THE GREATEST EUROPEAN NOVELS

BORIS YASHMILYE - ‘Flashes At Midnight’

As those who are fully acquainted with me should know, it has long been my habit to spend the months of June and July in my summer cottage outside Vladivostock. Though this tradition goes back as many as two years, a few mindless fools have this year been led to misinterpret my motives, giving air to the extraordinary claim that I am in hiding from some rampaging wannabe novelist. If such people shared a brain between them, they would no doubt have realised that this was not the case. I have not been hiding, nor indulging in any of the satanic rituals that have been associated with my name of late. No, I have instead been engaged in the most proper study of mankind. I have been reading.

Read, re-read and read again – so said my mentor, the late great Johannes Speyer. If you are lucky enough to know anything when you die, he would declare, it is that you will have never read enough. By this he did not mean that one should simply read a vast majority of books, but that one should also learn to get the best out of multiple readings of the same book. To read a novel just the once – as is the common practice these days – was to him like ‘a surfer spending millions to get to the best surfing beach in the world, before choosing to chase his sport in a puddle’. Curiously, for a man who was born, worked and died in landlocked Austria, Speyer was unusually fond of surfing metaphors.

 Nevertheless, his advice undoubtedly rings true. And I say this in the knowledge that I do not re-read as much I should. Unfortunately, my career as the editor of a literary magazine requires that I should spend most of my time ploughing through new work. When the summer swings around, still, the opportunity to follow Speyer’s guidance can at last be seized. When packing my bags for this year’s sojourn, I deliberately chose books that I have already read at least once. I also made sure to include many of the titles that were included on this year’s most discussed literary publication, of which I was the proud edito (I refer, of course, to the inventory of the ‘Greatest European Novels by Contemporary Writers’)

 

The first of these novels was Boris Yashmilye’s Flashes at Midnight, a book I have read twice previously; both readings taking place in a single week back in my days as a student. For this reason, it was with a certain amount of indisposition that I picked up the novel this third time, fearful that my contented memories of its charms would prove to have been the child of sentimental student fancies. I don’t mind admitting at this point that my taste as a young man was not exemplary. Might it be possible that a book I once considered a masterpiece was in fact nothing of the sort? Where my cheeks had once creased with laughter, would my forehead now crease with a frown?

Of course, there was another reason for my reluctance to return to Yashmilye’s debut. Here I refer to my own part in the uproar over the recent English translation, over which I still nurse significant wounds. Indeed, writing this very review, I find it extremely hard to come to terms with what I regard as the acute impertinence of the title Flashes at Midnight. What does it mean, I ask myself?

The answer, as far as I am concerned, is as clear as a glass of vodka. It means nothing. It is an elephant-sized error, a frightful fault, an unmitigated mistake. More saddening, it is a black spot on an otherwise perfect translation. This I find most fantastic. How could someone succeed to translate four hundred pages of Bulgarian without so much as a small slip and yet make such a massive mess of a three-word title?

As is often the case, the bulk of this blunder lies in the minutest detail. As far as I am concerned, there is only a single letter missing. But what a difference the absence of this solitary letter makes! At present, the English title of Yashmilye’s novel is a faintly mysterious affair: add the precious letter and it is immediately transformed into something reassuringly direct, less obtuse and almost certainly more in keeping with the wishes of the author.

My protests against this faux pas began directly after it was announced by the English publishers. Other literary critics joined the mêlée soon afterwards. Though no one agreed on what the title should be, everyone agreed that Flashes at Midnight was an utterly inappropriate choice and many followed my lead in collecting signatures to hasten some sort of change.  Unfortunately, no such amendment occurred. Yet after a decade or so my determination to put forward my alternative translation of the title has lost none of its strength.

What I proposed then – and continue to propose now – is very simple. Not Flashes At Midnight, but Flashers At Midnight. This is by far the most sensible translation of Yashmilye’s Bulgarian title, for reasons I have already mentioned in passing.[1] More than anything, however, it is true to the spirit of the book, as I shall now explain.

 

First of all, yet, I must reassure the reader that all my fears on returning to Yashmilye’s first novel were soon dispelled. The book was no less brilliant the third time around, if not more brilliant. What is certain is that I no longer harbour any doubt that this novel deserves its place on my list. This is an original tour de force from Bulgaria’s best living writer, worthy of a place on any list.

The fact is, good novels about streakers are few and far between. Whilst it is not an uncommon phenomenon, it requires as a subject an especially careful approach from a writer, for any lack of maturity in the line of attack may easily be misconstrued as recourse into literature of a different sort (namely pornography). Yashmilye steers clear of such problems with consummate ease. This is not to say that Flashe(r)s At Midnight does not contain the odd crude joke (it contains many) but that it is never immature, nor ever titillating, nor ever tedious. The fruit metaphors can be a little wearing after a while; aside from this the approach is faultless.

What helps is that this streaking with which this work concerns itself is not just any old streaking. It is that rare thing: political streaking. Streaking for a common cause. Democracy via nudity.

Was such a thing ever practised? The twentieth century may have created many reasons for citizens to protest against their governments, and those protests may have taken many forms, yet I am reluctant to say that political streaking was ever a popular remonstrative procedure, if one at all. Of course, Yashmilye may know differently; may have even been involved in such a practice himself; though it is much more likely that political streaking is a figment of his imagination; that is to say, a metaphor. What is certain is that the underlying claim of this novel – that the fall of Todor Zhivkov from the Bulgarian government in the late 1980s was primarily due to a group of streaking students – is not one that we should take literally. Nonetheless, Yashmilye consistently tempts us to do so, however preposterous the concept may be.

One way in which he does this is by ensuring that the historical background is never less than vigilantly researched. Yashmilye’s knowledge of Bulgarian political history is evidently vast, yet he never allows this mine of information to blow apart the comedic thrust of the story. Economic theory, rudiments of Marxism and the Capitalist philosophy are all dealt with in a manner with which Mary Poppins would be proud: the medicine of politics washed down with a spoonful of eccentric farce in the form of revolutionary buttock and breast baring. If you imagine an American gross-out teen comedy co-written by P.G Wodehouse and Gunter Grass and edited by the Political correspondent of the Financial Times, you will have a pretty rough approximation of what we’re dealing with here.

The plot is relatively straightforward. We are in 1980s Bulgaria, following the trials and tribulations of a group of male and female students in their late teens and early twenties, three or four of which are of Turkish descent. This is of particular relevance, as it was in the mid 80s that Todor Zhivkov’s Communist government began their campaign to repress Bulgarian Turks through a series of regulations, starting with the prohibition of the Turkish language and the introduction of Slavic surnames and leading to more physical forms of persecution, with the eventual hope of driving this minority out of the country altogether. On account of these activities and out of general disaffection with the Communist regime, these students take it upon themselves to cause some trouble of their own, which they direct against their local branch of the Fatherland Front (the organisation through which the Communist Party exercised political control). Rather than stage daylight protests, however, they are inspired by the prudish head of the front to organise a series of night time demonstrations, to take place in the nude. Not only do they interrupt Communist gatherings, but they also break into the houses of senior figures in the regime: not with the intention of committing theft or murder, but in order to run about the place thrusting their backsides into as many faces as possible. On such occasions, an emission of sulphur compounds is not infrequent.[2]

The extent to which their political streaking works is hard to gauge. Though the third person narrator concludes that their efforts were ‘instrumental in achieving the collapse of Zhivkov’ the reader is likely to voice doubts, maybe even dismiss the outfit as merely a bunch of fun-loving students, no more interested in political expression than their western contemporaries. As to which view is the more accurate, the answer is surely that it does not matter, for in the end the story (if not the political background) is fictional. All the same, the tension between these opposing ideas is undoubtedly what drives the novel. Yashmilye seeks to unnerve us at every turn. On one page we are treated with the farcical high jinks of trouser-less undergraduates, on the next we are confronted with the distressing facts concerning methods of torture amongst Bulgarian Communists. The way in which he interweaves the two is nothing short of masterly.

 

On re-reading, I have been struck by several aspects of Yashmilye’s work that I had not previously noticed. I knew that it was humorous, and I was not in the least disappointed. The passage in which he describes Ivan’s obsession with his own backside is as brilliant as it ever was. Indeed, the countless passages devoted to detailed descriptions of parts of his character’s bodies are to my mind some of most unfailingly amusing passages ever written. However, on this occasion, I saw past the comedy, glimpsing instead something that I might go so far as describing as romantic.

For a start, this novel introduces you to parts of the body you were never sure existed, or at least never considered paying attention to. This says a lot for Yashmilye’s approach to the streaking subject. Where newspapers will concentrate their interest on those parts of the body that streakers are said to be showing off – which, conveniently, are also those that audiences tend to want to see – Yashmilye favours areas which most of us would overlook, gracing these regions with the sort of concentrated prose we might expect to find in a geological survey. This leads me to the proposal that he is a writer with the heart of a painter. Certainly, he shares a painter’s interest for the colours of human flesh. His five page description of the back of Birgit’s knee (to be found near the end of the seventeenth chapter), as well as being quite moving, is as thorough as any of Lucian Freud’s nude studies: far too well observed to be appreciated merely for its comedic qualities. Elsewhere I noticed for the first time how Yashmilye shares with Caravaggio a particular obsession for the hollow at the base of the neck, on which he focuses at the beginning of chapter twenty-one, the model in question being Turgut, one of the central male characters. Though this description spans only two pages, it is no less comprehensive than other examples; the flesh that it invokes brought to no less life in the imagination of the reader.

Ultimately, this aspect of Flashe(r)s At Midnight warrants a separate study; one which in time may well prove to be no less fascinating than Grosnor Padviconavic’s analysis of the use of dead skin in Jarni Kolovsky’s …And I Lost.[3] I for one look forward to any attempt. For now, however, I am content to conclude this brief review with a full-hearted request that the reader should read the novel with which it concerns itself and, having done so, read it again. Once you have navigated the cheerless calamity of the title (if you are reading the English translation, of course) you should have little difficulty in enjoying the work itself, especially if (like me) you are young at heart. Written when Yashmilye was a student, it seems to me to capture the spirit of that age, with all its edginess (the lack of which, I must add, was very much a factor in the failure of Yashmilye’s later novels – The Musala Affair and Nuts Nuts Nuts - which, though entertaining, seem bare when compared to his debut). What is this novel about? I shall tell you what it is about.

It is about the excruciating futility of protest, the sordid reality of violence, the astounding prudery of liberals, the eternal eccentricity of youth, the heroic authority of nudity and the bare-faced cheek of the human condition.

      Review by Georgy Riecke