Review: Serhij Zjadan unbearable in « Mesopotamia »
« Between the rivers », Meso Potamoswas the historical area of today’s Iraq where the first human written language arose. Between two other rivers, Dnipro and Donets, Ukraine’s second largest city of Charkiv is located. 2014 – The same year that Russian -backed militia exclaimed independent people’s republics in Donetsk and Luhansk, just a few miles away – Serhij Zjadan’s portrayal of this modern two -flood land was published.
« Mesopotamia » is about charks in a similar way that Fellini’s « Roma » is about Rome. At the center is the city’s mood and cloudy logic. The mediation takes place in the form of nine vignettes about as many male protagonists with overlapping lives. The indebted Jura, Diverse worker Mario, the student Roman – they pass each other on the street, goes to the same funeral, has had it together with the same girl.
Not because They care about either one or the other. Sofia Uggla’s phenomenal translation captures men’s crass and disillusioned gaze on the world. They are beyond good and evil, too disadvantaged to do other than soup, fight and try to lie with as many women as possible.
Zjadan (born 1974) is one of Ukraine’s most award -winning and internationally renowned writers. He has published a couple of dozen poetry collections and novels and has a successful side career as a singer in the ski band Zjadan in Sobaki. Last year, he acquired in the army, after a long commitment to the Russian invasion and for a democratic Ukraine.
You want to like such a person, or at least what he writes. But it was a long time since I found a book as unbearable as « Mesopotamia ». The reasons are not very refined: it depends on the constant, almost compulsive sexism. Women appear exclusively as bodies to be assessed and then fucked. Whether the intercourse is voluntary can rarely be determined, as sentences like « she made no resistance » are more a rule than exceptions in the depictions of the seduction process.
Moralism comes so not from me, but from the novel
When you point out This is rarely that long before anyone accuses one of moralism. Well, says the person concerned, you think literature should only be about good people? That it should portray reality not as it is, but as it should be? That a writer should clearly identify the novel characters as culpable instead of letting the reader decide for himself?
No, of course I don’t think so. But it is also not easy to formulate what the problem actually consists in. However, I would like to think that it has to do with the interpellation, that is, how the text calls me as a reader. « Mesopotamia » states a relationship between art and world where the previous one offers a saturated mirror image of the latter. Through its only marginal exaggerations, it is assumed to say something true about how the world is acquired. What I am asked to do is confirm this interpretation. Men and women is So – how nice we can admit it!
Moralism does not come from me, but from the novel. It is the one who prescribes how to behave. Its tiring « openness » does not originate from a respect for human diversity, but on the contrary from a rigid, immature and thus literally uninteresting notion of what she is capable of. And then – I discover on Spotify – it is still better than Serhij Zjadan’s band.
Read More texts by Rebecka Kärde and More reviews of current books in DN Culture
