French theatrical company LA COMPAGNIE DES MOTS MIGRATEURS presents a performance for children UNE VICTOIRE EN PAPIER based on Ulitskaya's works - February 2009
Featured titles
-
Asan, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (2008)
Rights sold: Albania - OMSCA-1, France - GALLIMARD, Germany - LUCHTERHAND, Netherlands - DE ARBEIDERSPERS, Poland - REBIS, Russia - IZDATELSTVO E, Slovenia - Modrijan, Spain - ACANTILADO, Turkey - ALFA
Winner of the 2008 Big Book Award
On the surface, Vladimir Makanin’s Asan is a stream-of-consciousness account of events in the life of the Russian manager of a military warehouse in Chechnia. Deeper down, Asan is less a book about Russia’s Chechen wars than a novel showing how war forces participants and observers to piece together narratives that explain or justify actions.
At the centre of Makanin’s narrive is major Aleksandr Sergeevich Zhilin, nicknamed Asan by his fellow officers. He finds himself running a supply depot during both the first and second wars, supplying the Russian troops with fuel--and running his own little business on the side. A basically honest man, Major Zhilin is still one of those corrupt officers who used the war to make money for themselves, something that enables him to protect injured or runaway soldiers, and help desperate mothers ransom their sons who have been captured by Chechen forces. Is Major Zhilin a self-centered schemer, or a modern-day Russian Robin Hood? A bit of both, it seems.
Like most "Chechen" works, Asan is at its heart a tragedy, and full of the brutal details of the Chechen wars, where there were no real good guys; rape, pillage, torture, and murder were all commonplace; and even support officers in the rear could find themselves held at gunpoint or pawing through piles of dismembered corpses. But it juxtaposes that brutality with flashes of lyricism and heartfelt sympathy for the people caught up in the war. In the novel, Asan is both the name of a bloodthirsty mythological figure and of a person trying to do the most good he can in bad circumstances, and maybe stay alive against the odds.
Asan patches multiple stories together to form a rough novel about rough topics. Of course war, as Makanin reminds readers on several of Asan’s pages, is an absurd venture. You can’t understand it, says Zhilin, and there’s no logic. In short, truth slips and myths gain strength as Zhilin attempts to make sense of events, his actions, and his life. Asan is not about the kinds of war truths we expect from newspapers. It’s about how people try to order chaos by transforming war’s realities, commodities as elusive as sun bunnies, into a myth. Novel's message about money, truth, and war are important reflections of sociopolitical life in today’s world.
The most important thing in the book isn’t the topic, the scenes, the double break with genre, or the irony of the story but the character, the central figure. Makanin hit the mark, he DISCOVERED: he discovered a character whose biography and way of life could be the key to understanding an era, a metaphor for contemporary life. -- Lev Danilkin, a literary critic
Read more... -
Two sisters and Kandinsky, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (2011)
Rights sold:
Makanin’s novel Two Sisters and Kandinsky (2011) is a special genre structure based on the sophisticated play of classical and modern hybrid forms. Besides the genre definition as “a novel” stated by the author and specifying it as “a scene of life” oriented to Balzac genre form, the reportage and essays inclusions are significant in the novel as well. Dramatic code is actualized there not only in its classical variant, but also in the form of puppet theatre, contemporary talk-show, and other genres of film and television.
In Makanin's previous novel about the Chechen War, Asan (2008), the concept of "betrayal" had a structure-forming function. His next novel Two Sisters and Kandinsky (2011) placed the concept of "betrayal" into the context of a story of an individual human being and of the Russian society of the 20th century, when a snitch (betrayer) was the most important figure in the state. In Makanin's prose, in contrast to the narrow political interpretation widespread in the society, almost all types and kinds of betrayal are present: starting from betrayal in personal relations between a man and a woman, betrayal of a friend, violation of a social contract, betrayal of a strata or a state, and coming to the most terrible in the opinion of the writer ego-betrayal, i.e. oblivion of one's ideals and principles (the most terrible in the opinion of the writer). We may affirm that the dyad "loyalty betrayal" is the core in Makanin's world view, and "loyalty" is almost of a sacred character, and "recovery" of the society is possible only if it returns to a new "sacrum".
Read more...