The Underground in Around the World in 80 Books

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Nov 26, 2021 Tony rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kids, translated-fiction, novels, own-loanable, setting-russia

Phew -- this is a dense book, and one whose many layers are unlikely to fully open up to readers (such as myself) who are not well-read in Russian literature and the waning days of the Soviet Union. It's narrated by the ghost/corpse of Mbobo aka Kirill aka Pushkin, a 12-year-old boy whose body rots away as he tells his life story -- in other words, literally, Notes From the Underground... His mother was a Kakassian from Siberia who came to Moscow to work at the 1980 Olympics and had a tumble wit Phew -- this is a dense book, and one whose many layers are unlikely to fully open up to readers (such as myself) who are not well-read in Russian literature and the waning days of the Soviet Union. It's narrated by the ghost/corpse of Mbobo aka Kirill aka Pushkin, a 12-year-old boy whose body rots away as he tells his life story -- in other words, literally, Notes From the Underground... His mother was a Kakassian from Siberia who came to Moscow to work at the 1980 Olympics and had a tumble with an unnamed African athlete, resulting in Mbobo. And just to complete the identity blend, her paternal grandfather was Russian, supposedly descended from 13th-century Russian hero Alexander Nevsky.

The boy's life story is told via the framework of Moscow metro stations, with each 2-5 page section pegged to a particular station (at the time of the Olympics, there were about 110 stations, today there are double that). This framework allows for a freewheeling, almost stream of consciousness weaving in of Soviet history, architecture, and arts to his autobiography. The magnificent underground stations become a kind of refuge from the boy, or as he puts it about 2/3 of the way into the book: "The metro is my innards, my thoughts, my experiences, my life, my cavities, my veins, my arteries. If you cut me open on the operating table, you wouldn't find blue veins and red arteries, but the multicolored web of the Moscow metro stations."

The boy's life is clearly dense with meaning (his mother's name is "Moscow"), and his struggles at schools, and his mother's rocky relationships with a drunk literary figure named Gelb, and then a policeman from one of the Central Asian republics, named Nazar, are clearly meant to contain social and political allegories. The author, after fleeing Uzbekistan, lived for a time in Moscow and it's hard not to sense vignettes of his own experience navigating the city as a non-Russian, in the boy's story. Literary references and real-life writers abound, and in that sense, it's a bit of a struggle to read while knowing that most of these are completely passing me by. For the non-expert in Russian literature, the book is best perhaps, at evoking a sense of dusk settling over Soviet-era Moscow. ...more

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Jan 08, 2017 Keith rated it it was ok · review of another edition

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Around the World in 80 Books