The Blue Lantern And Other Stories. - Review - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by Robbie Clipper Sethi

THE BLUE LANTERN AND OTHER STORIES by Victor Pelevin. Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield. New York: New Directions, 1997. 179 pages. $22.95.

Victor Pelevin is not constrained by reality. Unlike many of his contemporaries--post-Soviet-realists or even his fellows in the Russian avant garde--he does not seem particularly bothered by it. That is not to say that he ignores the bleak conditions and sometimes hilarious cynicism of his fellow Russians. "News from Nepal" begins The Blue Lantern innocently enough, with a woman reporting for work at a trolley park--the raw material of socialist realism, official literature in the Soviet Union since shortly after the revolution--but for Pelevin's description of the traffic Lyubochka must negotiate to get to work:

   The sight of the trucks streaming by interminably was so oppressive that it
   was impossible to imagine what senseless and cruel will could possibly be
   organizing the movement of these oil-spattered horrors through the grey
   November fog that covered the entire town. It was hard to believe that
   human beings could be responsible.

I was tempted to interpret a sign, "Abandon robes, you are entering an industrial premises!" as awkward translation on the part of Andrew Bromfield, which, without the original, I could not check; but then I heard the voice of Dante breaking through the fog of Soviet propaganda banners. At times I did question Bromfield's choice of words, but not often enough to bring this fluid, easy-to-read translation into question.

The title story may stand as a fair illustration of Pelevin's method. A group of boys in a camp dormitory try to frighten one another with gruesome and surrealistic tales in which dream and reality, life and death, become indistinguishable. As in his novella, The Yellow Arrow (1996, New Directions paperback), in which a Russian communal apartment turns into the yellow "train traveling toward a ruined bridge. The train we're riding in," one cannot read far in Pelevin without abandoning reality.

On Lyubochka's bad day in the technical department as a rationalization engineer, reality begins to fade with a conversation between two engineers regarding the nature of electricity. Pelevin's characters carry on semi-absurdist, sometimes philosophical conversations in the oddest of situations. The world created as a result values the unseen as much as (if not more than) the concrete reality he portrays so vividly. Outside in the November slush Lyubochka encounters two men in nightshirts discussing the spiritual and psychological implications of a poster showing a man carrying a poster. "Aren't you cold?" Lyubochka asks. "Not at all. He's dreaming all of this." Traditional enough, and yet this story ends brilliantly with the mixture of serious observation and whimsy that runs through all of these stories, most of them long and luxurious in keeping with the Russian pace of life.

Chickens discuss the nature of existence, like men (well, better than men); a storage shed falls into a kind of post-Dostoevskian despair and commits suicide. In the brilliant chess story, "Mid-Game," streetwalkers turn out to be men and the men who try to kill them--but it's not fair to give away all of Pelevin's surprises. Practically every story has one, and they so subtly creep up on the reader that this reader didn't know whether to gasp or laugh out loud. I'd recommend a little bit of both.

ROBBIE CLIPPER SETHI Rider University