The Railway, by Hamid Ismailov

After hearing nothing but positive hype about Ismailov’s works, I set about trying to purchase them. Alas, the majority were available only in the UK when I bought this, so I paid a lot extra to have it imported. And then it sat, useless, on my shelf as other books flitted into my field of view and then back out again. I shouldn’t've waited: this was an extraordinary work, superbly translated, and offers a humorous insight into a country most people only know, quite unfortunately, through Craig Murray.

This is too bad. One of the things that so enchanted me about Chinghiz Aitmatov’s The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years was how the entire story was really just a vessel for telling Kazakhstan’s many myths and legends—Aitmatov copied the modernist’s tendency to tell an entire life’s story through a single day’s flashback. Ismailov uses no such gimmick to frame his story, though this does not detract from its resolute charm. Far wittier and far less tragic than Aitmatov, Ismailov seems to be, in a way, euphemizing the impact the Soviet Revolution had on Uzbek society.

Of course, I couldn’t claim expertise on Uzbekistan—others at this site, Nathan most notably, can. But the vignettes of traditional life, whether the terrors of the mountain Kyrgyz, or the outrageous bombast of low-level Party hacks, or the grim realities of going to and eventually returning from the GULAG, always found ways of inserting humor into the fundamental tragedy of Soviet life. My ignorance of Uzbek life was highlighted by the discussion of the differences between the Sarts and Uzbeks, a distinction I really didn’t know existed before. Similarly, the pervasive Tajikness of cities like Samarkand was never driven home despite having read of it before.

But what I was most delighted by was not just the style—Robert Chandler manages to make Uzbek stories deeply funny to a Western reader, which is no mean feat if all those Effendi stories are actually considered funny—but the glimpses of the insanity of Soviet living. From the absurdity of Mullah Ulmas-Greeneyes, who travels the world during World War II only to wind up in Brighton Beach, New Jersey, to the quasi-madness of Father Iohann in the one Orthodox church, life under the Soviets seems almost frivolous, if nevertheless dark. Interesting, too, is how the local Soviet officials are cast not in oppressive tones, but absurdist ones: most are scheming idiots, unable to carry through their simply plans to frame American emigrés, or to build up their own personal wealth. There is an amusing part where a man pretending to have memorized a partially burnt novel met with Aitmatov, and that Aitmatov used the word “manqurt” inappropriately as the misunderstanding of a French word he had never before heard.

The names are brilliant: most are puns, hyphenated with their profession: Bahry-Granny-Fortunes, Mukum-Happy-Trigger, Hoomer the Homer of Gilas, and so on. All of it adds to what can only be called an effervescent charm. There is far too much here to discuss, and far too much I cannot discuss intelligently in this crowd (see Nick’s review for an example why), but I simply cannot recommend this novel enough. It is, in a single word, brilliant. And Ismailov is truly worthy of his reputation.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust