Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
Russian
Categories
Weblink
http://www.peirenepress.com/book …

WUNDERKIND YERZHAN OR A SMALL MAN FROM A BIG COUNTRY

Hamid Ismailov

A haunting Russian tale about the environmental legacy of the Cold War.
Set in Kazakhstan, near what was for 40 years the main Soviet test site for atomic weapons at Semipalatinsk.
The narrator is on a long train journey across the Kazakh steppe. He starts talking to Yerzhan, a violinist who is busking on the train. The narrator takes Yerzhan for a 12-year-old boy, but Yerzhan insists he is actually 27.
The central tragedy is that Yerzhan suddenly completely stops growing at the age of 12 – he has been irrevocably damaged by swimming in a lake of radioactive water in "the Zone". But the girl next door, whom he loves and who is a year younger than him, continues to grow taller, becoming more and more unattainable
Available products
Book

Published 2011-09-01 by Druzhba Narodov

Comments

“A haunting and resonant fable”

'This superb novella... reads like a modern fairy-tale, full of a surreal yet mundane horror.' Lesley McDowell

“I very much enjoyed Hamid's novella. It is a poem, similar in tone to the work of Andrey Platonov – but Hamid has given it his own particular Central Asian colouring.”

'A poetic masterpiece, a novella of shocking legacies, alien beauty and blistering emotional intensity which marks the start of Peirene's new Coming-of-Age: Towards Identity series.'

Book of the Year, 2014

Book of the Year, 2014

‘Like a Grimm's Fairy tale, this story transforms an innermost fear into an outward reality. We witness a prepubescent boy's secret terror of not growing up into a man. We also wander in a beautiful, fierce landscape unlike any other we find in Western Literature. And by the end of Yerzhan's tale we are awe-struck by our human resilience in the face of catastrophic, man-made, follies.

'A novella which draws on myth, fairy tale, poetry and traditional story-telling, it stirs them together to create an unusual parable of a modern arms race cruelly impacting on a traditional way of life.' Elizabeth Buchan

'A tantalising mixture of magical and grim realism a powerful study of alienation and environmental catastrophe.'

'Ismailov's ability to show how lives seemingly on the periphery are at the heart of the human experience – and to leave us enraged and bewitched – confirms him as a writer of immense poetic power.' Kapka Kassabova,