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Compartment No 6 by Rosa Liksom (view source)
Revision as of 13:27, 21 April 2014
, 13:27, 21 April 2014no edit summary
But what the blurb wants to sell us, and what fell much shorter than the spirit of the evocative USSR descriptions did for me, is the relationship in the compartment between the two characters. I just found this dull, for all the unlikeliness in her remaining utterly silent to him throughout the train ride, for all the many trips and diversions they take together, and for all the intimacy they share over the picnic table. He might have been a fully realised character and all his racial bigotry accurately portrayed, but he adds a sense of unreliable narrator to things with his own cut-and-paste stories. Her backstory is a part of things too, but presented to us in random wisps – I was reminded of the way one looks out of the train windows watching the world go by and through the angles of light is suddenly given instead a reflection of oneself at the window.
And as for the way these two form a companionship, considering their innate differences, well… It just wasn't for me. I found myself thinking the whole book was actually geared to showing the negative history of Russia – the train was the country, hurtling through either saying the wrong things or silently, meekly conceding things, and miring itself in a boring future of alcohol, racism, sexual violence and tedium. As you can see I was almost in the end forced to make the book about Russia and Russianness for my own purposes, for I found little enjoyment in these pages elsewhere. If I ever do get on to one of the carriages as featured here it would be in the company of the Thubron or Theroux non-fiction books concerning the Trans-Siberian, and not this short novel, however correctly it defines the Soviet spirit as seen by the community of the train.
I must still thank the publishers for my review copy.