Shishkin’s Letter Book.

It’s taken me over a month — twice as long as it should have — to finish Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник, literally “Letter-Writing Manual” but translated by Andrew Bromfield as The Light and the Dark. It’s the most recent of his four novels, all of which I’ve now read (LH: 1, 2, 3), and much as it pains me to say it, I hope he doesn’t write any more of them. He’s probably come to the same conclusion, since it’s been fifteen years since this came out; the fact is that he’s a good writer but a bad novelist, and he’s surely clever enough to have realized it.

Why, you ask, did I plow through all 376 pages if it wasn’t working for me? Two reasons: in the first place, I figured I might as well have read all his novels so I could talk knowledgeably and fairly about them and him, and in the second, I’d already bailed out of several novels and was starting to feel like a slacker, so I called on my inner Stakhanovite and got the job done. (Also, I was curious about how he’d end it.) The basics are soon told: it’s an epistolary novel alternating between letters by Alexandra (“Sashenka” or “Sasha”) and those by Vladimir (“Volodenka” or “Volodya”), who may or may not be writing to each other. They are love letters (often containing clichéd and increasingly embarrassing avowals of over-the-top emotion) but are stuffed with details of daily life and of early memories, both usually grim. If you want more (and aren’t worried about spoilers), there’s Mia Couto at The Modern Novel (cautiously approving), Phoebe Taplin at the Guardian (a rave: “The breathlessness of Maidenhair becomes, in The Light and the Dark, a more measured brilliance”), and Carla Baricz at Words Without Borders (an even more enthusiastic rave). I’ll quote the end of the Baricz review to give you an idea:

Both of Shishkin’s books, like his other works, return obsessively, with tenderness and with great brutality, to the question of whether individual moments of existence add up to more than the sum of minutes we are given to live, and whether and how they may be salvaged through language. Shishkin’s incandescent Russian undertakes this redemptive project, rendering translation a Sisyphean task. One cannot translate Shishkin, in fact; one can only attempt to find an adequate equivalent in the target language. Andrew Bromfield works very hard to do so with The Light and the Dark, and it pays off. In English, his Shishkin becomes, to quote Shakespeare’s Ariel, “something rich and strange.”

The Light and the Dark is a sentimental book, but only because it takes as its subject matter human love, in all of its infinite varieties and with all of its bitter complications—its indefinite hopes, its moments of transcendence and grotesqueness. Which is to say, as Volodya does, that this narrative is a story about death. Death, however, is never the end of the story. In language, we are always in the eternal present, so that, in one of his last missives, Volodya can whisper: “After all, I’m alive, Sasha.” Death belongs to time, and time wavers in this remarkable narrative and finally folds in on itself: “They write from Gaul that in the evening, in the dense rays of the sunset, a fine skin grows on the cobblestones of the street. They write from Jerusalem. [. . .] As the years go by the past does not recede but moves closer.” Of course, language cannot make up for loss: “I want everything alive, here and now. You, your warmth, your voice, your body, your smell,” Volodya cries. But Shishkin holds to the idea that, despite what mortality may take from us, language can nevertheless redeem the ephemeral moment, capturing it and returning us to its present. In letters, he seems to say, we are always the people we were when we wrote them—we are always young, we are always in love, we are always reaching across the dark, like “flies in amber.” The sheer beauty and power of his prose makes us believe that, indeed, as he writes, “it’s going to be the word in the beginning again.”

The thing is that all of that is Literature 101: yes, life is suffering, we’re all going to die, and love and language are important counterweights to the bad stuff. This is what Shishkin has been saying his entire career, and it’s wasted effort, because the only point to writing is to (as my man Ezra said) make it new, and he doesn’t do that, he just retails the same old bromides. His novels are full of little slices of life that should be affecting but aren’t because they’re just narrated flatly rather than seen in their individuality, and because they don’t happen to people but to cardboard characters. See the end of this post for a more extended riff on that subject; I’ll just add that if you value ideas over people you should write essays rather than novels, and Shishkin does that well. Philosopher, stick to thy lasting values and leave messy humanity to people like Dostoevsky!