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missnicolerose's review
2.0
#readthworld challenge for Uzbekistan.
I have to be honest, I don't know nearly enough about Uzbek/central Asian history to get through this book. The writing is beautiful and the stories are lovely, but the amount of notes I had to follow and references I had to Google were countless. It doesn't help the sheer number if characters and the non-linear chronology from story to story...
I would love to beef of my knowledge of the history of this area and give it another try at a later date. Right now I'm just not cultured or patient enough to fully embrace The Railway...
I have to be honest, I don't know nearly enough about Uzbek/central Asian history to get through this book. The writing is beautiful and the stories are lovely, but the amount of notes I had to follow and references I had to Google were countless. It doesn't help the sheer number if characters and the non-linear chronology from story to story...
I would love to beef of my knowledge of the history of this area and give it another try at a later date. Right now I'm just not cultured or patient enough to fully embrace The Railway...
roenfoe's review
challenging
emotional
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.25
*Read for university*
For the first two thirds of this book, my feelings towards it were positive overall. However, the last third greatly sullied my experience with the narrative, characters, and cultural relevance of the work. It is not discussed enough that this work features (trigger warning) extensive child rape, child slavery, assault of mentally ill characters, murder, necrophilia, pedophilia, and other horrible acts of violence. I am not saying these topics have no place in literature; they are unfortunate realities of the world we live in, and thus they are fair game to be discussed and addressed in works of all kinds.
HOWEVER... my problem with these topics being so rife throughout this novel is that they seem to be purely included for shock value, especially when seen through the narrative structure. This novel takes a lot of hints from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, in that it has a non linear narrative structure that winds its way through the lives of those living in a town in Uzbekistan. The Railway also essentially steals the ending of OHYOS, but that is neither here nor there (:) The problem with this structure is that it does not have many instances of cause and effect following through to their logical conclusions. Therefore, we as the readers witness a horrible act of child rape, and then the POV cuts to a different character and it is never addressed again. I understand that there is an argument that this is to show the random cruelty of life on the steppe, but if that is the case, did we really need four separate instances of child rape to make that point? It feels gratuitous to me, and if there is ever anything you don't want to be gratuitous with in your novel, it is certainly that.
There were things I enjoyed about this work, but almost an equal number I didn't. Some of the anecdotes were beautiful folk-style tales, evoking sadness and тоска... but others were disgusting and featured repulsive depictions of mentally ill and disabled characters. While the nonlinear structure was interesting, OHYOS did it significantly better. The ending was underwhelming after 300 pages. I really wanted to like this book, but it did its best to convince me otherwise.
For the first two thirds of this book, my feelings towards it were positive overall. However, the last third greatly sullied my experience with the narrative, characters, and cultural relevance of the work. It is not discussed enough that this work features (trigger warning) extensive child rape, child slavery, assault of mentally ill characters, murder, necrophilia, pedophilia, and other horrible acts of violence. I am not saying these topics have no place in literature; they are unfortunate realities of the world we live in, and thus they are fair game to be discussed and addressed in works of all kinds.
HOWEVER... my problem with these topics being so rife throughout this novel is that they seem to be purely included for shock value, especially when seen through the narrative structure. This novel takes a lot of hints from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, in that it has a non linear narrative structure that winds its way through the lives of those living in a town in Uzbekistan. The Railway also essentially steals the ending of OHYOS, but that is neither here nor there (:) The problem with this structure is that it does not have many instances of cause and effect following through to their logical conclusions. Therefore, we as the readers witness a horrible act of child rape, and then the POV cuts to a different character and it is never addressed again. I understand that there is an argument that this is to show the random cruelty of life on the steppe, but if that is the case, did we really need four separate instances of child rape to make that point? It feels gratuitous to me, and if there is ever anything you don't want to be gratuitous with in your novel, it is certainly that.
There were things I enjoyed about this work, but almost an equal number I didn't. Some of the anecdotes were beautiful folk-style tales, evoking sadness and тоска... but others were disgusting and featured repulsive depictions of mentally ill and disabled characters. While the nonlinear structure was interesting, OHYOS did it significantly better. The ending was underwhelming after 300 pages. I really wanted to like this book, but it did its best to convince me otherwise.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Sexual assault, Rape, and Child death
hsquared's review
2.0
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. The novel takes place in Uzbekistan, and features a huge, diverse cast of characters, representatives from the many ethnic groups in the area. I found the first part to be funny and poignant with a meandering but engaging voice. Each of the characters has a nickname reflective of a defining characteristic, such as Opok-Lovely or Umarali-Moneybags, which definitely helped with remembering them (also useful is an appendix at the end of the book listing all the characters). Unfortunately, as the novel progressed, it got increasingly dark and violent, and the main story arc (if there was one) seemed to get lost in the wandering voice. I'm sure my unfamiliarity with the area also affected my ability to understand the nuances of the story.
serendipitysbooks's review against another edition
challenging
dark
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
The Railway is set in Uzbekistan between 1900 and 1980, in a small railway town called Gilas. The story unfolds like a collection of short stories. They are not in chronological order but move back and forward in time. There is a real diversity in the huge cast of characters travelling through or living in the town. Some are Muslims heading on a pilgrimage, others are being sent to a labour camp. Some have been forcibly relocated to Gilas while others are military or civil service personnel, stationed there for a time. The shifting timeline and large cast of characters made any overall plot hard to discern, but there were definitely some key themes. The harm done by the Soviet regime was a key one, often highlighted in a darkly humourous way - if you don’t laugh you’ll cry. The book had extensive footnotes with more information on culture, historical events, important people etc, which ensured I got more from the story than I would otherwise have done.
rebeccameyrink's review against another edition
challenging
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
This book was too ambitious. This is about a town of people in Uzbekistan that has a railway and it’s centre. The story jumps from character to character who’s loves all intersect.
The book does give you a list of characters but the list is 130 characters long which is overwhelming for a book with 330 pages. I felt like the book was trying to tell the story of everyone in the town and on top of that there were many footnotes of real life history.
I love stories that feature a large cast of intersecting stories but this book got lost in the details and didn’t have an overarching plot to pull it all together. Part way through the book I gave up flipping to the character list section and decided to give up on trying to figure out how the characters lives intersected with others.
There were some nice moments in the first third of the book and even though I couldn’t figure out how any character connected with any other character I was still enjoying the story but as the narrative moves on it becomes increasingly violent and I couldn’t find the reason these scenes were included.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pedophilia and Rape
sirin_tugbay's review
4.0
This one started out confusing (mostly because of the vast number of characters and the seemingly unrelated stories), but grew on me. It is probably harder to follow if you know less about Muslim cultures and Russian / Soviet culture, yet its a delightful(ly weird) book.
harryr's review against another edition
2.0
Having set myself the modest enough goal for 2010 of reading a few more books for the Read The World challenge than I did in 2009… I’m already behind schedule. We’re into March and I’ve only just finished my first. Ho-hum.
The Railway (translated by Robert Chandler) is my book from Uzbekistan. I was slightly peeved when I received the book to read in the author bio that Hamid Ismailov was actually born in Kirghizstan, but his Uzbek credentials appear to be otherwise impeccable. His parents were just working in Kirghizstan when he was born, at a time of course when both countries were part of the USSR anyway. In some ways it’s quite fitting for this novel, because it is a book full of a patchwork of different nationalities and ethnicities, and full of people moving from place to place, for traditional reasons like pilgrimage and trade; or as part of the army or civil service; or sent to labour camps; or forcibly relocated en masse by the government, like the ethnic Koreans from the far east of the USSR who were moved to Central Asia for some paranoid reason that presumably made sense to Stalin.
One of the reviews quoted on the cover says ‘imagine Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude on the empty plains of Central Asia’, and although it’s perhaps not quite so overtly magical as 100YoS, it is certainly of that ilk, full of strange happenings and grotesquerie. It also has many many characters, all with long Uzbek names — there’s an eight-page list at the back to help you keep track of them, although I can’t say it helped me much — and it shifts around in time and place in a way which, to be honest, just meant I was usually a bit confused. It almost would have been better if I’d read it as a book of short stories, I think, because it would have saved me that sense of being permanently unsure what was going on. I have a relatively high tolerance for non-linear narratives and that sort of thing, but I found it hard going. I didn’t help myself by the way I read it; rather too many long gaps between picking it up.
On the positive side, the world it conjures up is an interesting one: a traditional Central Asian culture rubbing up against Russia and the Soviet bureaucracy, an Islamic culture in a sometimes aggressively secular state, petty local politics in the middle of it. It was one of those books where I kind of thought that maybe, if I had read it in a different place or a different mood I might have really enjoyed it, because it certainly had interesting stuff going on and I can’t put my finger on why I didn’t enjoy it… but there you go.
The Railway (translated by Robert Chandler) is my book from Uzbekistan. I was slightly peeved when I received the book to read in the author bio that Hamid Ismailov was actually born in Kirghizstan, but his Uzbek credentials appear to be otherwise impeccable. His parents were just working in Kirghizstan when he was born, at a time of course when both countries were part of the USSR anyway. In some ways it’s quite fitting for this novel, because it is a book full of a patchwork of different nationalities and ethnicities, and full of people moving from place to place, for traditional reasons like pilgrimage and trade; or as part of the army or civil service; or sent to labour camps; or forcibly relocated en masse by the government, like the ethnic Koreans from the far east of the USSR who were moved to Central Asia for some paranoid reason that presumably made sense to Stalin.
One of the reviews quoted on the cover says ‘imagine Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude on the empty plains of Central Asia’, and although it’s perhaps not quite so overtly magical as 100YoS, it is certainly of that ilk, full of strange happenings and grotesquerie. It also has many many characters, all with long Uzbek names — there’s an eight-page list at the back to help you keep track of them, although I can’t say it helped me much — and it shifts around in time and place in a way which, to be honest, just meant I was usually a bit confused. It almost would have been better if I’d read it as a book of short stories, I think, because it would have saved me that sense of being permanently unsure what was going on. I have a relatively high tolerance for non-linear narratives and that sort of thing, but I found it hard going. I didn’t help myself by the way I read it; rather too many long gaps between picking it up.
On the positive side, the world it conjures up is an interesting one: a traditional Central Asian culture rubbing up against Russia and the Soviet bureaucracy, an Islamic culture in a sometimes aggressively secular state, petty local politics in the middle of it. It was one of those books where I kind of thought that maybe, if I had read it in a different place or a different mood I might have really enjoyed it, because it certainly had interesting stuff going on and I can’t put my finger on why I didn’t enjoy it… but there you go.
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