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lauren_endnotes's review
"'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
▪️ 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
kate_in_a_book's review
3.0
This strange short book started out with so much eerie promise but it got a little boring in middle. In fact, I put it down for a month and wasn’t sure if I would pick it up again, but I’m glad that I did. The language is beautiful and the story almost a fairy tale. It’s about Yerzhan who lives in a remote part of Kazakhstan where the Soviets test atomic weapons. As a young boy he fell in love with the girl next door and one day, to impress her, he dived into a forbidden (and almost certainly radioactive) lake. The consequences of this action are odd and fantastical, which is fitting for such an empty, unsettling landscape.
qqjj's review
challenging
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Set during the Cold War in remote Soviet Kazakhstan, the atmosphere and setting emanates from nearly every word of this short novel. Tightly focused on the members of two entangled families living beside the railroad track, the plot line is purposefully ambiguous and impossibly possible with references to folk tale, music, and atomic testing sites. The frame narrator waits for the main narrative to continue in the tedium of a cross-Kazakhstan train journey and imagines possible endings for the story being told to him. I came out the end slightly disoriented and unsure about what had just happened, but didn't mind.
jamiep's review
4.0
Well written. No tidy ending, but those books are typically the ones that stay with you.
joecam79's review
5.0
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
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
clairewords's review
4.0
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.
Full review here at Word by Word.
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.
smokeyshouse's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
Evocative descriptions of the central Asian steppe, with Soviet nuclear testing forming the backdrop. An intriguing premise.
leethepea's review
4.0
These books are a quick read! Really enjoyed it. An unusual story told well. The landscape is a huge part of the story, and I enjoyed reading about it. Lovely book
balancinghistorybooks's review
4.0
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.
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.
arirang's review
3.0
"Does anything make sense" he retored, suddenly prickly again, 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 which..."
The Dead Lake was longlisted for the 2015 Independent Foreignn Fiction Prize, and indeed shortlisted by the generally more discerning, shadow jury.
The IFFP is, naturally, awarded jointly to both the original author and the translator into English and in this case the short-list honours go to Andrew Bromfield, an experienced translator. He is most familar to me as the translator of Shishkin's excellent The Light and the Dark (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/627742808), but perhaps more widely known as the translator for Boris Akunin (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/307276267) and Viktor Pelevin.
And credit must also go Peirene Press, an independent press running for 5 years, their tagline "Contemporary world literature, thought provoking, well designed, short". They publish just 4 books a year and this is the 5th consecutive year that one of them has made the long list.
The story told in the novel is set in the steppe in north east Kazakhstan around the Semipalantinsk nuclear test site, and the lake referred to in the title is presumably based on Lake Chagan, actually deliberately created by a 1965 atomic test on the uses of nuclear weapons for peaceful earth-moving purposes.
“It was a beautiful lake that had formed after the explosion of an atomic bomb. A fairy-tale lake, right there in the middle of the flat, level steppe, a stretch of emerald-green water, reflecting the rare stray cloud.”
The writing is evocative, for example when describing life on the steppe:
“For anyone who has never lived in the steppe, it is hard to understand how it is possible to exist surrounded by the wilderness on all sides. But those who have lived here since time out of mind know how rich and variable the steppe is. How multicoloured the sky above. How fluid the air around. How varied the plants. How innumerable the animals in it and above it. A dust storm can spring out of nowhere. A yellow whirlwind can suddenly start twirling around the air in the distance in the same way that women spin camel wool into twine. The entire, imponderable weight of that immense, heavy sky can suddenly whistle across the becalmed, submissive land."
And the sinister air underlying the bucolic descriptions is effectively done - the source of the whistling whirlwinds is, every so often, a nuclear blast.
However, I was left at the novel's - or rather novella's - end feeling unsatisfied. The TLS has described the Peirene series as "two hours books to be devoured in a single sitting, literary cinema" which the books quote as a complement, but to me 2 hours was an overstatement and this felt much closer to an expanded short story than a compact novel.
Also, while it's possible to write a book about adultery without needing to be compared to Anna Karenina, if your subject is a man who stopped growing as a young boy (even if here by accident not design) well known for playing a particular instrument (even if violin not drum) and where there is a geo-political angle (here the nuclear arms race). comparisons to Oscar Matzerath are inevitable and this novella unsurprisingly comes off worst.
The Dead Lake was longlisted for the 2015 Independent Foreignn Fiction Prize, and indeed shortlisted by the generally more discerning, shadow jury.
The IFFP is, naturally, awarded jointly to both the original author and the translator into English and in this case the short-list honours go to Andrew Bromfield, an experienced translator. He is most familar to me as the translator of Shishkin's excellent The Light and the Dark (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/627742808), but perhaps more widely known as the translator for Boris Akunin (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/307276267) and Viktor Pelevin.
And credit must also go Peirene Press, an independent press running for 5 years, their tagline "Contemporary world literature, thought provoking, well designed, short". They publish just 4 books a year and this is the 5th consecutive year that one of them has made the long list.
The story told in the novel is set in the steppe in north east Kazakhstan around the Semipalantinsk nuclear test site, and the lake referred to in the title is presumably based on Lake Chagan, actually deliberately created by a 1965 atomic test on the uses of nuclear weapons for peaceful earth-moving purposes.
“It was a beautiful lake that had formed after the explosion of an atomic bomb. A fairy-tale lake, right there in the middle of the flat, level steppe, a stretch of emerald-green water, reflecting the rare stray cloud.”
The writing is evocative, for example when describing life on the steppe:
“For anyone who has never lived in the steppe, it is hard to understand how it is possible to exist surrounded by the wilderness on all sides. But those who have lived here since time out of mind know how rich and variable the steppe is. How multicoloured the sky above. How fluid the air around. How varied the plants. How innumerable the animals in it and above it. A dust storm can spring out of nowhere. A yellow whirlwind can suddenly start twirling around the air in the distance in the same way that women spin camel wool into twine. The entire, imponderable weight of that immense, heavy sky can suddenly whistle across the becalmed, submissive land."
And the sinister air underlying the bucolic descriptions is effectively done - the source of the whistling whirlwinds is, every so often, a nuclear blast.
However, I was left at the novel's - or rather novella's - end feeling unsatisfied. The TLS has described the Peirene series as "two hours books to be devoured in a single sitting, literary cinema" which the books quote as a complement, but to me 2 hours was an overstatement and this felt much closer to an expanded short story than a compact novel.
Also, while it's possible to write a book about adultery without needing to be compared to Anna Karenina, if your subject is a man who stopped growing as a young boy (even if here by accident not design) well known for playing a particular instrument (even if violin not drum) and where there is a geo-political angle (here the nuclear arms race). comparisons to Oscar Matzerath are inevitable and this novella unsurprisingly comes off worst.