Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire

by José Manuel Prieto, Thomas Christensen, Carol Christensen (Translation)

Now in paperback, Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire was acclaimed by The Hartford Courant as "a thrilling discovery ... a reversal of the letters [of] Saul Bellow's Herzog ... [with] a Nabokovian delight in words and texts." J. is a smuggler living in Russia, making his living fencing the flotsam of communism's collapse. In Istanbul he takes a commission to trap an endangered Russian butterfly and decides to use it as an opportunity to smuggle V., his Russian lover who has no papers, back into her homeland. In the port of Odessa, she disappears, and J. continues alone to a small village on the Black Sea. Letters from V. begin to arrive, and as J. hunts the butterfly, he seeks a way to lure V. back into his life. Equal parts bittersweet love story, international intrigue, and one man's quest to write the perfect love letter, Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, wrote The Tennessean, is "an amazing jewel of a story ... that winks with wit [and] wears its astonishing craftsmanship lightly." "An aesthetically blissful reading experience ... Nabokov's spirit, alive and kind, has touched [Prieto] with its butterfly wings." -- Aleksandar Hemon, The Village Voice Literary Supplement "...Nocturnal Butterflies is an impressive performance by a writer whose gifts are clearly abundant." -- Richard Bernstein, The New York Times "A beautiful, lavish, seedy, poetic, and magical book.... Pure pleasure for the literary mind." -- Chris Kridler, The Baltimore Sun

Genres: Fiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Abigail · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to write a review of this book without being paralyzed by the fact that my writing, and that of most other humans, is so inferior to Prieto's that effectively describing the astonishing beauty of this novel is all but impossible. The prose is almost unbearably good. I would have to stop every few paragraphs--sometimes every few sentences--to let my plodding mind absorb the words just read.

It is so so good. Please read it as soon as possible.

[Oana Dediu · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was a real letdown. I was expecting a gripping story about love and post-Soviet life, but instead, I got a confusing mess of overly poetic writing that just didn't make sense.
The main character, chasing butterflies and some vague love story, felt flat and hard to care about.
The story jumped all over the place, and the use of 447 brackets made it even more annoying to read.
The big, flowery descriptions left me lost, and I kept wondering, what was the point of it? Even the cool Russian settings couldn't save it.
It felt slow, stuck-up, and I barely got through it, feeling totally disconnected.

[Sam Wischnewsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great usage of late twentieth century science in imagery and metaphor.

[Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

After enjoying the insane brilliance of Rex: A Novel, I got this earlier novel from the library. (It's his second book, but the first to be translated. Rex is his third, but translated into English second; Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia is his first, translated third. I think?) Prieto is a Cuban writer, now living in New York City, but these three novels (Esther Allen, who translated the other two, refers to them as a trilogy) stem from the decade-plus he spent in Russia. So take your Russian heavyweights, mix with Latin American aesthetics (more Borges than García Márquez), and add in some cosmopolitan postmodernism (Nabokov above all).... it seems unlikely, but it works.

Nocturnal Butterflies doesn't work as well as Rex, though. It's an epistolary novel, nominally consisting of the drafts of seven letters from J., a Cuban smuggling Russian goods to the West, to V., a woman he has met in Istanbul, where he was meeting a Swede to arrange an expedition to the Caucasus to find a rare butterfly. J. is in Livadia, on the Black Sea, and expected V. to join him there, but she only sends letters instead. We read only J.'s drafts (or maybe they're not his drafts—they're narratives, structured according to the intervals between incoming letters, but they're not really addressed to anyone). J. reads not only V.'s letters but piles and piles of books of great letters from history—Russian authors, Abelard and Héloïse, Paul's epistles, you name it. And that's where the book disappoints, because while J.'s character unpeels itself from a noble and scholarly butterfly-hunter to a wannabe lover/smuggler/adventurer—and that's reflected in the prose, which gets more entertaining as the book goes on—what I also wanted, after reading Rex, was for that prose to be so suffused in J.'s epistolary models that the reader couldn't be quite sure of even reading J.'s story any more, rather than some other letter-writer whose consciousness had leaked in.

It does that a bit, but not enough. Perhaps the translators aren't quite as skilled as Esther Allen? Nocturnal Butterflies starts off slowly and the pomo pyrotechnics don't really get going until halfway through. And even then they seem muted, subtle—and I don't think subtle is Prieto's thing.

If you liked Rex, you'll like this book—but don't expect to like it as much.

[Luke Franklin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prieto's reverse-epistolary novel is such an homage to Nabokov, it's almost hard for it to be it's own self, which I suppose is appropriate. This is no two-bit I've-read-Pale-Fire-and-so-can-I, but really a masterful bit of stylized prose, mulling over memory, borders, (erotic) love, and butterflies (I mean, I mentioned Vladimir Vladimirovich, right? Oh, and there's a bookseller by that same name, and one Sirin is the author of a lepidoptery guide in the book...). Though brilliant and admirable, failed to ever catch a spark in mine eye, lacking that elusive something-or-another that makes the heavily referential, erudite, and multilingual prose something more than a puzzle to appreciate (and at times, slog through), but, you know, a great novel. And I don't know if it's an issue resulting from the Spanish to English translation, or what, but there's weird stuff going on with the renderings of Russian in the book. Like a lot of Cyrillic "B/b"s that are written as Latin "B/b"s rather than "V/v"s. And other weird shit.