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The Underground, by Hamid Ismailov
PDF Ebook The Underground, by Hamid Ismailov
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“I am Moscow’s underground son, the result of one too many nights on the town,” says Mbobo, the precocious twelve-year-old narrator of Hamid Ismailov’s The Underground. Born from a Siberian woman and an African athlete competing in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mbobo navigates the complexities of being a fatherless, mixed-raced boy in the Soviet Union in the years before its collapse, guided only by the Moscow subway system. Named one of the "ten best Russian novels of the 21st Century" (Continent Magazine), The Underground is Ismailov’s haunting tour of the Soviet capital, on the surface and beneath. Though deeply engaged with great Russian authors of the past—Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, and, above all, Pushkin—Ismailov is an emerging master of Russian writing that reflects the country’s diversity today.
Reviews
"Hamid Ismailov has the capacity of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque realization of history on the ground."
—Literary Review
"The dream of grandeur is more than justified by the artfulness of The Underground, which...create[s] the motifs of blackness, subterranean movement, and isolation that are the novel’s strongest effects."
—Transitions Online
Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek journalist, writer, and translator who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 for the United Kingdom, where he now works for the BBC World Service. His works are still banned in Uzbekistan. His writing has been published in Uzbek, Russian, French, English, and other languages. He is the author of novels including Sobranie Utonchyonnyh, Le Vagabond Flamboyant, Two Lost to Life, The Railway, The Underground, A Poet and Bin-Laden and The Dead Lake; poetry collections including Sad (Garden) and Pustynya (Desert); and books of visual poetry Post Faustum and Kniga Otsutstvi.
Carol Ermakova studied German and Russian language and literature and holds an MA in translation from Bath University. She first visited Russia in 1991. More recently, Ermakova spent two years in Moscow working as a teacher and translator. Carol currently lives in the North Pennines and works as a freelance translator.
- Sales Rank: #1376228 in eBooks
- Published on: 2014-01-10
- Released on: 2014-01-10
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"Ismailov tells a haunting tale of an Afro-Russian boy's search for love. Generous in spirit yet unsparing in its honesty, The Underground illuminates a loneliness that is as devastating as it is universal. In breathtaking prose, Ismailov reminds us again and again that even the slimmest thread of light can pierce through the darkest of days."
—Maaza Mengiste, author of Beneath the Lion's Gaze
“In reading Hamid Ismailov's The Underground, I found the hard-won wisdom of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in conversation with the boyhood lyricism of Anne Carson's Autobiography Of Red. But most crucially, simmering just under the skin of every word, I heard Ismailov's own heartbeat: haunted, beautiful even when strained, and insistent. The world has conspired to keep this necessary and timely novel a secret for too long.”
—Saeed Jones, author of Prelude to a Bruise
“One of the best Russian novels of the twenty-first century”
—Continent Magazine
"Hamid Ismailov has the capacity of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque realization of history on the ground."
—Literary Review
"A writer of immense poetic power."
—The Guardian
“The Underground, Ismailov’s latest novel published in English, depicts the brutal separation between the hopes and realities of social integration on the threshold of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The dark and picaresque tale follows the life and death of the young Mbobo (also the book’s title in Russian) in a series of vignettes marked by the grand stations of the city’s metropolitan transportation system.”
—f news magazine
“Wonderful…. Intimate details from a specific era and location enrich Ismailov’s novel. Kirill’s memories of seasons and stations become a nostalgic elegy for the bittersweet cityscape of late-Soviet Moscow.… The imagery is visceral.… Ismailov’s work, like Pushkin’s and like Platonov’s, is a profound and haunting exploration of place and time. Just as The Railway conjures up a multifaceted Uzbek town and The Dead Lake is rooted in the tortured vastness of the Steppe, so The Underground creates a spiritual and cultural map of Moscow.”
—The Kompass
"Ismailov’s works blend a keen awareness of the cosmopolitanism of the Soviet project, with its feverish drive for modernization.… It also pays homage to the rich tapestry of Russian—and Soviet—literature, and the interplay between the two.The Underground’s structure is reminiscent of Yerofeyev’s Moscow to the End of the Line; and Ismailov delights in pan-Soviet literary references, from Abkhazia’s Fazil Iskander and Chuvashia’s Gennady Aygi to Odessa’s ‘Ilf and Petrov’ and Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin. Ismailov sees himself as part of the Russian literary tradition (his prose has been compared to Bulgakov, Gogol, and Platonov).… Ismailov's novel is a deep examination of the confusions of Soviet and post-Soviet ‘Russianness.'… An intricate portrait of an all too foreign loss: the disappearance of one’s country."
—openDemocracy
About the Author
Born in an ancient city in what is now Kyrgyzstan, Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek novelist and poet who was forced to leave his home in Tashkent when his writing brought him to the attention of government officials. Under threat of arrest, he moved to London and joined the BBC World Service, where he is now Head of the Central Asian Service. In addition to journalism, Ismailov is a prolific writer of poetry and prose, and his books have been published in Uzbek, Russian, French, German, Turkish, English and other languages. His work is still banned in Uzbekistan. He is the author of many novels, including Sobranie Utonchyonnyh, Le Vagabond Flamboyant, Two Lost to Life, The Railway, Hostage to Celestial Turks, Googling for Soul, The Underground, A Poet and Bin-Laden, and The Dead Lake; poetry collections including Sad (Garden) and Pustynya (Desert); and books of visual poetry including Post Faustum and Kniga Otsutstvi. He has translated Russian and Western classics into Uzbek, and Uzbek and Persian classics into Russian and several Western languages.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A fun surprise!
By Florence
I had never heard of this novel and essentially bought it as something just occupy me through a long flight. But! It turned out to be wonderful. After my trip I took it back with me to pass on to others.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
"My mother died when I was eight, and I died four years later...
By Friederike Knabe
"...and is all there is to my Moscow life…"."The rest is just decaying, late-blown blooms of memories…" explains Kirill, better known as Mbobo or "Pushkin", the narrator of Hamid Ismailov's The Underground. It is a roller-coaster of a ride...criss-crossing the Moscow Metro system, one station at a time. The novel reads like a complex jigsaw puzzle where the pieces may play more than one possible role.
These early introductory sentences, quoted above, couldn't be more stark or precise as to his condition: he writes from beyond the grave, a stream of consciousness that allows him to reflect on his complicated and exceptional young life. Why complicated and exceptional? His mother, of Khakassian ethnicity, came to Moscow from Siberia to work as a hostess at the Moscow Olympics. Her fling with an African Olympian resulted in the child Mbobo... A African-Khakass mixed race child's existence was not easy in those days, whether on the playground or, later, in school. He compensated by developing into an avid reader... evidence is sprinkled throughout the narrative.
The only places where Mbobo feels safe and happy are the grandiose hallways of the Moscow Metro stations. His mind, even while his body is decaying, eaten up and crumbling, remains vivid and retraces the routes he has taken with his beloved "Mommy Moscow" or those, after her death, explored on his own late into the nights, avoiding conflicts or worse of any kind with people "on the surface". His mother couldn't go back home and had to survive on existence level, unless she could hook up with a man to support her and her child. Two of these, Uncle Gleb, a writer, and Uncle Nazar, a policeman, play important roles in Mbobo's life.
The book's chapters are organized roughly in chronological order but, as memory does, Mbobo's mind flips back and forth, as he revisits, randomly, the various Metro Stations in central Moscow. The chapter headings tell the reader in which station he finds himself on a given day. The Metro system, in fact, is his home; he describes the older stations viscerally and with great affection. For the young boy, as imagined from the grave of an adult, each trip is an adventure, and a starting point for his story telling.
If you ever visited Moscow's Metro stations, especially the older stations, you will recognize them from the narrator's descriptions. If not, google one of the respective sites to get an impression. It adds to the understanding of the young boy's love for life underground, in contrast to the problems above ground. [Friederike Knabe]
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A novel of extraordinary richness
By Jack H
'The Underground' is an extraordinary novel in its sheer richness. The title refers to the Moscow Metro. Each chapter is titled by the name of a Metro station, and triggered by some reflection or association. It is narrated from the consciousness of a boy christened with the most typical of Russian names, Kirill, but familiarly known as Mbobo, who died at the age of twelve. But the consciousness is not smothered by death, and continues 'underground' from a grave beneath the city of Moscow. And the all-embracing consciousness ranges over the city from station to station of the Metro, recounting the short life of the boy and the historical events that impinged on it. But it also ranges over the whole history of Russian literature starting with the father figure, Pushkin, whose unfinished novel, 'Peter the Great's Negro', here finds a sort of consummation.
Mbobo is a black kid, son of a Siberian mother and an African father, so he is an outsider; his nick-name is Pushkin - Pushkin himself was descended from an African man brought to Russia as a slave in the reign of Peter the Great. Mbobo's long suffering mother is called Moscow and does carry the symbolic weight of her name, but lightly. Again the allusion to Platonov's great satirical novel, 'Happy Moscow', sets associations reverberating. So Mbobo is the son of Moscow, but is not embraced as a son of the city.
The imagery throughout this highly entertaining novel is majestic. Descriptions of the individual stations are knitted into the events of Mbobo's life seamlessly. The consciousness of Moscow City as a living organism, with the railway tunnels underneath as its veins pumping its vitality through them, is frequently overlaid with the consciousness of its soil as a vast grave through which the worms are burrowing their own tunnels.
Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek writer living in exile. I also recommend his novels set in his native country, 'The Railway' and 'A Poet and Bin-Laden'.
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