Reviews

I'm not altogether sure that this book has any lasting relevance or appeal beyond to citizens of Lviv in 2011. Written as a result of an invitation from the mayor of the city, aside from being very much of its place this translation by Reuben Woolley starts off okay but increasingly becomes annoying to read.

It's magic realism for the masses - while it's quirky, none of the symbols really come to mean anything by the end. We start with the premise of hippies gathering by a grave in Lviv supposedly containing Jimi Hendrix's hand, they're met by a KGB agent who claims that he was asked to keep surveillance over them during Soviet years but in doing so became a Hendrix fan himself and arranged for the hand to be delivered to Lviv. Instead of really developing the Hendrix theme, Kurkov decides to string us along on several disparate threads, and bearing in mind I only finished this book yesterday I already can't really remember which character is involved in which. We've got a character who, to earn a living, removes kidney stones from clients by driving them over Lviv's cobbles, falls in love with a woman allergic to money and cures her with some of these stones; we've got another who's a lighting technician and works with the KGB agent to try and figure out why 'anomalies' involving the smell of the sea and seagulls attacking citizens are occurring in Lviv; we've got a side story involving a real-life organisation helping the city's homeless. Is it bizarre? Yes. Is it interesting? No. The principal mystery - that of a fictional sailor escaped from a book who is causing the 'anomalies' - made absolutely no sense to me. I suppose this novel would be a nice tribute to Lviv for those who live there, but I can't see why it had to be translated for a wider audience.

On that point, I alluded to Woolley's translation above. As has already been pointed out by The Guardian, he displays an annoying tendency to use the past progressive incorrectly - an item "was sat" on the table, "he was stood". I'd add to this an irritating number of overtranslations, not least when translating dialogue when Woolley seems to have had recourse to a primary school thesaurus to find as many synonyms for 'said' as he could. Overall, as many others have pointed out, this seems to have been longlisted for the International Booker Prize for political reasons (and perhaps because one of the jury is also a translator from Ukrainian).