BOTM May The Railway by Hamad Ismailov

[Celia]

Hamid Ismailov, a journalist from Uzbekistan, weaves a colorful yet dark tapestry of history and reality in his writing. The Railway, his first novel translated into English, demonstrates his ability to write satire while being ‘ironic, hilarious, tender and full of ‘toska’, an ‘untranslatable word” showing longing and melancholy.

[Gail]

Both of this month's reads centered around trains and railways!
And they could not be more different.
The Railway is by Hamid Ismailov who is a Uzbek although his parents were working in Kirghizistan when he was born. There are two main characters in his book. The first is the village of Gilas in Central Asia on what was once the Silk Road in what is now known as Uzbekistan. For much of the past 100 years Gilas has been part of the Soviet Union. The second character is the straight and undeviating rail line that ties the Soviet Union together and stands in for all that is unbending in a land that has traditionally bent to everything including a harsh desert environment.
This book is not for the faint of heart. There are eight pages of characters in the List of Characters. There is rape of boys, girls and grown men. There is no chronological plot. There is a deep belief in God threaded throughout the book but it is a God that few western people would recognize. There is what is known as "Soviet Magical Realism" (who knew?) which colors all interactions between the characters.
Much like how one listens to a story from a stranger on a train, each chapter waivers by itself and only after reading many of these separate stories do you begin to piece them together and hear the history of Gilas from about 1900 to 1980 through these multiple interconnected vignettes. However, you may hear the beginning of one person's story at the end of another's and the book does not pretend to tie it all up nicely for the reader although you do ultimately find out the fate of quite a few of the characters we meet. It is just that you may learn their fate 20 chapters before you meet them alive.
The book is not meant to be a puzzle however, as some modern books of this ilk are. Rather it is the wash of impressions, people, myths, the humor of those in despair, the satire aimed largely at the communists but also largely without real venom although generation after generation are sent away to the Gulags. There is a huge host of ethnic groups represented in Uzbekistan and we get to meet many of them, from Koreans, to Jews and many of the nomadic tribes of the steppes. Also, the author has given the western reader over 150 notes which detail the background and history of the stories you are reading. I learned a huge amount about Uzbekistan from these notes and I learned even more about the Soviet era outside of Russia where there was no proletariat but only people who grew fruit and traders. These people were forced into slave labor to build a railway or to read slogans on top of the rail station or to sign up for party membership in order to gain a pension.
It is quite a different book but ultimately I enjoyed it and would give it 3.5 stars if GR let me.

[Celia]

Gail wrote: "Both of this month's reads centered around trains and railways!
And they could not be more different.
The Railway is by Hamid Ismailov who is a Uzbek although his parents were working in Kirghizist..."
😀

[Celia]

I'm sorry to say I could not get into this book. So... I have put it on the shelf and hope to get back to it some other time.