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Overview
In Manuela Draeger’s poetic ‘post-exotic’ novel, a group of young leftists trapped in a burning building after one year’s Bolcho Pride parade plunge back into their childhood memories, trading them with each other as their lives are engulfed in flames. They remember Granny Holgolde’s stories of the elephant Marta Ashkarot as she travels through the Bardo, to find her home and be reincarnated again and again. They remember the Soviet folk singer Lyudmila Zykina and her melancholic, simple songs of unspeakable beauty. They remember the half-human birds Granny Holgolde called strange cormorants, the ones who knew how to live in fire, secrecy, and death, and as the flames get higher they hope to become them.
Draeger, a heteronym for the acclaimed French writer Antoine Volodine, and a librarian in a dystopic prison camp, gives post-exoticism an element of tenderness, and a sense of nostalgia for children’s tales, that is far less visible in the other authors’ works. Eleven Sooty Dreams is her first book written for adults, a moving story of the constancy of brotherly, loving faithfulness.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781948830263 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Letter |
| Publication date: | 02/09/2021 |
| Pages: | 140 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
J. T. Mahany is a graduate of the masters program in literary translation studies at the University of Rochester and received his MFA from the University of Arkansas. His translation of Antoine Volodine's Bardo or Not Bardo won the inaugural Albertine Prize in 2017.
Read an Excerpt
Granny Holgolde’s Tale: The Lamp
It was a basic elephant trap. A wire stretched across the trail, right where pachyderms were likely to tread; two stakes to hold the wire in place, which only a very large animal would have the strength to unearth; a mechanism to shoot off a cluster of firecrackers; and the firecrackers themselves. Simply tripping over it would blow everything up in three seconds flat. The humans who had created it didn’t want to injure or kill, and in any case, they didn’t have the technology to whip up a lethal weapon, but they were counting on the frightful suddenness of the detonations to awake in the animal a feeling of terror. The elephant could only quickly turn back around and flee, panic-stricken, unable to comprehend the din in the darkness a few steps ahead of it. It would remember a lasting fear, and would never come back. Such was the function of the trap. Such was its philosophy.
Marta Ashkarot walked a few meters forward without touching the wire that barred the route. She observed the firing mechanism for a moment and then defused it with the tip of her trunk. Then she picked up a firecracker and began to chew on it pensively. Several years before, she had discovered that she enjoyed the taste of potassium nitrate. She never overindulged, but, when the opportunity presented itself, she didn’t deny herself the small pleasure. Even the wrapping had a candy-like appeal: the spoonful of plaster, the cardboard tube. Even the by-products had an agreeable flavor: the charcoal, the sulfur.
Oh yes, she thought. Oh yes, indeed. I’m quite the foodie, aren’t I?
The veil of bamboo was thick enough to conceal her, and she moved with suppleness, without crunching the fallen leaves all around her. If, in spite of the late hour, anyone were keeping watch, they wouldn’t have been able to detect her presence. She approached the vegetation’s edge and stopped to observe what lay beyond.
Before her feet were cultivated fields, sweet potato plantations, and the village’s territory.
It was night, a moonless night. Beyond the fields, a dozen shacks were lined up around a rectangle of beaten earth, which must have had the pretension of being a street, the main and only street in the settlement. A single light was on. It shone above a hovel even smaller than the others, though less dilapidated.
An administrative building, Marta Ashkarot deduced.
Administration! the elephant thought. The hominids’ last pride before their return to the primitive horde or their pure and simple disappearance. It’s what separates them from animals. One last collective affirmation, as important for them as their subsistence agriculture and firecrackers.
The lamp illuminated an overhang. Still unmoving in her plant-covered hiding spot, Marta Ashkarot concentrated her gaze. At the risk of being blinded, she stared at the light and its surrounding environs. She wanted to figure out what sort of institution was hosted behind those planks. Sometimes, humans or assimilees continued to practice the art of writing, scribbling on walls the handful of official terms they had retained. If that’s an institution, they may have slathered its name in paint somewhere, the elephant thought.
Several medium-sized, rather active spiders could be tallied in the light; they were busy wrapping freshly caught butterflies in silk. But there was no visible inscription that indicated the nature of the administration or its hours of operation. In contrast with the night, the light fixture was a form of optical violence. Marta Ashkarot averted her eyes and pressed her eyelids together five or six times to fill them with tears and dispel the imprint of the incandescent filaments. She waited for her optic nerve to stop sending her messages in burn marks and thunderbolts.
She waited for a long minute.
She reflected.
Spiders eating butterflies. A lamp lit in front of an office, on the village’s main street. Hominids sleeping in their filthy huts.
Nothing out of the ordinary, really, she thought.
The stars in her ocular globes had finally stopped dancing.
She shook her immense ears. The bamboo leaves rustled against her skin. The powerful stalks hung like springs over her neck, her flanks.
“Alright, I’m going over there,” she decided.
She pushed through the bamboo stalks without breaking them and exited the thicket. Now she was out in the open. The ground was dusty, and, after a slightly damp layer, due to the cultivators’ waterings, it became hard. Her feet left practically no prints in the soil.
She crossed the vegetable patches, stepped onto the street, and stopped before the administrative shack and its lightbulb. The building did not have an ironclad solidity. It was obvious that a pachyderm attempting to squeeze inside would distort the entire frame.
The man working the desk had heard a noise and must have feared that his guest was taking the initiative to enter, for suddenly he clicked a latch, put a rudimentary wooden sign on himself, and appeared at the threshold, his hand raised above his forehead, more to protect himself from the light of the lamp than to salute any sort of greeting.
“Would you mind if I turned that off?” he asked.
“No,” the elephant said.
They remained there for several moments, saying nothing. The man had just switched off the electricity and there they were, face to face, waiting for their filament-blinded retinal tissues to reconstruct themselves.
“It’s protocol,” the man finally said. “It’s bad for your eyes, and keeps you from seeing in the dark, but those are the orders.”
“Ah,” the elephant said.
“Do you remember the First Soviet Union? Right at the start, someone said that if the Soviets wanted to achieve communism, they first needed more electricity. He was a short bald man. His name escapes me.”
“I vaguely recall,” Marta Ashkarot reflected. “Soviets, more electricity, yes. But I no longer remember whether it was to achieve communism or socialism. That was seven or eight centuries ago, at any rate.”
She swayed back and forth, and, when her head approached the awning, she felt the heat of the bulb, its filament taking some time to cool, and smelled the scent of the butterflies dissolving from the gastric juices that the spiders had injected into them.
The man who had come out of the house was not afraid of her and stood a meter away, peacefully, without gesticulating, quite the opposite of how peasants act in the presence of pachyderms.
“At any case, in the long run, we got there,” the man said. “The bald guy was right.”
Marta Ashkarot silently agreed. Then, with her trunk, she gestured toward the shack that, now no longer artificially illuminated, was much more visible.
“Is that the village soviet?” she asked.
“It was, yes,” the man explained. “The village soviet. But, in the surrounding areas, there was a decline in population, so we regrouped. Now, it’s more of a regional soviet. Interregional even, since there’s not much else around anymore.”
“Hmmm! Interregional!” the elephant exclaimed in admiration.
“Well, yes,” the man said.
He stuck out his chest, as if he felt invested with a titanic responsibility, and Marta Ashkarot noticed that he was wobbling slightly. There was no smell of alcohol on his breath. Perhaps he had succumbed to the giddiness of success.
Their dialogue paused. Around them, the village was sleeping. Four houses were inhabited, maybe five. At the center was a medium-sized agglomeration, on which circumstances had bestowed the status of capital. In the context of the population’s rarefaction and even extinction, the soviet administered a nearly continental territory.
“That does mean though,” the man continued, “that with this lamp and this soviet, communism has been established over an immense part of the world.”
“I don’t know about communism,” Marta Ashkarot rectified. “Maybe just its preparatory phase. Maybe just socialism.”
The man continued sticking out his chest.
“Hardly matters,” he said.
“Yes,” the elephant conceded. “No reason to quibble over words.”
“Of course not,” the man said. “Words don’t matter. What matters is that it’s been established. And this time, it’s here to stay.”