{"id":305876,"date":"2017-04-10T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2017\/04\/10\/oblivion-by-sergi-lebedev-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T14:26:20","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T14:26:20","slug":"oblivion-by-sergi-lebedev-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2017\/04\/10\/oblivion-by-sergi-lebedev-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Oblivion” by Sergi Lebedev [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists<\/a> and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and read!<\/em><\/p>\n

The entry below is by P. T. Smith, a frequent Three Percent contributor who has also been a BTBA<\/span> judge and has worked with The Scofield<\/em> and Asymptote.<\/em><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oblivion<\/em><\/a> by Sergei Lebedev, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis (Russia, New Vessel Press)<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 74%<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA<\/span>: 16%<\/b><\/p>\n

Judging from the cover copy and selected blurbs, the reason the Sergei Lebedev\u2019s Oblivion<\/em>, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, should win the 2017 BTBA<\/span> is because it is an Important and Necessary novel: it \u201cprobe[s] the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system,\u201d is \u201can important book above where Russia is today,\u201d \u201cdiscloses the weight of Soviet history,\u201d and is \u201ca haunting tale about the loss of national memory.\u201d This is all true, sure, but would never be enough for me to pick up a novel, much less believe it deserves to win an award like the BTBA<\/span>. More compelling is how it does these things, how the prose, structure, aesthetics, accomplish this. If a novel exists solely to be an important cultural, historical artifact, count me out.<\/p>\n

So, Oblivion<\/em> deserves to win because it\u2019s a beautiful, creative, linguistically challenging novel interested in many things besides the history of Russia and its lasting influence. From his earliest pages, Lebedev sets the terms of his novel, not that it will be about Russia and history, but that essential to it all is language as something with a physical tangible presence in the world, about the land and the animals that inhabit it, and about the deeply, intimately personal. It is a gorgeous and mysterious, contextless, opening section:<\/p>\n

Birches, snow, sky, road, fire, smoke, frost\u2014I repeated the words that I remembered for only a slightly shorter time than I remembered myself. Birches, snow, firewood, sky, road, fire, smoke, frost\u2014the words grew, as if they were material, had material energy; the words sounded symphonically, one through another, without blending, the frost was frosty, the fire fiery, the smoke smoky; the words became translucent, melting slightly, like pure flame, their phonetic casings lost their hardened precision, and the eye perceived the pure essence of meaning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At any moment, the narrator may drift off, taking a minor observation and riffing in a widening gyre. When he witnesses an old woman \u201chilling potatoes in the garden,\u201d he see a whole class of being: \u201cThese old women are a special breed\u2014they don\u2019t get tired, life to them is a daily chores\u2014dig, water, hill, weed; they harness themselves habitually and probably only for themselves, without hope, without expectation, without haste.\u201d You don\u2019t need to agree with his insights, theories, explorations, don\u2019t need to believe, or you can, but either way, they are beautiful, intelligent, and feed back on themselves, Lebedev\u2019s way of giving personality to his unnamed narrator. Later, when of the same woman, he writes, \u201cshe had become something like a film strip or a gramophone recording that captured the image and the voice of the deceased; she did not embroider or invent things; she toiled as an eyewitness,\u201d it\u2019s a tacit admission that he is something other, not an eyewitness, not toiling. It\u2019s this other role that allows the novel to work as it does.<\/p>\n

One of these conceptual wanderings opens the space for the narrator to begin his recollections. Looking at his own life, the narrator meanders at length on the blindness of his elderly neighbor, known only as Grandfather II. It\u2019s a meditation on blindness creating the consciousness of this man, and how it crafts the narrator\u2019s perception of him, his memories of him. Grandfather II\u2019s blindness is \u201cwhy [he] did not persist in the viewer\u2019s retina, he seeped through it, remaining a vague silhouette; you remember his profile better than his face, he somehow was always turned sideways, behind something, as if in a crowd.\u201d As the narrator tells the story of his life with Grandfather II, making no distinction between his own memories and recollection of events before he was born, you understand that this man has some other history, and that when it is uncovered, that is when Russia\u2019s history will be encountered. At first, the narrator seeks personal answers, to understand the role Grandfather II played in forming his childhood, and at the very moment that personal investigation becomes active, takes him to an old mining town, the space of the novel opens again, to the collective past, the narrator forced to look beyond himself, but never leaving that behind fully.<\/p>\n

That Lebedev takes his time getting Oblivion<\/em> to its destination elevates the book mightily. The novel\u2019s structure is subtle, aligned with the moves of the narrator\u2019s thoughts. The narrator is full of ideas, beliefs, declarations of faith and conceptual explorations, but none of it is Lebedev telling you anything, telling you the seriousness of his project, or even what that project will be. Lebedev does ask the reader to work, which is fitting for a book that should win the BTBA<\/span>. The ask is rewarded as the narrator seeks answers without knowing his initial question, and uncovering more questions as he pursues answers; he\u2019s fascinating as he stretches his language to accommodate his ideas; and throughout it all, there is the beauty in the prose and the depth of emotions found in the minor incidents that create the world of Oblivion.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[65936,35996,64586,48766,51506,65916,52096,65926,37876],"class_list":["post-305876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-antonina-bouis","tag-btba","tag-btba-2017","tag-btba-fiction","tag-new-vessel-press","tag-oblivion","tag-p-t-smith","tag-sergei-lebedev","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305876"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396672,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305876\/revisions\/396672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}