Book 101: Azerbaijan (English) – Solar Plexus (Rustam IBRAGIMBEKOV)

When he was a child, nothing had given him greater pleasure than the sea. But he had abandoned it for a very serious reason: of course it was hard to accuse an inanimate medium of treachery, but as he gulped down the water in terror, feeling with his foot for the bottom that wasn’t there, it was precisely the bitterness of betrayal that he had tasted as he sank down into the water’s bottomless depths. That was the summer he thought he had learned to swim.


For Azerbaijan, I would have liked to have read Ali and Nino (said to be by Kurban Said), which has received some great reviews. But as the author, and whether or not he definitely was Azerbaijani, is uncertain, I had to rule it ineligible here. Hopefully I’ll get around to reading it some day!
So my choice was Solar Plexus by Rustam Ibragimbekov, a prolific writer, scriptwriter and playwright, and there were no regrets. It’s a family saga in four parts following three generations (1940s to 1990s) and four friends living in the same house compound through Azerbaijani history under the USSR from Stalin’s reign of terror and WWII to Azerbaijan’s newly attained independence. The vagaries of life and history throw up some serious moral dilemmas for the group. What to do when your friendships make you have to choose between your loyalty to those friends as a group; as individuals; and to truth? It is told from each of their points of view.
The cosmopolitan city of Baku must be fascinating, and so is this trip through its difficult last century. I felt like I missed a lot of its depth, but still got more than enough enjoyment from the narration of the story.

IBRAGIMBEKOV, Rustam (1939 – ), Solar Plexus: a Baku saga in four parts, translated from Russian by Andrew Bromfield, Glagoslav, 2014 (originally published 1996), ISBN 978-1-78267-116-9