Back when I was first starting my Global Challenge, trying to find a book for each country, I asked my boyfriend which book I should read for Ukraine, considering he and his family are Ukrainian. He lent me this one. He'd never read it, but he liked Serhiy Zhadan—he listened to his music and had met him once or twice (for a fairly large country, Ukraine is also pretty small, if you get my meaning). So I took the book and proceeded to not read it for several months.

Then Ukraine was invaded. My boyfriend's family imploded; friends and relatives were in peril, suddenly a week without texts wasn't just someone forgetting to write, it was something terrifying, something so much bigger. They worked to send supplies and aid over. We went to protests and fundraisers. And, for several more months, I didn't read this book.

I don't know what finally made me open it up, but I'm glad I did. In Voroshilovgrad—the title itself referencing the Russified name of a place now called Luhansk—Serhiy Zhadan writes of a Ukraine which is at once living and dead, simultaneously dying and being resurrected. He describes broken asphalt and train tracks that go nowhere, wandering dogs, endless wheat fields and sun-bleached negatives where portraits of Lenin once hung. It feels wrong to say this is eerily prescient, presaging the now-nearly-obliterated state of many of these places in Eastern Ukraine since the war began... It feels wrong because all of this really started long before 2022 or 2014 or even 1991, and so in a way Zhadan is observing the past just as much as he is telling the future.

I've been vague about what Voroshilovgrad actually is, and it's basically a Ukrainian odyssey, a road novel where the road just keeps bringing you back to the place you were trying to leave. There is an overarching narrative, but it's very loose, and you find yourself caring less and less about it as the story moves along: the real meat here is the series of surreal episodes our main character Herman experiences. A midnight soccer match with ghosts, a wedding at a village of Stundist smugglers, a drink of cognac with a psychopathic capitalist, an auspicious birth in the middle of the steppe. It is, by turns, contemplative, hilarious, mysterious, erotic, tense, depressing, and absurd.

The writing here is superb. Really, really wonderful. Zhadan is a master of simile.

Here is how he describes taking shelter in a building during a rainstorm: "...as if we were diving into a tin cookie jar while kids happily drummed on it with sticks."

Or his description of the desolate cornfields: "...yellow cornstalks that swayed in the wind like hangers in an empty closet..."

And this lovely sentence about a man entering a house where the main character has been cooped up for a while: "There was fresh air nestled into his leather jacket, as though he had come carrying scraps of an October morning in his pockets."

Just wonderful. I should mention the translation, though. It is, in the broad strokes, magnificent—perfectly representing Zhadan's expansive, textured, visual prose—but sloppy in the details. Missing punctuation, duplicate words, and omitted phrases are common. There are a few sentences that are totally botched and garbled beyond comprehensibility. Deep Vellum is an indie publisher and a nonprofit and I respect their mission (and in fact I did buy two more books from them after I finished this) but come on guys, hire a copyeditor, please!

_____________________

Global Challenge: Ukraine