Twelve Loops features some familiar topography: readers will recall Chrotopil’, the setting of Recreations, and, of course, L’viv, the city at the center of Andrukhovych’s fictional universe. In Twelve Loops L’viv attracts two artists, the Austrian photographer Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen and, sixty years earlier, the Lemko poet Bohdan-Igor Antonych, with lethal and inexplicable magnetism.

Yes, Lviv – the city of police brass orchestras, provincial community meetings, public coffee-houses and coop tearooms, the city with an enormous jail right on the main street, very near the poet’s licentious dwelling . It is not difficult to distinguish in this city two main segments appealing to Antonych.

The first is the L’viv subterranean, buried and flooded, with dead-ended tunnels and corridors, secret half-covered labyrinths and a walled-in river against whose shores herds of blinded fish rub fitfully, pushing from underneath at buildings and cracking the city’s dinted asphalt shell.

The second is the proletarian L’viv, perhaps even the lumpen L’viv, all those terribly lit and impassable spring-autumn suburbs with all manner of mines, tanneries, refineries and breweries, with ubiquitous dirty street markets and vendor carts and limousines, fallen apart and swallowed forever by the street mud…

When Zumbrunnen comes to Ukraine at the end of the century, this L’viv – and Antonych – are only memories, but memories, echoes, reflections, things bygone are, in Andukhovych’s fiction, omniscient, stamped onto the characters’ souls and woven into their dreams. Zumbrunnen himself is not merely a foreign photographer who, with the Westerner’s other-worldly sharp and somewhat misguided judgement, observes Ukraine’s transition from the post-Soviet chaos into post-chaotic inertia. He is also a descendant of a forgotten Austro-Hungarian imperial forester who managed the Carpathian woods a few generations ago. He is also, in the grand scheme of the novel, a man with the power to fulfill a prophecy for an exiled Gypsy king. Both facts – the distant stirring of the ancestor’s genes and the words of a prophecy about someone he’s never met – have very real bearing on Zumbrunnen’s fate, because Andrukhovych’s world is old, layered, and infinitely connected.

How this connectedness is revealed to us, how casually we overlook it, and what price we might have to pay for our ignorance are all themes of this novel. Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen develops an affair with his Ukrainian interpreter, Roma Voronych, whose husband, the writer Arthur Pepa, is going through a midlife crisis. All three are invited by a mysterious benefactor to attend a conference at an inn high in the mountains. Roma’s eighteen-year-old daughter, a professor of literature, a fashionable clip-maker, and two strippers, contracted by the same benefactor, also come. Once this group is delivered to the isolated mountain-top inn, whose own walls are swathed in mysterious and tragic history, it is only natural that super-natural things should begin to happen. For instance, Roma’s long-dead first husband comes to claim her body.

It is to the author’s great credit that the reader follows effortlessly as the characters shuffle and stumble between their habitual reality and the magical world that spills out of their dreams and drunken hallucinations. When is Zumbrunnen closer to the truth, we are asked – when he writes to his friends in Austria that “there is nothing sweeter than the sense of gradually inhabiting the Other. One day it occurs to you that indeed, without exagerration, you could live here. And there is nothing impossible, if the next day you want to be and live only here,” or when he realizes that “it was horror… to sit in this oscillating dark pit, in this overfried grinding mixture of smells, among these strange people, to listen to them howl along with the tape-player”? When he camps and swims in green heated-through mountain rivers or when he dreams he is one those blind fish locked under the Opera Theater in L’viv? Or both?

Of course Twelve Loops is a telling of myth. The reader will have both the pleasure of wonder and the pleasure of recognition for myths are universal and this one is no exception.

Twelve Loops by Yuri Andrukhovych
Dvanadtsat’ Obruchiv
Kyiv: Krytyka, 2004.

The theme of Dario Franceschini’s second novel is the nature of madness, an exploration of that subtle line that divides normality from what we regard as mental aberration. Like the skin that separates our pulsing body fluids from the air around us, or the transparent surface of the water in a flooded church – the only straight line in a building filled with collapsing columns and refracted arches. Or again, the straight line of the tables that Ignazio walked across in mid morning on an otherwise normal day. Until that morning, Ignazio’s madness – possibly a genetic trait since his brother had died in a lunatic asylum – was confined to his dreams, which were filled with colour, sensuality and violence, in contrast with a lifetime’s drudgery spent filling the yellowing files with his beautiful copperplate handwriting.

Franceschini’s novel maintains an extraordinarily creative dichotomy between the tragic lyricism of events seen through Ignazio’s eyes during the rest of that day, and the reaction of his colleagues, Ragioniere Garbioni and the Registrar himself, Conservatore Ansaldi. These are two stereotypes of Italian officialdom, consumed by petty concerns and squalid ambitions. Garbioni is the self-appointed representative who undertakes to report Ignazio’s behaviour to the Registrar, and is then asked to investigate the matter further. His main concern, apart from missing lunch at home and his afternoon nap, is how to report the incident to his wife and colleagues and how best to turn it to his own advantage. The Registrar is a thoroughly odious individual, enjoying power without lifting a finger to earn it. He knows how to press flesh at the appropriate moments and can work the “system” to his advantage. Later that afternoon, while waiting to interview Garbioni, Ansaldi flaunts the regulations by lighting a cigarette in his office, with disastrous consequences. However, using threats and influence, he succeeds in shifting the blame for the ensuing catastrophe onto the innocent shoulders of his ex-employee. The black humour that results from the behaviour of both these men highlights the magical qualities of Ignazio’s last hours.

Dreams are a rich vein for literary exploration and Franceschini deserves credit for mining it in all its technicolour and fantastic detail. His style and imagery have a poetic quality that is truly captivating. Two of the most memorable images conjured up in Ignazio’s dreams are the iridescent clouds of imagination escaping from the dissected brain of a corpse undergoing autopsy; and the brilliant green lawn surrounded by fiery terracotta walls where Ignazio realises that just by “standing upright, one’s head is already in the sky”.

Like a tightrope walker for whom a moment’s loss of concentration can be fatal, Ignazio has held his schizophrenia in check for years, dividing his existence between the monotony and sepia tones of his everyday life and the technicoloured brilliance of his dreams. When Ragioniere Garbioni’s bluffs his way into Ignazio’s flat, the shutters in the ordered part are tightly closed, shrouding it in gloomy secrecy. Only when he discovers the hidden door leading into the “dream room” is he overwhelmed by sunlight and chaos, suggesting that Ignazio’s schizophrenia is a sense more real than the half-light of the normal world. However, the book offers no neat conclusions. Readers are left wondering about Ignazio’s love for Lisa/Laura, the muse whom he abandoned but who continues to travel with him in dreams. It is to her that he turns in his last moments, having already lived this moment again and again in his dreams. Ignazio’s passage from the nightmarish turn of the afternoon’s events to the paradise that awaits him is as innocent and unblemished as his madness.

Franceschini is a lawyer and member of parliament, deputy-secretary for the Partito Democratico, a key ally in Walter Veltroni’s Margherita coalition at the last general election. It is tempting to read his latest book as an allegory of Italian society and politics, but this may be too simplistic. However, in questioning our definition of madness, Franceschini makes a valiant attempt to redefine the straight line between creativity and bureaucracy, dream and reality, normality and madness, decency and corruption, and in doing so creates some memorable images and characters.

by Dario Franceschini
Bompiani, Italy
154 pgs., €13.00

Dario Franceschini’s first novel, Nelle vene quell’acqua d’argento (2006), was awarded the Premier Roman 2007 in Chambéry, France, and in Italy the Premio Opera Prima Città di Penne and Premio Bacchelli. The novel has just been published in France by Gallimard under the title Dans les veines ce fleuve d’argent (May 2008). For Italian reviews of both novels, see the .

Lucinda Byatt translates from Italian into English and reviews books for Scotland on Sunday and other publications.
Contact: mail@lucindabyatt.com

Flawed, yet engaging—at least in the opinion of the author himself—The Bad Memory takes place in 1977 and tells the story of Julian Santos: a man hired by a mysterious widow to ghostwrite her war criminal husband’s autobiography. Santos’s search into his subject’s past leads him to discover the secret town Alcahaz, which has been erased from all official records, and causes him to relive his experiences as a child during the Spanish Civil War.

What distinguishes Another Damn Novel from its predecessor, and makes the book a fun read, is that in this re-release, each chapter closes with an anonymous reader’s disparaging but humorous criticism of Rosa’s writing style and techniques that can be extended and seen as a critique of mainstream, realistic writing as a whole.

No character, word, or quote is safe from Rosa’s scathing self-criticism. This anonymous reader rips apart every aspect of the novel, wittily revealing interesting insights into the writing process and shortcomings of conventional novels. He jokes about the Moleskine journals that “writers” can’t live without, the author’s inability to create believable female characters, and the author’s habit of constructing whole chapters around bizarre words chosen at random from an encyclopedia.

For example, here’s what the anonymous reader has to say following a chapter in which the protagonist—through luck and a series of coincidences—discovers the town he’s been searching for:

Fate, the easy way out for bad writers. Chance, the unforeseen, a turn of luck, deus ex machina that in this case is aided by infallible intuition, by a hunch that helps the journey move along. Fate fatefully reveals the fateful existence of Alcahaz through a photo that fatefully falls from a book chosen by fate (well, actually, a photo prettily “born from the womb of the book”). And if fate isn’t enough, the protagonist’s resolute intuition enters the game, the hunch that there is something curious about this place, accented by the widow’s revelation that her husband’s voice “lightly trembled” upon speaking the name, and that “he became furious, he told me to shut up, he lost his temper.” Hmm, how curious, the protagonist will think, we imagine him raising an eyebrow and stroking his beard. What infuriated him and made him tremble upon speaking the name? Hmm, hmm, there could be something here, we shall see, we shall see. [Translation mine.]

Although Rosa jokes in the introduction that the impertinent critic is trying to “sabotage” his work, the re-writing of The Bad Memory becomes the central aspect of the novel. But it would be too simplistic to portray this as just a clever exercise in metafiction. Instead Rosa’s desire to rewrite his first novel reflects the novel’s plot (Santos’ ghostwriting of the war criminal’s autobiography) and explores Spain’s desire to rewrite its own violent past.

By drawing so much attention to his “bad writing,” Rosa runs a risk of alienating his audience. Who really wants to read 200 pagse of a crappy novel just to enjoy some snarky comments? But by linking up to the Spanish tradition of Civil War novels with a narrative that’s actually compelling, the still up-and-coming Rosa mostly avoids this problem, creating a book that—as a meditation on the nature of authorship, as a story about the Civil War—can be enjoyed on several levels.

Another Damn Novel about the Spanish Civil War!
By Isaac Rosa
Untranslated
Seix Barral
432 pp., 20,50 euros