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A review by arirang
Of Strangers and Bees: A Hayy Ibn Yaqzan Tale by Hamid Ismailov
4.0
The one who walks before you is a deceiver and a windbag, who beautifies what is false and forges fiction. He will supply you with stories you never sought, made murky with falsity, in which the truth is overburdened with lies. But still, he will serve as your secret eye and your watchman.
Avicenna, Hayy ibn Yaqzan
Translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega from Hamid Ismailov's 2001 Uzbek original, Of Strangers and Bees has the subtitle: A Hayy ibn Yaqzan Tale. As the translator explains:
- Sheikov, a Uzbek novelist, hoping to emulate the international success of his friend and compatriot “the hard-working Hamid Ismailov you’ve heard so much about”. Sheikov leads a nomadic existence in the 1990s in exile in various cities (e.g. Paris, New York, Bamberg), in search of the cheapest possible accommodation, paid work/stipends and compatriots, and, in theory although he seems to make limited progress, hunting for traces of Avicenna, as he is convinced that the Bukhara-born polymath didn't die, as history records it, in 1037, but lived on through the centuries.
‘Life in exile! May it be cursed. Once you have become a stranger, a stranger you shall remain; you may endeavour to make friends, but the task is a difficult one, full end to end with uncertainty. You must keep your mind always vigilant and wary, live where others have lived before you; everything mid temporary, everything costs your heart dearly. In exile, you may be closer to the meaning of life.
- a Stranger - essentially the living-on Avicenna, who pops up in various places during history such as late 15th century Florence and the early 18th century Tulip-era Ottoman empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_period)
- a bee, Siva, who inherited Avicenna's spirit on his death and who, while going about his worker-bee duties, contemplates Sufi mysticism.
It all makes for a heady if not always entirely easy to follow mix, although one Ismailov keeps at a readable and often humorous level - one minute we are learning Ismailov's version of the origin of paintings by da Vinci and Botticelli, and the next with 'the Tashkent terror', the rather infamous Tour de France sprinter, Djamolodine Abdujapparov (as Anglicized here), fresh from his infamous crash on the Champs-Élysées: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x69qvs
A book whose depths I struggled to fully appreciate at times (the reviews below bring out many further aspects), but an impressive achievement, particularly the mixture of Sufism and the loneliness of exile. 3.5 stars rounded to 4 for the ambition.
Now I understood something: all my searching — whether for the right room, or Avicenna, or the lost Stranger among the pages of old manuscripts or in countries developed and developing, whether his name was Vissens or Sheikhov, or whether they were bees, drinking in the secrets of the eternal soul along with their nectar — in truth, it had all been a search for myself, for how I belonged to something more important than the small, idle details of everyday events in this inhospitable world. We find ourselves only when we lose ourselves in the Other.
Some blog reviews:
https://booksandbao.com/2019/10/28/review-of-strangers-and-bees-by-hamid-ismailov/
https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/11418/uzbek-writer-hamid-ismailovs-latest-novel-on-being-a-stranger-finding-oneself-and-the-other
https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/of-strangers-and-bees-by-hamid-ismailov/
https://www.themodernnovel.org/asia/central-asia/uzbekistan/ismailov/of-strangers-and-bees/
Interviews with author and translator:
https://voicesoncentralasia.org/translating-central-asian-literature-an-interview-with-shelley-fairweather-vega/
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/the-city-and-the-writer-in-bukhara-uzbekistan-with-hamid-ismailov
Avicenna, Hayy ibn Yaqzan
Translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega from Hamid Ismailov's 2001 Uzbek original, Of Strangers and Bees has the subtitle: A Hayy ibn Yaqzan Tale. As the translator explains:
The novel you hold in your hands is not the first to boast the name Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Our present tale spans centuries and half the globe, but it is mostly the quite modern story of a writer in exile in the tumultuous waning days of the twentieth century. The very first Hayy ibn Yaqzan, on the other hand, was the eponymous protagonist of an eleventh-century allegory by the Persian philosopher Avicenna. Or shall we call him the Uzbek philosopher Abu Ali ibn Sino?The resulting novel is fascinating, with three intertwined stories, those of::
- Sheikov, a Uzbek novelist, hoping to emulate the international success of his friend and compatriot “the hard-working Hamid Ismailov you’ve heard so much about”. Sheikov leads a nomadic existence in the 1990s in exile in various cities (e.g. Paris, New York, Bamberg), in search of the cheapest possible accommodation, paid work/stipends and compatriots, and, in theory although he seems to make limited progress, hunting for traces of Avicenna, as he is convinced that the Bukhara-born polymath didn't die, as history records it, in 1037, but lived on through the centuries.
‘Life in exile! May it be cursed. Once you have become a stranger, a stranger you shall remain; you may endeavour to make friends, but the task is a difficult one, full end to end with uncertainty. You must keep your mind always vigilant and wary, live where others have lived before you; everything mid temporary, everything costs your heart dearly. In exile, you may be closer to the meaning of life.
- a Stranger - essentially the living-on Avicenna, who pops up in various places during history such as late 15th century Florence and the early 18th century Tulip-era Ottoman empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_period)
- a bee, Siva, who inherited Avicenna's spirit on his death and who, while going about his worker-bee duties, contemplates Sufi mysticism.
It all makes for a heady if not always entirely easy to follow mix, although one Ismailov keeps at a readable and often humorous level - one minute we are learning Ismailov's version of the origin of paintings by da Vinci and Botticelli, and the next with 'the Tashkent terror', the rather infamous Tour de France sprinter, Djamolodine Abdujapparov (as Anglicized here), fresh from his infamous crash on the Champs-Élysées: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x69qvs
A book whose depths I struggled to fully appreciate at times (the reviews below bring out many further aspects), but an impressive achievement, particularly the mixture of Sufism and the loneliness of exile. 3.5 stars rounded to 4 for the ambition.
Now I understood something: all my searching — whether for the right room, or Avicenna, or the lost Stranger among the pages of old manuscripts or in countries developed and developing, whether his name was Vissens or Sheikhov, or whether they were bees, drinking in the secrets of the eternal soul along with their nectar — in truth, it had all been a search for myself, for how I belonged to something more important than the small, idle details of everyday events in this inhospitable world. We find ourselves only when we lose ourselves in the Other.
Some blog reviews:
https://booksandbao.com/2019/10/28/review-of-strangers-and-bees-by-hamid-ismailov/
https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/11418/uzbek-writer-hamid-ismailovs-latest-novel-on-being-a-stranger-finding-oneself-and-the-other
https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/of-strangers-and-bees-by-hamid-ismailov/
https://www.themodernnovel.org/asia/central-asia/uzbekistan/ismailov/of-strangers-and-bees/
Interviews with author and translator:
https://voicesoncentralasia.org/translating-central-asian-literature-an-interview-with-shelley-fairweather-vega/
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/the-city-and-the-writer-in-bukhara-uzbekistan-with-hamid-ismailov