BOOK REVIEW: Short stories and novellas on Ukraine and Ukrainian themes (12/19/04)

BOOK REVIEW

Short stories and novellas on Ukraine and Ukrainian themes

"A Land the Size of Binoculars" by Igor Klekh. Translated from the Russian and with a foreword by Michael M. Naydan and Slava Yastremski. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Writings From An Unbound Europe, 2004.

by Michael Naydan

Igor Klekh emerges as a writer from the crossroads of Europe - western Ukraine - influenced by the Russian and Ukrainian literary traditions, as well as the languages of both East-Central Europe and his native country. As one of the brightest lights to emerge from the post-perestroika literary scene, Mr. Klekh's work has been welcomed as a synthesis of multiple literary traditions and celebrated as some of the most breathtakingly original prose of recent years.

"A Land the Size of Binoculars" collects the five short pieces and novella that comprise Klekh's "Galician Motifs," plus two more-recent novellas. Throughout, Mr. Klekh passes over landscapes as intimate as the terrain between fathers and sons and as broad as the wild and mysterious Carpathian Mountains. All the prose pieces in the collection concern Ukraine and Ukrainian topics, and Mr. Klekh is publishing a collection in Russia that mirrors this Northwestern volume.

His work has drawn comparisons to Jorges Luis Borges for the blurring of boundaries between forms and styles; to Nikolai Gogol's (Mykola Hohol's) focus on the ontology of the word; to Umberto Eco's use of esoteric knowledge; and to the stylistic innovations reminiscent of Latin American magical realists.

"Everything Klekh writes has its own intonation, its own dialect, its own style, and it is very convincing and manifest. It would be much more difficult to discuss what he writes about. Because as a true master (people are born masters and do not become them), behind his attitude to the material at hand - to that wall of the bungalow, to that rooster painted on it, or to a sound being sung - he evidently quite diligently and quite skillfully conceals his author's "I." ... That is why I leave it to you the readers to judge what he is writing about." (Andrei Bitov, from the Introduction).

Mr. Klekh was born in Ukraine and is a Russian writer of both fiction and essays. Growing up in Lviv, he intereacted with a number of leading contemporary Ukrainian writers, among them Yuri Andrukhovych, Yuri Vynnychuk and Viktor Neborak. Mr. Klekh has been living in Moscow since 1994, where he is a member of the Union of Russian Writers and the Russian PEN Club. His first book, "An Incident with a Classic," was published in Russian in 1998. He was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize in 1995 and was the winner of the 2000 Yuri Kazakov Prize given for the best Russian short story of the year.

The book, which has a list price of $18.95 in paperback, is available on the Northwestern website, http://nupress.northwestern.edu/title.cfm?ISBN=0-8101-1943-9.

It is also available at www.amazon.com and from other Internet booksellers.

Michael M. Naydan is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Pennslyvania State University.

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