This Fatal Land
Twelve CirclesBy 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.”
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.