · Rating 3 out of 5]

KAZAKISTAN

Descrizione di un'epoca della storia kazaka, attraverso la voce di un bambino; la crudezza della povertà e della Guerra Fredda edulcorata e smussata dal tono fiabesco e dallo sguardo infantile. Racconto ricco di folklore, riesce a trasmettere la versione più autentica dell'anima della steppa. Rivisitazione precisa di una vicenda tuttora abbastanza oscura, che solo dopo decenni sta venendo a galla attraverso inchieste e documentazioni desecretate.

L'elemento di realismo magico, dosato con criterio, bilancia la grande ombra degli esperimenti nucleari, che appaiono agli occhi di Eržan più misteriosi e sovrannaturali delle leggende della tradizione popolare, nelle quali viene immerso durante la sua infanzia, ed i cui racconti sfumano, alle volte, nella realtà.

La crescita del protagonista fluisce e scorre insieme alle vicende della sua famiglia allargata, il cui nucleo è una sorta di metonimia per l'intera varietà della popolazione, dando, così, spazio a molte tipologie umane, tutte indistintamente trattate con molta partecipazione. La gravità degli eventi non offusca mai l'umanità che costella questo breve romanzo in ogni sua parte.

[Elisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro strano, quasi alieno, che mi ha portato nella steppa Kazaka, tra fiabe nucleari, spazi sconfinati, uomini, vecchi, bambini e racconti narrati nella cuccetta di un treno che corre nella notte.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Velmi příjmená jednohubka. Trochu mě mrzí, že ten konec nebyl úplně uzavřený, ale i tak mě to chytlo a nepustilo.

[Gio Pervinca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Non è assolutamente un brutto libro; semplicemente non è il mio genere. La scrittura non mi ha convinta.
La storia, invece, è davvero potente.

[Massimiliano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Siamo di fronte a un romanzo breve che mescola denuncia storica e suggestioni poetiche. Ambientato nella steppa kazaka, racconta la vita di Eržan e della sua famiglia: un "uomo bambino" dal momento che smette di crescere dopo un contatto con le acque radioattive di un lago creato dai test nucleari sovietici.
Ho scelto di leggerlo proprio dopo un recente viaggio in Asia Centrale: la storia, anche drammatica, di quei luoghi ha fatto da ispirazione primaria.

La scrittura è lirica, ricca di simboli e contrasti: tradizione e modernità, innocenza e violenza, vita e potere. Questa scelta stilistica però, unita alla brevità dell’opera, mi ha reso difficile entrare in sintonia con i personaggi. Le figure restano più archetipi che persone, e il dramma di Eržan, pur tragico, appare filtrato da una distanza poetica che riduce l’impatto emotivo.

È un libro che colpisce per atmosfera e originalità, ma personalmente, avrei preferito maggiore profondità narrativa e meno astrazione.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I actively avoid a novel that is described as a modern fairy-tale, it is a good term to use while talking about The Dead Lake. The novella tells the story of Yerzhan growing up in the remote parts of Kazakhstan, in an area that the Soviets used for atomic weapons testing. As a young boy he tried to impress the neighbour’s daughter by diving into a forbidden lake. The lake was radioactive and diving into the water changed Yerzhan forever.

Diving into the dead lake means that Yerzhan will now never grow into a man, he is doomed to watch his love grow into a beautiful woman while he will forever be a prepubescent boy. The plot is very fairy-tale like and the reader has a front row seat into a struggle in masculinity. While never growing old may seem like a dream for some people, never reaching puberty would not be desirable. While re-reading Interview with the Vampire, I wanted this exact issue explored with Claudia. The idea that while Yerzhan may never physically age, time and experience means he grows and matures. His inner self is not reflected physically and he is doomed to be always treated like a child.

While the plot tells a fairy-tale like story, underneath all this there is something different happening. The Dead Lake is an exploration into the environmental impact of the cold war. Not just exploring the effects the Soviets had on Karakhstan but rather the impact both American and the USSR had on the world to demonstrate their power. I believe this novella was based on Lake Chagan, which the Soviets conducted nuclear tests on in 1965 and is still radioactive today. Around about 100 times more than the permitted level of radionuclides in drinking water.

This grim book deals with some hard hitting topics but credit to Hamid Ismailov for producing a beautiful novella. The writing in The Dead Lake is so lyrical and poetic it just flows off the page. I found myself captivated by the writing and completely sucked into the story. While it is no secret that I am a fan of Soviet and post-Soviet literature, there is something special about this novella. I love the idea of a bildungsroman where the protagonist is physically unable to truly come of age, I would like to read more novels like this.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/book-rev...

[Sue Kozlowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book as part of my quest to read a book written by an author from each of the 169 countries in the world. The author of this book grew up in Kazakhstan.

I read this book through twice. A little background and history will help the reader to understand this book better.
The story takes place in East Kazakhstan. This region occupies the easternmost part of Kazakhstan, along both sides of the Irtysh River and Lake Zaysan. The region borders Russia in the north and northeast and the People's Republic of China in the south and southeast.

This region was created by the merger of two Soviet-era oblasts (administrative divisions): the old (East Kazakhstan) Oblast and Semipalatinsk Oblast.

This is the first line of the preface of the book:
"Between 1949 and 1989 at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (SNTS), a total of 468 nuclear explosions were carried out, comprising 125 atmospheric and 343 underground blasts."

This was the primary testing venue for the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons and the tests were done with little regard for their effect on the local people or environment. The full impact of radiation exposure was hidden for many years by Soviet authorities and has only come to light since the test site closed in 1991.

The story is about a boy, Yerzhan, who grows up near a railway station in the middle of this desolate area, not far from the testing grounds. The men of the family work as station masters for the trains. Yerzhan becomes an excellent violin player. He also falls in love with his cousin Aisulu, who lives next door. No one specifically mentions the explosions that happen periodically. The blasts seem to suck up all of the air and then cause extreme winds and a blast that knocks all buildings and people to the ground. After an explosion, the families must stay inside their houses for days until the air clears. Yerzhan's life and dreams are filled with the terror of these explosions. He never knows when they are going to happen.

The author sets the tone of this book to be very desolate, cold, and monotonous. He often describes the harsh climate and lands of this region. The winters are extremely cold and windy on the steppes (grasslands). He writes, "The steppe appeared somber, just like the faces of the people. Leaden clouds swept across the sky without rain or snow."

[Elena Sala · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE DEAD LAKE (2011) is a hauntingly beautiful novella, part of Peirene Press’ Coming of Age series.

At the beginning, an unnamed traveller encounters Yerzhan, a 27 year-old man seemingly confined to the body of a 12 year old boy, selling yoghurt and playing the violin beautifully on the platform of a railway station. Fascinated by this prodigy, he invites him to join him on his train journey. Yerzhan accepts and then proceeds to share his account of growing up in a two-family railway “stop” on the steppes of Kazakhstan during the years of the Cold War.

This frightening story is set in the Kazakh steppes near the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (SNTS), the largest in the former Soviet territories. The landscape of Yerzhan's homeland, vast and underpopulated, were considered to be the ideal testing ground for the Soviet side of the nuclear arms race. The tremors and explosions that rock the “Zone” become a terrifying feature of daily life for the nearby residents.

As a background to the story, the novel's preface mentions briefly the detonation of 468 nuclear bombs in four decades of testing at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Soviet Kazakhstan, unleashing a total of 2,500 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb on the local population.

So this is the moving story of a young, gifted musician exposed to radiation. His dreams of the conservatoire are lost and also his planned future with his childhood sweetheart, ending up as a yoghurt vendor on the trains across the steppes. However, this stark summary does no justice to Ismailov's story. The lyrical descriptions of the steppes and the lives of the inhabitants are unforgettable. And the story is narrated as a sort of grim fairy tale, in a captivating, magical style.

It is a gripping, enraging novel, a must read, because radiation sickness continues to devastate people in the Semipalatinsk area to this day.

[Røbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a Zweig-like framing device, the story is told in the course of a train journey through Kazakhstan. The story involves a boy growing up in an isolated location close to a Soviet nuclear testing site, and the effect this has on him and his family, as they nevertheless continue with their lives (schooling, friendship, musical talent, farming). Tragedy strikes early in the boy's life after a dip in a toxic lake causes him to stop growing; meanwhile, by contrast, his uncle insists on the Soviet progress in "catching up and overtaking the Americans". His family, unaware of the toxic lake incident, each have differing perspectives on the muffled adulterous relations among the two neighbouring families, and their own causes and cures for his arrested development.

Sounds depressing? Well maybe, but the book is so rich in lush language that it is a quite beautiful story. It is steeped (or steppe-d perhaps) in the strong oral traditions of Central Asia, and local legends are woven in, as the characters attempt to make sense of events. Although it is far from my experience, Andrew Bromfield's translation vividly evokes the wide landscapes, wildlife, and characters of the region. Overall, a beautiful little book on the overlooked local lives affected by distant politics, a theme which bears examination throughout time.

[Clau MZ · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
Wer nie in der Steppe gelebt hat, wird schwer begreifen, wie man es dort, in dieser vollkommenen Einöde, aushalten kann; doch die, die seit eh und je da zu Hause sind, wissen, wie abwechslungsreich diese Steppe ist, wie vielfarbig fließend der Himmel über ihr, wie unstet und wechselhaft die Luft dazwischen, wie unendlich mannigfaltig ihre Flora, wie vielerlei Getier kreucht und fleucht. [...] Je älter Erjan wurde, desto mehr Unterschiede fielen ihm auf, wenn er zur Geigenstunde (...) unterwegs war; dieser Weg erschien ihm wie Musik, ebenso klangvoll und abwechslungsreich.