Book 167: Hawai’i (English) – House of Many Gods (Kiana DAVENPORT)

Lightning season came, the air so electric the fillings in their teeth hummed. Everything they touched just sparked. There were flash floods, the seas gave off a yellow glow. For days, lightning zigzagged up the valley. It hit a wild pig that rolled into their yard completely roasted. One night, herringbones of ions, lightning striking everywhere. no one saw Ava leave the house. But they heard her awful scream, and found Ben standing over her, his hair electrified a gaseous blue.

Some books prove hard to find a single good quote (which doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily bad). Not this one – it was hard to choose!

It is set in Hawai’i and Russia – at first blush it is hard to imagine two lands more different, but the parallels soon become obvious – destruction by respective militaries, horrible consequences of the nuclear cycle, and poverty. (Even so, while both this part of Hawai’i and Russia are poor and polluted I can’t help thinking Hawai’i must be a much nicer place to live, for its climate and natural beauty if nothing else.)

Both suffer environmental degradation and nuclear pollution and sickness from rampant militaries. The beautiful island (home to some of the world’s most unique and endangered creatures) is used for target practice.

Sadly Hawai’i is no longer among the ranks of independent countries. It was deceitfully taken over by a kleptocracy of greedy American businessmen, and handed over to the USA (few Americans seem to be aware of this shameful episode in their history). Since then, the Hawai’ians’ tradition of aloha was taken advantage of by the US military and the Polynesians have been overrun by immigrants and tourists, so that they are only a small minority in their own country now.

The story is set mainly on the poverty-stricken Wai’anae coast of O’ahu. Ana was abandoned when she was a child by her mother Anahola and feels extremely resentful because of this. She meets Nikolai, a Russian who makes films about ecological catastrophes in his home country and in the Pacific, and they come to share common feelings. Having let him go, she heads to Russia to try to track him down.

Meanwhile her mother has thrown herself into the horrible trauma of working in ER departments, and tries fruitlessly to reconnect with her daughter, dying of cancer.

One thing I’d take issue with – having lived through the time of Chernobyl and its aftermath, I don’t remember individual Russians being blamed for it in the West. We saw them as being victims of the system. And another thing – Kazakhstan is not in Russia.

If I can have a little personal rant against American “spell checkers” on behalf of so many non-English writers: Here both the Hawai’ian and Russian languages have fallen victim. In the Polynesian (and Scandinavian) languages ‘i’ means “in”, in the Slavic languages it means “and”. In Polynesian, “a” is a possessive (”of”). Of course, such words shouldn’t be capitalised in the middle of a sentence. But smarty-pants programs like Word assume that they are English words and capitalise them. So despite typing correctly, you have to go back and correct them. Several phrases in both Hawai’ian and Russian have fallen foul of this in this book. Down with cultural imperialism!

This is an amazing novel. Much of the writing is very sensual but there is a lot of volcanic anger seething beneath the surface and often erupting. One that I can’t recommend too highly.

Davenport, Kiana, House of Many Gods, NY, Ballantine, 2006, ISBN 978-0-345-48151-1

Book 46: Uzbekistan (English) – The Dead Lake (translation of: Вундеркинд Ержан = Wunderkind Yerzhan) (Hamid ISMAILOV)

Towards evening Uncle Shaken took the children to the Dead Lake. ‘Don’t drink the water and do not touch it,’ he told them. It was a beautiful lake that had formed after the explosion of an atomic bomb. A fairy-tale lake, right there in the middle of the flat, level steppe, a stretch of emerald-green water, reflecting the rare stray cloud. No movement, no waves, no ripples, no trembling – a bottle-green, glassy surface with only cautious reflections of the boys’ and girls’ faces as they peeped at its bottom by the shore. Could there possibly be some fairy-tale fish or monster of the deep to be found in this static, dense water?
The bus driver called Uncle Shaken to help him with a punctured tyre. Yerzhan was left in charge of the class. He saw his long shadow reflected on the water’s surface. Dean Reed in the boundless steppe, underneath the limitless sky, above the bottomless water. He briefly took Aisulu’s hand. Then he let go of it and pulled off his T-shirt and trousers and walked calmly into the forbidden water. For a moment he splashed about in it and then, to the admiration and terrified twittering of Aisulu and the others, he walked out of the water, shook himself off as if nothing had happened and dressed again in his canvas trousers and Chinese T-shirt.
Nobody snitched on him. And for a long time afterwards everyone recalled with respectful admiration Wunda’s dramatic escapade.

I’ve long felt a special connection with Uzbekistan, both because of a long fascination with Central Asia and because I was privileged to visit in the year it became independent from the USSR.
The author Ismailov was born in Kyrgyzstan, lived in Uzbekistan (whence he was forced to flee in 1994) and now lives in Britain, and this book is set in Kazakhstan. Does he qualify for my Uzbek writer? Well, it seems everyone doing a similar project to this one thinks so, and has chosen him. (Fair enough; after all, Uzbekistan lies at the very heart of the Silk Road, so you should expect a bazaar of influences, cultures and ethnicities, especially with the crazy, artificial borders left in Central Asia by the collapse of the USSR.) However, while they seem to have all gone for his The Railway, I’ve chosen The Dead Lake.
With a title like that coming from an Uzbek writer, you might (like me) expect the Dead Lake to be the what’s left of the Aral Sea (which perhaps should now be re-named the Arid Sea). But it refers to another Soviet ecological catastrophe, in another country altogether.
The scene is the Polygon, the poisoned zone in Kazakhstan where the Soviet Union carried out its atmospheric and underground nuclear tests, seemingly without any consideration for the people who lived on the supposedly empty steppe (which can’t help reminding this Australian of the British tests here).
The narrator meets “Wunderkind” Yerzhan on a train across the Kazakh steppe, where he is playing the violin. He angers Yerzhan, who has been permanently stunted by the incident of rash childish bravado I quoted above, by mistaking him for a 12-year-old boy (he is in fact 27). As the train rattles over the endless plain, he learns Yerzhan’s tragic story (and fills in some of the gaps himself).
After he realises at 12 that he has stopped growing, Yerzhan makes pathetic attempts to stretch himself.
The railway seems to be a symbol of progress, and it is sometimes hard to distinguish a nuclear test from a rumbling train. So often in this world you wonder whether ‘progress’, even on balance, is worth it, most especially for the people unfortunate enough to live where there are resources (minerals, forests, agricultural land, or just space) that others covet.
I’ll never forget Ismailov’s exquisite potted legend of that other Wunderkind, Mozart.
What a tragedy that this incandescent, angry and compassionate book, along with Ismailov’s other works, is banned in Uzbekistan.

 

ISMAILOV, Hamid (1954 – ), The Dead Lake, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield, Peirene, London, 2014, ISBN 978-1-908670-14-4