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DADDY WASSUP, a flow novel by Andrei Gelasimov
Rights sold: France - SYRTES, Germany - AUFBAU, Russia - GORODETZ, World Arabic - AL MADA
Winner of the 2021 Moscow Art Prize (Russia)
One day in 2016, a rap group from Russia and its leader Booster, aka Pistoletto, aka Tolya, got in troubles during a tour in Germany. First their rehearsal was interrupted by a police raid in search for drugs, then at their night concert one the crowd got killed in a fight, and one of the musicians got arrested and put in jail. Tolya-Booster meets with frau Steinbach who owns the venue of their show, only to find out that she is in fact his once-girlfriend Maya who immigrated to Germany a decade ago. Back in 1990s then 17-years-old Tolya and Maya both lived in Rostov, a city with a well-deserved reputation of Russia's criminal capital: armed gangs all around, corrupt government and police agents, sweeping poverty, drugs, and beyond that a real war in the nearby Chechnya.
Novel's plot develops during about twenty years, from the late 90s to the present. There's no political declarations in the novel: Tolya-Booster is strictly and deliberately apolitical. There is no social pathos in it as well: none of the protagonists give a damn about problems of the society they live in. However, Gelasimov's fictional characters mirror the reality of what's happening with Russians for last two decades: carelessness, fatalism, disregard of any existing rules and laws, pure logic of survival, amazing neglect of death, endless insecurity, and firm belief that there's nobody around to help. Gelasimov's heroes has been through terrible times; and realize what they've lost.
In his main hit song Samsara, Booster formulates the main belief of his generation: one day the world will inevitably be a better place, though they are destined to see it only through the eyes of their children. Gelasimov defines his new book as a flow-novel. In rap terminology, flow is a term referring to rhythms and rhymes of song's lyrics and how they interact, i.e. it is the correct speed of reading, an impeccable technique of writing and playing text under the swinging bit.
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Savely's Days, a novel by Grigory Sluzhitel
Winner of the 2020 Moscow Art Prize (Russia)
Winner of the 2019 Big Book Award (Russia)Rights sold: Bulgaria - GNEZDOTO, China (simplified Chinese) - GINKGO, Estonia - TANAPAEV, France - SYRTES, Hungary - TERICUM, Italy - FRANCESCO BRIOSCHI EDITORE, Latvia - JANIS ROZES, Lithuania - ALMA LITTERA, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - LOGOS
Grigory Sluzhitel’s Savely’s Days, narrated by a male cat named Savely who was likely named for a brand of a cottage cheese, is so affecting and charming that it makes even experienced reader smile, laugh, and even sob. Savely’s story isn’t just a chronicle of a cat’s life, it’s also a love letter to Moscow, and a bittersweet story of kinship, friendship, and separations.
As the novel’s title indicates, Savely, a very literate and literary cat, tells his life story, beginning with memories from the womb, birth, and early life in a Chiquita banana box. Savely’s childhood is pretty happy, featuring food from benefactors, regular visits to see his aunt (who lives in a front-loading washing machine), and good relationships with his sisters and mother. His upbringing is solid: his mother tells him that cats don’t really have nine lives so there’s no sense in taking chances by walking in front of motorized transportation. Savely loses touch with his family after a well-meaning human takes him in. He’s not particularly happy in his new life despite nice possessions like a laser mouse, scratchers, and rubber balls, not to mention a Sunday ritual of climbing into a tea pot. He ends up bolting on the way to a vet visit (he’s already been neutered), leaving Vitya, a bookish teenager who’s something of an outcast, catless.
Savely cycles through quite a few lives in the book, serving as a rat catcher at the Tretyakov Gallery and having to co-habit, albeit briefly, with a parrot named Iggy, a situation not fated to end well. Then he's hosted by a young Kirgiz man who rescues Savely after he’s attacked and left badly injured. After Askar is fired from his job at Gorky Park he finds work as a bicycle deliveryman and brings Savely with him. They even deliver food to a theater backstage in a scene that seems to include Sluzhitel in a cameo appearance.
Savely wants to see the world (or at least Moscow) and even gives the impression of being something of an existentialist with a phobia for commitment, too. At least, that is, until he meets a beautiful young cat, in some of the book’s nicest passages, and starts a happy cat-family life in a doghouse with his love and a dog
In his introduction to Savely’s Days, Eugene Vodolazkin says that Sluzhitel draws on his acting skills and becomes a full-fledged cat in the novel. Indeed, Sluzhitel is so good at writing about a cat’s life that at certain point Savely’s descriptions of his own life are more convincing than his passages about his humans’ backstories. The humans’ stories feel like slivers of a portrait of Moscow in the twenty-first century, but they only really come alive when Savely is interacting with his people in some way, by climbing into the teapot, observing Vitya’s grandmother, or making sushi deliveries. Or sitting inside someone’s coat on a park bench during a time of mourning.
Somehow this doesn’t just feel like a matter of Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, something else Vodolazkin mentions in his introduction. It feels as if Sluzhitel’ isn’t just showing the world from a novel perspective. He’s an actor who’s an author (and an author who’s an actor) and channels his inner catness to thoroughly inhabit a character who’s not even of his own species. In doing so, he manages to find an internal logic for his text that makes the feline perspective feel perfectly natural, as if it’s not just a literary device. Savely may be a cat but he can tell a story – an exceedingly rare quality these days – at least as well as he can chase his tail.
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