THE BIG GREEN TENT

Fiction

Dead characters walking

THE BIG GREEN TENT

By Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated by Polly Gannon

579 pp. Picador 

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

It appears to me that American fiction writers work to please their readers, while Europeans write to please critics. How else to explain the purple praise lavished on The Big Green Tent, a tome by “one of Russia’s most famous writers,” “a must-read,” “Compelling, addictive reading,” “never boring,” and “As grand, solid and impressively all-encompassing as the title implies”?

List me among the ignorati: I can agree only with the first and last of these plugs. For 400 of its almost 600 pages I had to beat myself up to keep reading.

Ulitskaya whimsically pursues a kind of anti-narrative, telling a character’s story to its end, killing him or her off – then in the next chapter or so: What? Here’s Olga or Ilya again, young and lusty, living another piece of his/her life.

This is a lazy way to write. It relieves the author of the tedium of making sure things happen in some logical way. Among other downsides: It’s hard to remember what the characters are supposed to look like, who’s the gorgeous sex-bomb, who’s the sad-sack hanger-on. (The morphing of Russian names, always a problem for Anglophiles, doesn’t help.) And it’s hard to care. I fell asleep during Ilya’s interrogation with the KGB, not caring what happened to him because I already knew – Ulitskaya had told the rest of his story in an earlier segment.

All right, I’m being unfair. This book doubtless resonates with Russians, with anyone who lived, or whose parents lived, under KGB tyranny. In her postscript Ulitskaya pays homage to the people who inspired her characters, “the innocents who stumbled into the meat grinder of their time, those who survived, and those who were maimed, the witnesses, the heroes, the victims.”

The translator provides citations for the poetry, all of which is unfamiliar to me and which, again, may be meaningful to readers with a Russian background.

The basic story line follows three boyhood chums from their bullied school days through post-Stalinist political repression. Two of them, Ilya and Mikha, end up at odds with the KGB, although for very different reasons. Ilya, a wily activist and photographer, is involved in samizdat, the promulgation of illicit underground writings, music and art.  Mikha gets into trouble for his empathy for the downtrodden. The third, Sanya, a musician who lives in his own cultural world, pays no attention to politics – yet in the end emigrates for no discernible reason. The author lingers so long and in such a convoluted way on Ilya that when Mikha resurfaces late in the book I scrawled in the margin, “who?” 

Ultiskaya’s men and women couple and uncouple, marry and divorce in a slippery, thoughtless way. They seem to live in single rooms measuring 15 square feet – is this possible? They get and lose jobs at the whim of the state.

There is subtle satire, perhaps a joke or two, for those in the know. She writes of an unlucky diplomat who was “the fifth deputy of the seventh assistant in a department that had been slated for dissolution for twenty years already.”

This author doesn’t describe what happens in Soviet prisons or work camps. Everybody already knows. She has one character compare the Soviets to Hitler: “This regime doesn’t allow a man any way out, either. They always get the better of those who have a conscience.”

Elsewhere Ilya muses, “Maybe it was true that only beauty would save the world, or truth, or some other high-flown garbage, but fear was still more powerful than anything else. Fear destroyed everything born of beauty, the tender shoots of all that was fine, wise, eternal…”

Mikha’s is the most coherent story. His singular talent in life is empathy for others; he finds his calling as a gifted teacher at a school for the deaf and mute. On a walking holiday he and his friends befriend a family of Tatars, an ethnicity suffering displacement and discrimination by the authorities. He tries to help them, later contributes pro-Tatar articles to an illicit magazine. He is found out, arrested, imprisoned. The deaf-mute school apologetically fires him; he can’t get another job, gets into trouble again. His interrogator offers him exile if he will denounce his friends. But he knows he will die in exile; Russia is everything to him. He won’t sign a denunciation in any case. He knows prison camp will kill him. For him there is just one solution.

I will admit that in the end, confronted with yet another character I had forgotten about – but who was suddenly important to Sanya – I felt a momentary need to go back and read the book again, if only to find out why. Perhaps this is the test of important literature, that it will provide new insights with every reading.

But I don’t believe I will apply that test to this book.

Journalist Marty Carlock was a regular contributor to The Boston Globe for almost two decades, authored A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston, currently writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines and publishes short fiction in literary journals.