Sunday, April 1, 2018

The Tin Foil Hat Crowd: Volos’s Shpakovsky’s Hat

Andrei Volos’s Шапка Шпаковского (Shpakovsky’s Hat) is an odd kind of book, a pleasant-but-serious-too jumble sort of satirical novel that doesn’t always hold together particularly very well for a stickler like me but that reads along nicely enough to finish. I read all 316 pages. The description on the back of the book promises a novel about a novelist, Innokenty Dogavtsev (pseudonym Semyon Sukhotrub), who decides to kill off the unkillable hero of his thriller series, but Shpakovsky’s Hat is more about the absurdities of modern life, both private and public.

Volos tosses so many plot threads and tropes into this brief book that I almost expected to find an essay about kitchen sinks somewhere in the middle. There’s the issue of Sukhotrub’s novel, there’s publisher humor, there are work relationships (one of which, with an Alisa—she’d be Alice in English, like the Wonderland girl—quickly becomes far more personal), there are guy-time outings, there’s a political element, there’s a detainment, there’s freedom, and there’s the question of the many-layered tin foil hats that Shpakovsky (one of the buddies) wears to keep out voices. I sympathize about the hat since heaven only knows there’s way too much background noise in life these days. Full disclosure: I confess to having worn foil hats more than once during my first youth, though only when hennaing my hair.

I could go on and on about bits of humor that I marked—a publisher with big game trophies who proclaims the uselessness of electronic reading devices, a film producer saying any book with a print run lower than 60,000 copies has no propaganda value, etc., etc.—or mention lots of other enjoyable or sad-but-funny bits, but I’m not sure there’s much point. Shpakovsky’s Hat is the sort of book that can be compared to soufflés, meaning that they may be tasty or even yummy, but they’re airy and thus not especially satiating even if there are Big Topics (the flavor of cheese? some bits of bacon? the threat of high cholesterol?) involved. Of course I enjoyed the publishing world chunks most, though hope nobody ever has to go through the contract indignities Dogavtsev-Sukhotrub does.

The most interesting aspect of Shpakovsky’s Hat is that it kept me reading, despite the meandering plot and despite being rather short on Shpakovsky himself, since I think he’s the most interesting character, someone who’s tuned in but wants to tune out. It’s voice—Dogavtsev’s voice—that keeps the book going. His first-person narrative is chatty and humorous, nattering on and on without getting too dull, and, of course, blending in a reference or two to Moscow to the End of the Line for good measure. (Beyond that, NatsBest juror Veronika Kungurtseva’s review notes lots of apparent references to Master and Margarita.) Digging through the book for more notes and details would be completely untrue to my reading, which was, second confession, fairly mindless, which probably means careless. I’d been warned going into Shpakovsky’s Hat that it wasn’t Volos’s best work, though someone who’s been recommending Volos to me for a long time said I’d enjoy it anyway. Yes, I did, even if it felt too loose. (For more, Kelderek’s observations on the book, on the Ozon.ru site, are very, very close to mine.) I have several other Volos books on the shelf so I’m sure there will be more to come.

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up next: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Teacher Dymov, a lovely short story cycle, more books in English, and upcoming award news. I’m still rereading War and Peace, though focusing more on Peace than War this time around (there’s enough chaos in present-day life that the chaos of war in the novel feels a little overwhelming) and still don’t intend to blog about the experience.

0 comments:

Post a Comment