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Coming May 2023: Eugene Vodolazkin, internationally acclaimed novelist and scholar of medieval literature, returns with a satirical parable about European and Russian history, the myth of progress, and the futility of war.
This ingenious novel, described by critics as a coda to his bestselling Laurus, is presented as a chronicle of an island from medieval to modern times. The island is not on the map, but it is real beyond doubt. It cannot be found in history books, yet the events are painfully recognizable. The monastic chroniclers dutifully narrate events they witness: quests for power, betrayals, civil wars, pandemics, droughts, invasions, innovations, and revolutions. The entries mostly seem objective, but at least one monk simultaneously drafts and hides a “true” history, to be discovered centuries later. And why has someone snipped out a key prophesy about the island’s fate?
These chronicles receive commentary today from an elderly couple who are the island’s former rulers. Prince Parfeny and Princess Ksenia are truly extraordinary: they are now 347 years old. Eyewitnesses to much of their island’s turbulent history, they offer sharp-eyed observations on the changing flow of time and their people’s persistent delusions. Why is the royal couple still alive? Would the missing prophesy shed any light?
In the tradition of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, Vodolazkin is at his best recasting history, in all its hubris and horror, by finding the humor in its absurdity. For readers with an appetite for more than a dry, rational, scientific view of what motivates, divides, and unites people, A History of the Island conjures a world still suffused with mystical powers.
The history of Eugene Vodolazkin’s island is traced from the Middle Ages to modernity. Prince Parfeny and Princess Ksenia live through 357 years of it, through a dozen wars with a dozen different leaders, including a revolution. The parallels to the Russian revolution, Stalin, and the Gulags cannot be avoided. Parfeny and Ksenia see history, time, as a fluctuation of Good and Evil, not as cause-effect events. Vodolazkin’s view of time is very different than the typical western idea, and only an author of his skill could write effectively through centuries without losing the freshness and depth of characters. He is at his best in talking about the art of the time, ultimately comparing it to the realistic style we recognize as Socialist Realism. The danger in narrating through the centuries manifests in Vodolazkin’s diluting the depth of the story and the characters. It also presents sudden huge leaps in time in time and place: a third of the way through the novel we are abruptly dropped into modern Paris where Parfeny and Ksenia are meeting with a French film director for a biopic with the prince and princess as consultants. This sudden leap into another time and place may be somewhat disorienting, but once we become accustomed to such time shifts, like eyes adjusting to a dark theater, we are comfortable when steamboats suddenly appear off the shores of the island. But it also risks some departures in character: consulting on a biopic of their lives simply does not seem like something these these two deeply sympathetic characters would do. Perhaps Vodolazkin was making a wry comment on too many writers’ eyes on film rights, often to the detriment of the original story. Other sections are superb: the smooth narration about Vlas, the Lord of the Bees and the conversion of his daughter, Melissa (new ruler of the island), shines. From a religious country to an atheistic revolutionary country back to a religious country, all done so skillfully we travel without realizing the transition. This is vintage Vodolazkin. Vodolazkin has displayed his unorthodox use of time and - as a medieval scholar - the Middle Ages in his previous novel Laurus, and for all his skillful craftsmanship, this may weaken his novels. Still, he brilliantly transcends frontiers of geography, politics, time, and history, and has produced a novel well worth reading.
