Ice

The air inside the lodging house is dense and heavy, scarred by every bodily odour, human or animal; no one opens the windows, doors are instantly slammed shut and cracks above the doorsteps stuffed with rags, so that no warmth escapes from the building – firewood has to be paid for, after all, anyone able to afford coal wouldn’t normally be cooped up in such dark holes, where the air is dense and heavy, and you breathe it in as if you’d drunk the water spat out by your neighbor as well as by his dog, as if your every breath had previously passed a million times through the consumptive lungs of peasants, Jews, coachmen, butchers and whores; hawked up from black larynxes, it returns to you again and again, filtered through their saliva and sputum, processed through their mould-infested, louse-infected, pus-incrusted bodies, coughed up by them, blown out through their noses, spewed up straight into your mouth, but you have to swallow it, you have to breathe it in, so breathe, breathe!

I started this as an audiobook and 4 hours(?) in I decided I needed to read (electronically) because of a) Many Russian names with patronymics and b) many early twentieth century Russian political terms. So I switched over to 1200 page e-book.

The central plot device of the book is the “Ice” (or Gliessen) which is some form of living? ice which spreads beyond the normal seasonal limits of winter, and in places creates webs of the ice above ground, between buildings and other obstacles. Logically enough the overall phenomena is called “Winter”. There are theories that the ice is connected to the tunguska impact and that the widening geographic spread of the ice is tied to ancient migratory patterns of Mammoths (who, just to be clear, are extinct)

Benedyct Gieroslawski is recruited by Russian agents to journey to Siberia where his 10?-years absent, Siberian political dissident, father apparently knows something about how the living ice works and can control it. The rest of the story is protagonist Gieroslawski’s journey from Poland to Siberia on the Transiberia Express train and the adventures that follow. Along the way he meets a mysterious on-and-off-again girlfriend Jelena and there is also the special guest star, Nicola Tesla, who has also been tasked by the czar with doing something about the Gliessen.

I found the book difficult to understand, firstly, becaus the dialog assumes you can follow the back and forth between characters and in many places I could not. That and much of the dialog is Gieroslawski’s semi autistic internal monolog which in places blends with interpersonal dialog. Secondly there is the plot device of of the science of living ice and negative electromagnetism which is somehow related to the Tunguska detonation, which though it sounds enticingly pseudo-real, I could really not follow what it was supposed to do or how it worked except that it produced darklight (Unlicht). And lastly there are the many different factions (Lyednyaks, Narodniks, Martsynians, Ottepyelniks, Pilsudtchiks, etal) along with the hierarchal titles of the various governments. Yes, there is a nice glossary in the back of the book but no, I didn’t have the energy to keep referring to it.

At about the halfway point in the book I lost any motivation because I found that I did not follow either the plot device of ice-based anti-physics nor the convoluted politics of the Russian/Siberian empire. And yet there is some gorgeous writing, I didn’t know if our protagonist would get the girl and I was 600 pages in to this tome. I decided that I would keep going in spite of understanding sunk cost fallacy, also I just appreciate the ambition of this book along with the effort it must have taken to write and then translate the book in to English, regarding which translation, there is a 20ish page essay entitled “Translating the Untranslatable” in the back of the book before the glossary.

In the second half of the book, the Winter has thawed and all government in Siberia descends into anarchy and it felt like Benedyct was this singularly compulsive survivor trudging aimlessly along looking for some new functional government. And like Gieroslawski, I the reader, simply tried to read a percent (since Kindle would tell me my progress that way) of the book at a time, garbage in garbage out. Finally I saw the text end and the aforementioned translation essay begin when Kindle said I was only at 98% of the way through the book. It was such a pleasant surprise.

Anyway I am proud that I trudged through this book even though I don’t think I would recommend it to any other readers. I am happy that the one thing I understood in the book is that finally Benedyct tracks down (the thought dead) Jelena Muklanowicz and they live, maybe, happily ever after.

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