A review by siria
The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov

3.0

Via the framing device of a tale told on a long train journey across Kazakhstan, The Dead Lake tells the story of Yerzhan, a virtuoso violinist raised on the steppes whose body has been perpetually stunted thanks to the repeated nuclear testing carried out by the U.S.S.R. near his childhood home. Hamid Ismailov's novella reads like a folk tale, and his conjuring up of the rhythm of life in the vast grasslands of central Asia, with its continuities stretching across centuries, was for me one of the most pleasurable parts of The Dead Lake. The other was his framing of the nuclear testing as a nameless, mythical horror—inexplicable events whose full ramifications are clearly not understood by Yerzhan and his family at the time.

I never found myself warming to any of the characters, though, and particularly not the central character, Yerzhan. His fits of angry, jealous possessiveness towards his childhood sweetheart, Aisulu, were offputting, especially in a work which otherwise concentrates more on allegory than emotion.