Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin

Anita Endrezze Butterfly Moon University of Arizona Press Butterfly Moon marks the seventy-second volume of Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series. The consistently high standards of the series are maintained in this volume of fifteen deftly constructed tales. The stories negotiate through myth and reality and are inspired by the Yaqui, Slovenian, German, Italian, and Romanian roots of Anita Endrezze. march–april 2013 • 143 Dung Kai-cheung Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City Dung Kai-cheung, Anders Hansson, & Bonnie S. McDougall, tr. Columbia University Press Far in the future, a group of archaeologists use maps, written accounts, and other historical artifacts to reconstruct a city that has long disappeared. Atlas owes much of its literary inspiration to Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, and the author’s native city of Hong Kong. Nota Bene Mitrova Amerika is replete with fine psychological nuances, primarily concerning the dilemmas of emigration . Sarić eschews nationalistic tones, although he mentions the parents’ attempts to instill pride in their children toward their Serbian origin . He underscores the difficulties, almost impossibility, of the original descent surviving in a generation or two. Sarić traverses the long and often painful road many immigrants have gone through. In this sense, the novel attains a fascinating social value, describing experiences millions have gone through. A frequent poetic tone and the intertwining of narration with inner thoughts of characters, marked in cursive, add a higher literary quality to the novel. Mitrova Amerika offers a valuable contribution to contemporary Serbian literature as well as thoughtprovoking reading to both domestic and foreign readers (the novel is being translated into English). Vasa Mihailovich University of North Carolina Mikhail Shishkin. Maidenhair. Marian Schwartz, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2012. isbn 9781934824368 Mikhail Shishkin has been publishing in Russia to acclaim and accolades for almost twenty years. His work is allusive, dense, and strikingly beautiful. He’s a challenge for any translator and a pleasure for the Russian reader. And now, Marian Schwartz’s translation of his novel Venerin volos (2006) finally brings the full complexity of Shishkin’s work to the English-speaking world. Schwartz’s translation faithfully conveys the structure and intricacies of Shishkin’s novel, providing no more hints or signposts for the Englishlanguage reader than the author allows his native readership. The novel is built from a web of textual sources assembled so seamlessly that the subtlety of connections can, at times, flummox even the conscientious reader. Maidenhair does not explicitly differentiate descriptions of the “real” world from secondhand stories . A detail from the protagonist’s life might appear alongside a line from a book he’s reading, suggesting that each has equal claim to the representation of some kind of reality. The novel’s protagonist works as an interpreter in the Swiss migration service, where he translates hearings for political asylum seekers . Transcripts of these hearings make their way into the text, alternating with other stories, including the interpreter’s own. In letters to his son, he retraces the dissolution of his marriage to the boy’s mother, which takes them to Rome, where the interpreter searches for the origin of their love and for the elusive origin of the West’s cultural heritage. However, even in Rome, originals are hard to come by. Everything is a copy of something that came before it; everything is a reflection of the stories surrounding it. (This section was translated by Jamie Gambrell and published as “We Can’t Go On Living This Way” in the November 2009 issue of WLT.) The interpreter’s account is compelling in its own right, but the real drama of Maidenhair comes in the spaces between the novel’s different stories. Aside from the transcripts and the interpreter’s reminiscences , Shishkin includes reimagined 144 World Literature Today reviews ancient Greek histories—which the interpreter reads on his breaks—and the memoirs of a Soviet-era singer whose biography the interpreter is commissioned to write. In each story, Shishkin brilliantly reproduces a distinctive style, placing each story in a recognizable time and place. But once the stories enter Maidenhair, they start to bleed into one other. Images and motifs from the singer’s story appear in the

Art · Art history · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Poetry · The Imaginary · History · Soviet and Russian History