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A review by runeclausen
The Railway by Robert Chandler, Hamid Ismailov
3.0
I barely know where to begin with this one. What a journey. And not, unfortunately, a exclusively positive one.
The cover of the book touts a review saying "Imagine One Hundred Years of Solitude set on the empty plains of Central Asia". This was actually a citing that made me very exciting, but it took the worst parts of 100 YoS but not a lot of the good ones. The story is seemingly an incoherent set of events and happenings following a extremely expansive gallery of characters (there's a 8 page character-list at the back of the book!!) that seemingly doesn't have a lot to do with each other, and the stories not overlapping with each other a whole lot, until there's a somewhat tying up of all the characters into the same story at the very end.
Most of the book is not even concerned with the titular Railway, but instead recounts various more of less fantastic stories of the inhabitants of the uzbek town of Gilas, characters of all kinds of ethnicities, religions and social-statuses.
Ismailov does however do one thing I like a lot, and that is the mixing of western philosophers (Beauvoir, Sarte etc.) with Soviet leaders, philosophers, authors, Persian poets, Uzbek and Kyrgyz cultural personalities and much more, weaving a multi-cultural tapestry bringing the whole world together in Gilas. Chingiz Aitmatov, the most famous Kyrgyz author, whom i've also read before even makes an appearance.
The book is heavy in soviet and uzbek cultural and historical references, luckily theres a vast number of footnotes to explain a lot of them, but it still takes an effort to comprehend everything that is going on.
I'm still not at all sure what the themes and main storyline of this book actually is, or what even happened for the most part, but somehow it was still enjoyable - atleast a times.
The cover of the book touts a review saying "Imagine One Hundred Years of Solitude set on the empty plains of Central Asia". This was actually a citing that made me very exciting, but it took the worst parts of 100 YoS but not a lot of the good ones. The story is seemingly an incoherent set of events and happenings following a extremely expansive gallery of characters (there's a 8 page character-list at the back of the book!!) that seemingly doesn't have a lot to do with each other, and the stories not overlapping with each other a whole lot, until there's a somewhat tying up of all the characters into the same story at the very end.
Most of the book is not even concerned with the titular Railway, but instead recounts various more of less fantastic stories of the inhabitants of the uzbek town of Gilas, characters of all kinds of ethnicities, religions and social-statuses.
Ismailov does however do one thing I like a lot, and that is the mixing of western philosophers (Beauvoir, Sarte etc.) with Soviet leaders, philosophers, authors, Persian poets, Uzbek and Kyrgyz cultural personalities and much more, weaving a multi-cultural tapestry bringing the whole world together in Gilas. Chingiz Aitmatov, the most famous Kyrgyz author, whom i've also read before even makes an appearance.
The book is heavy in soviet and uzbek cultural and historical references, luckily theres a vast number of footnotes to explain a lot of them, but it still takes an effort to comprehend everything that is going on.
I'm still not at all sure what the themes and main storyline of this book actually is, or what even happened for the most part, but somehow it was still enjoyable - atleast a times.