Maidenhair

It is not an exaggeration to say that Mikhail Shiskin's Maidenhair is probably the best book I've read in years. It is the rare novel that transcends the genre--a collection of stories and interviews and narratives  that blend together so seamlessly as to almost appear effortless. 

Persian King Cyrus and his guards

 Maidenhair is sort of the story of a Russian translator living in Switzerland, but it is also the story of his last love affair, his son and the fantasy world they share, his past loves, the diary of a Russian singer who grew up during WWI and the Revolution, and, not to leave anything out, some of the more memorable bits of Herodotus's Histories. If that doesn't sound like it should work, that's because it shouldn't, but Shiskin weaves these texts together so artfully you'd almost think that someone had intended them to go together. The blurb on the back of the book reads, "Mikhail Shiskin's Maidenhair is an instant classic of Russian Literature. It bravely takes on the eternal questions--of truth and fiction, of time and timelessness, of love and war, of Death and the Word--and is a movingly luminescent expression of the pain of life and its uncountable joys."

Lenin addresses the proletariat

Ordinarily, when someone tells me that a book is a "movingly luminescent expression of the pain of life," dealing with truth, fiction, love, time, timelessness, war, Death, and the Word, I start to feel that a Humanities PhD at whatever University Press has gotten a little out of control and read too much into something. But I had time to read the first twenty pages of this one, and in that short space it became clear to me that Shiskin really was addressing all these themes and doing so in a way that felt, well, right. In other words, it is a book about everything and nothing. What you take from it will depend entirely upon what you bring to it.

It is a novel with at once too many underlying threads and no underlying thread. You might call it "a renunciation of the geographic cure," or you might call it the best argument ever for said cure. You could call it "love" or you could call it "loss." Shishkin has some real zingers that echo home, such as "Dostoevsky, I think it was, said that sacrificing your life might be the easiest sacrifice of all." (35) Trust Shiskin to understand Dostoevsky perhaps better than Dostoevsky himself, and trust him to call into question the life's work of all of us who see ourselves as sacrificing for the greater good.

St. Peter's Basilica, Rome

Time and space are fluid in Maidenhair, and intentionally so, as Shiskin gives us lines like, "But time and space are decrepit, worn, shaky. What if they suddenly snag on something--your blackberry branch? And it snaps off?" (70) Or, "Time can be a slippery thing in winter. Your foot takes a step and you have no idea where or when you're going to plop down. Lo and behold, you're in the Russo-Turkish War." (132) More than anyone except perhaps Faulkner, Shiskin captures the feeling of time travel in his narrative--one minute we're in modern-day Switzerland, the next Chechnya, the next the Russian Revolution. His characters are all more or less transient, being driven across borders and states by the flukes of politics and history. And when not driven by history, they're driven by that geographic cure, the idea that everything would be better if I could just make my way to some better place.

But all Shiskin's characters are really looking for is love, something to fill the gaping holes in their psyches. Love of a spouse, love of a child, illicit love will do--it doesn't matter. As in real life, Shiskin's characters don't really get what they want--at least not in the way that they think they want it--but they do get something, albeit fleeting. A famous actor makes an appearance to tell the would-be singer, perhaps rightly, that, as she writes in her diary, "my love, the kind I will have, will depend on me alone." (297) On the one hand, I want to kill the actor because I know he's manipulating her into a love affair by making it appear that she's choosing it; on the other hand, he has her pegged: she is exactly the kind of person who gets to make a lot of choices (some of them hard) about the kinds of love she wants to allow into her life.

Maybe this is one of Shiskin's revelations--we think that love depends on what someone else brings into our lives and whether it pleases us, when in reality where and when and with whom we find love depends entirely upon what we ourselves have to offer. We are impossible; therefore, love is impossible. And yet it's always there for the taking.