Twelve Circles
By Yuri Andrukhovychtranslated from the Ukrainian by Vitaly ChernetskySpuyten Duyvil Press, 2015It is spring in the Ukraine after a long Soviet winter, but a perilous spring with people caught “between fear of the past and fear of the future.” Yuri Andrukhovych’s novel Twelve Circles, masterfully translated from Ukrainian by Vitaly Chernetsky, takes us into the rugged Carpathian Mountains, where everything, Andrukhovych tells us, “always bumps into Transylvania”–haunted (in the 1990s) not by Dracula but more recent ghouls: military bunkers, car cemeteries at the bottom of ravines, gangster capitalists, and environmental holocaust. Hutsul locals wander about as if dazed, when they are not drunk and rowdy (“These people really do like drinking sessions in the open air”). We have entered the junkyard of modern history, with its detritus of two world wars, Nazi and Soviet occupation, and post-Soviet-era chaos overseen by a new breed of oligarch overlords.The strength of Andrukhovych’s novel is not plot but its masterful use of language, biting satire, playful wit, and chaotic atmosphere–the Ukraine’s cruel history haunts every page. Plot, in this innovative, postmodern work, doesn’t fully kick in until halfway through the book. The first half is a montage of discrete scenes, lavish descriptive passages, and characters who appear in brief cameos. The Austrian photographer Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen, the novel’s outsider, wanders through the Carpathians snapping photos, intrigued by the half blighted, half beautiful land, struggling to understand it. He asks a Ukranian nationalist, “If your culture is truly so ancient and powerful, how come your public toilets are so filthy?...Why do your villagers throw all their shit right into rivers?” Nonetheless, he is attracted to the earthy warmth of the people, contrasting the cold sterility of the West. He sleeps with his interpreter, “Ms. Clumsy,” Roma Voronych, who figures large in the novel’s minimal plot.As if summoned, the characters all arrive together at a train station in the mountains, with a hammer and sickle above the waiting room door, along with an incongruous “Obey your thirst” ad on one wall. Whisked away in an SUV, they magically end up in a helicopter, sitting on wooden benches facing each other: photographer Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen; Roma Voronych, sitting beside her husband, Artur Pepa, a 37 year old writer and drunk, who sees death “waltzing around him in circles”; Roma’s daughter Kolya--“aged 18, in a skirt so short that one feels like asking which feminine hygiene products she uses”–who is eyeing the “redheaded goblin” Yarchyk Volshebnik (“Magikstein”), a hip, long-haired videographer; “gal pals,” Lilya and Marlena, who look identical, like all people whose images are shaped by pop culture, Andrukhovych tells us; and Professor Doktor, “an expert in dead languages” and in the dead poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych, who committed suicide in 1937 at age 27 and wrote about “the twelve circles of spring,” whose ghost still wanders the streets of Lviv and haunts this novel. The ninth character, Ylko Vartsabych:
is best introduced in the form of a billboard-sized business card.... So how should I reveal him...how should he make the entrance to his guests–this thug, redneck, Bull Terrier, bruiser, rascal, all covered in gold chains and cell phones? With these fat stubby fingers, a balding head, leathery skin, and a boundless butt?
This capitalist oligarch, Ukraine’s “new type of man,” has supplanted the all-powerful state and, like that state, owns most everything: markets, gas stations, restaurants, public restrooms, factories, missile silos, an ostrich farm, pool halls, railroad lines, “ferns in bloom,” “river pebbles, junkyards” ...everything. He is a product, Andrukhovych writes, “of the free economic zone and the play without rules.”
Add to these nine characters the author, who metafictionally invades his text to inform us that all his heroes love water and so forth; the poet Antonych; and the Ukraine itself–resilient, long-suffering, schizoid, with its ex-soviet industrial wastelands to the east and bucolic Carpathian mountains to the west, bathed through much of the novel in gentle spring light and warm breezes. Twelve characters in all, who are both distinct individuals and representative types.“Meteorologists” forecast the Ukraine’s future and give us an account of its tortured past. “Everything was really going to hell, vodka was not giving strength but taking it away.” Winds were blowing toward Transylvania. Meanwhile, Karl-Joseph hikes through “the primordial forest,” passing abandoned missile silos smelling of mushrooms, unused train tracks, and gypsy shacks along the way. We learn how Artur Pepa and Roma Voronych met at a museum and about her ill-starred first marriage, about Artur’s struggles with drink and his failing writing career. He wants to write a “potboiler” which will contain, “a variety of
magic realism, long and hypnotic sentences, almost completely without dialogue, density and saturation of detail, with very elliptic hints.” It sounds much like the novel we are reading. But Pepa can’t decide where to begin.A befuddling hodgepodge of brief scenes follows, jumping from character to character: Artur picks up a college girl (or dreams that he does); Roma takes a bath and thinks him a fool in a stream-of-consciousness rant ending in an erotic Molly Bloom epiphany; Yarchyk is at work on a video (an ad for tycoon Ylko Vartsabych’s
Balsam); dancers and lovers Lilya and Marlena lounge in bed, bickering and gossiping; and young Kolya eats cheesecake and is quizzed by Professor Doktor about “the twelve circles of spring” (“The third circle is the embrace of my faraway sweetheart,” she guesses correctly, not imagining it will be the professor). The author relates adventures with the poet Antonych in Lviv decades ago, telling of the poet’s lovers and his suicide by asphyxiation. It is a mini-biography of Ukraine’s Walt Whitman in one of the book’s many digressions, some factual, some fictive. At this point, the novel seems in search of narrative and characters, one briefly taking the stage and being abandoned for another. The reader may feel a bit dizzy trying to track the orbits of the novel’s multiple characters, spinning through the Ukraine’s confounding universe. Andrukhovych himself confesses: “A weirdly chaotic sensation grew.”But then, as the characters gather around the breakfast table at a mountain resort, the narrative finds direction again in the love triangle between Roma Voronych, her husband, Artur Pepa, and her lover Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen. Artur gets drunk and challenges Karl-Joseph to a chess match (losing), then to a madcap sword fight wherein Karl-Joseph slices Artur’s forehead, and finally to a drinking bout of walnut schnapps, which Pepa clearly wins. Karl-Joseph realizes “this will be the night when I die in Ukraine from liquor.” He goes off into the dark forest with Roma, intending to buy more vodka at the “13th kilometer.” Artur Pepa attempts to follow them, but stumbles into the grotesque realism of a round dance in a party tent, where he is surrounded by dancing grannies smoking long pipes, with faces like baked apples, whom he fears will rape him. Then Artur is magically in bed with his wife Roma. He wanders in a daze through motifs from his past, seemingly captured in museum dioramas–or perhaps in one of Yarchyk’s surreal videos. He sees naked dancers Lilya and Marlena “jump” an old man. It is a common motif in the work: characters wandering dreamily through orgies of symbolism.Out in the dark Carpathian woods, Karl-Joseph gropes Roma and begs her to run off with him, insisting she must choose someone. She rejects him and returns to the resort. Later, she and Artur worry about the Austrian lost in the forest and go in search of him, together with young video maker Yarchyk, who finds Karl-Joseph’s body hung up on a sand bar in the river, his half-submerged head bobbing in the current. The photographer has been robbed and murdered by drunk thugs he bought drinks for at the “13th Kilometer.” Nearby in the woods, unaware of Karl-Joseph’s death, Roma and Artur ponder one another’s shortcomings. To escape a sudden spring blizzard, they slide down an
incline into a car junkyard, where they take shelter in a wrecked Chrysler Imperial and make passionate love on the frayed upholstery, while wet snow drifts in the car’s empty window frames in one of the book’s bawdiest scenes. Back at the resort, Roma’s teenage daughter, Kolya, “let her first lover inside herself”–a hybrid of Professor Doktor and the poet Antonych–and we learn “The eleventh circle is when two become one.”Suspecting he killed Karl-Joseph, the police interrogate Artur at “the former local military detention site” in a scene reminiscent of Soviet-era forced confessions and show trials. “It is simply scary,” Artur thinks, “to see how Nonentity lets itself play with us and take away into the night the best people.” Oligarch Ylko Vartsabych intervenes on Artur’s behalf, since he owns the police along with everything else. When Artur asks if he is the devil, Vartsabych answers that he is “an author,” master of his own creation.The novel employs magic and grotesque realism to coax the reader into an oneiric daze. It is both fragmentary and exhaustively detailed, given its endless descriptive lists in mile-long sentences which itemize the senseless cacophony of everyday life:
One saw computers, photocopy and fax machines, printers, simulators and synthesizers and also simulators and sublimators wrapped in electric wiring...abandoned video cameras, home theater systems, antennas (regular and satellite), various generations of TVs, music systems, with and without karaoke, vacuum cleaners....night vision goggles, rapid excitement machines, milking units...portable land-sky-land rocket launchers, special dryers for chest, armpit, and also for pubic hair–thus it would be hardly surprising if the nuclear football was also to be found there.
A list of the many items in the pockets of Yarchyk’s cargo pants is reminiscent of Tim O’ Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” Yarchyk’s ambulatory file cabinet contains six multi-layered deli sandwiches, contracts, honorariums, pepper spray, insect repellent, a .7 liter can of Vartsabych Velvet dark beer, and half-liter of light beer, a vibrator, videotapes, a religious brochure, etc.The work is punctuated with satire–“Even the dog giggled a little, the sycophant”; a morgue orderly is “not entirely of sound mind (twenty-nine years of experience at the same job!), with an enormous bust, yellow eyes, and formalin-smelling breath”–as well as dreamy poetic imagery: moonlight pouring through a window is a “pale, flour-like substance,” and there is the “incommensurable laziness that happens only in springtime sun.”Andrukhovych is a master of literary legerdemain, keeping twelve balls in the air at once, dazzling us with his verve and dexterity, bringing us into a Carpathian trance which is both daydream and nightmare. In the epiphanic ending, Karl-Joseph’s spirit floats high above the land in the moonlight, looking down on people asleep in their beds: Artur Pepa and Roma, Lilya and Marlena pressed together, Kolya writing a letter to her lover, and Yarchyk in a drunken stupor on a bench in Lviv, having learned his last video has been erased. He wings over Transylvania and Eastern Europe on toward the West.____William Luvaas has published two novels, a third, Beneath The Coyote Hills, is due out in 2016, and two story collections. His collection Ashes Rain Down was The Huffington Post’s 2013 “Book of the Year” and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award. His short stories, essays, articles and reviews have appeared in dozens of publications.
