I did it. I joined a book club. I believe this means I have officially either become middle-aged, accepted my middle-aged-ness, or maybe just missed the roundtable discussion of some great reading that was one of my favorite parts of grad school.
First up for this book club was a newly translated edition of Gaito Gazdanov's The Spectre of Alexander Wolf. I had not heard of Gazdanov but I have a soft spot for pretty much any Russian writer (Babel, Chekov, Dostoyevsky, Sorokin and Tolstoy have all found their way onto my book shelf).
The story begins with our unnamed narrator. He, like Dostoyevsky's Roskolnikov, is reeling from a perceived crime he committed during the Russian Civil War. A "murder" he calls it, though most readers likely understand that this is a bit of an overstatement. However, this moment, this murder, is the critical moment of the narrator's life and, many years later, it is a haunting, the spectre that has followed him throughout his life, causing him great anguish, a "burning regret."
In many ways, the first few pages are somehow indebted to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, though Gazdanov quickly finds his own ground in dredging through the horror of war and the psychological impact it has on those who survive.
First up for this book club was a newly translated edition of Gaito Gazdanov's The Spectre of Alexander Wolf. I had not heard of Gazdanov but I have a soft spot for pretty much any Russian writer (Babel, Chekov, Dostoyevsky, Sorokin and Tolstoy have all found their way onto my book shelf).
The story begins with our unnamed narrator. He, like Dostoyevsky's Roskolnikov, is reeling from a perceived crime he committed during the Russian Civil War. A "murder" he calls it, though most readers likely understand that this is a bit of an overstatement. However, this moment, this murder, is the critical moment of the narrator's life and, many years later, it is a haunting, the spectre that has followed him throughout his life, causing him great anguish, a "burning regret."
In many ways, the first few pages are somehow indebted to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, though Gazdanov quickly finds his own ground in dredging through the horror of war and the psychological impact it has on those who survive.
I knew also that the constant proximity of death, the sight of the killed, wounded, dying, hanged and shot, the great red flame in the icy air above blazing villages on a winter's night, the carcass of a man's horse and those auditory impressions -- the alarm bell, shell explosions, the whistle of bullets, the desperate, unknown cries -- none of this ever passes with impunity. I knew that the silent, almost unconscious memory of war haunts the majority of people who have gone through it, leaving something broken in them once and for all.
The Spectre of Alexander Wolf is a story of breaking and the things that break us, about how we try to mend ourselves, about how we attempt to keep on living. "... as we're still alive," Gazdanov writes, "perhaps not all is lost." Not all is lost, but something is lost, irretrievable, as we march toward a fate that is inescapable. With Biblical undertones, the story of the first murder, of Cain and Able, the sense is that murder, death, killing, war is a part of what somehow makes us human and that this death makes a break and at that break is regret, the driving emotion that propels this narrative forth.
It is a slim, masterful book. Gazdanov should find himself on your bookshelf or, at the very least, at your next book club.
It is a slim, masterful book. Gazdanov should find himself on your bookshelf or, at the very least, at your next book club.