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BOOKS PASSED BY Dasgupta's novel, set in a vividly
imagined Bulgaria, is a large portrait of smallness. Dreams and responsibilities
in Rana Dasgupta's "Solo. " BY JAMES WOOD Rana Dasgupta's novel "Solo"
(Houghton Miffiin Harcourt; $25) brings to mind Mark Twain's quip about how
the older he got, the more clearly he remembered things that had never happened.
Its protagonist is a blind Bulgarian man named Ulrich, who is nearly a hundred,
and who lives in dismal desuetude in a shabby apartment in Sofia. Unable
to read, and with no immediate family, he spends his days remembering and
daydreaming, and the novel provides powerful extended examples of each activity,
each "solo" given its own section. In the first part of the book, which Dasgupta
has titled "First Movement: 'Life,'" Ulrich recalls nearly a century of Bulgarian
history, from his comfortable childhood as the son of a railway engineer
to his gradual impoverishment under postwar Communism and his isolation in
a newly capitalist Bulgaria. He has lived too long, he feels: "He was living
in the aftertimes, whose rules he did not understand." The second part of
the novel, entitled "Second Movement: 'Daydreams,' " presents a series of
linked contemporary stories, set in Bulgaria, the republic of Georgia, and
New York. We encounter Boris, a brilliant Bulgarian violinist, who has a
fabulous international career as a pop-folk musician; Kakha, a Georgian footballer-turned-tycoon,
and his avaricious girlfriend, Khatuna; and a flamboyant Manhattan record
producer named Plastic Munari. These are Ulrich's fictions, the things that
never happened to him, the daydreams that fizz in his mind as he sits in
his apartment-for Ulrich has never been to America, and has left Bulgaria
only twice, as a young man. Salman Rushdie has called Rana
Dassgupta "the most unexpected and original Indian writer of his generation,"
and it is indeed the word "unexpected" that leaps out at the reader, mostly
in good ways. Dasgupta was born in 1971, in England, and educated at Oxford
and the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud, in Aix-Provence. You might expect,
then, almost anything except a long novel minutely engaged with Bulgarian
life and history, a book that is clearly the product not only of imagining
but of prolonged travel, reading, and friendship. In interviews, Dasgupta
has mentioned an interest in Bulgarian music, which prompted two long trips
to the country, in 2002 and 2004, and has spoken of the country's "large
and generous personalities." The novel constantly impresses both with its
fluent mastery of large pieces of Bulgarian history and with its imaginative
immersion in the textures of daily life. It is a book full of sharp, pungent
stories, and it loses power only at those moments when it leaves that pungency
for an elevated, satellite view of the "story of a century." The beguiling first section
of "Solo" has some of the atmosphere, and verve, of Joseph Roth's great novel
of multigenerational decline in the Austro- Hungarian Empire, "The Radetzky
March" (1932). Ulrich's father began his career as an engineer on the Vienna-Constantinople
railway, in the active embers of the Ottoman Empire. A great Germanophile,
he dreamed of building a Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad: "As he dreamed, his
mustache trembled with the snaking of glinting rails across continents."
(In one of Roth's books, a character is given muttonchops whiskers, whose
two halves are likened to the two halves of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.)
Ulrich grows up in a large house in Sofia, and develops interests in music
and chemistry. The family's decline begins when Ulrich's father is wounded
in the First World War, and can no longer work. The fine house is sold, and
we are told that it was bombed in the Second World War and subsequently demolished.
Ulrich goes to Berlin to study
chemistry. Berlin occasions some of the slightly automatic writing that surfaces
in this section; the research ghost hovering over the table seems to move
the author's hand into the appropriate shapes. "Berlin was the capital of
world science, which lifted him on its tremendous current and made him certain
of his own great future," we read. "But Berlin was also the studio of mighty
artists and musicians. Bertolt Brecht was there, Marlene Dietrich and Fritz
Lang." In present-day Sofia, Ulrich
recalls his distant student days in Berlin. His memories of the city "do
not hang together, or fall into sequence, because they were later scattered
like refugees, and were forced to take shelter in other times and places."
Dasgupta renders these memories as broken paragraphs, disparate items on
a list. They are precise little jewels. One of them runs like this: In
one of Max Planck's lectures, he thought that his father, with his admiration
of far sight, would have approved of all those eyes set on the remote country
of atoms. In another of these "items,"
the nonagenarian remembers picking up some papers dropped by Albert Einstein
in a corridor. It is a scene that will vibrate throughout the novel. Einstein
looks the young Ulrich in the eye and says, "I am nothing without you." Ulrich
managed to say, "Nor 1, sir," as Einstein turned his back and ambled on.
Ulrich has thought back so many times to this moment that the figure in the
corridor has transmuted into something more than a man. Now Einstein looks
down on him with eyes that scan like X-rays, and his speech comes not from
his mouth but from somewhere invisible and oracular. But Ulrich's dreams of achieving
greatness in chemistry are curtailed when his father loses his money in bad
investments. Ulrich returns to Sofia without a degree, and almost immediately
the provincial shadows begin to thicken. Ulrich finally experiences some
success in postwar Bulgaria, though grayly. He is chosen to be the technical
director of a factory making barium chloride, and does the job well enough
to be praised on state radio as an "ordinary hero." But his mother, always
politically outspoken, is arrested on charges of being a Fascist, and is
put in a camp. She is released, broken. She and Ulrich share an apartment,
but it is an unhappy alliance. She drinks heavily, and Ulrich retreats into
himself. Dasgupta is a strange writer:
uneven, sometimes a little formulaic, and even seemingly a little bored by
the obligations of detail, but also graced with a superbly ironic eye and
a gift for sentences of lancing power and beauty. He writes about Ulrich's
unhappy life with his mother, after her release from prison: "She opened
and closed her mouth in those years, and sound came out, but Ulrich paid
little attention." It is savage, but also has a curious, submerged poetry.
There are wonderful and odd things like that scattered throughout the book.
In a passage near the end of this section, Ulrich reflects on "how much has
slipped through the fingers of his memory." What has gone, he realizes, is
"the substance of all those days." And so Dasgupta recovers that substance,
for Ulrich and for the reader: The
days of dust drifting in the light shafts. Tea bags put out to dry. Listless
newspapers with new dates on them every day. The pipes of grubby gloss that
turn from the back of the radiator along the wall. The gradual death of things:
plants and machines and animals, furniture and friends. Twisted hairs trapped
in a hairbrush .... Filling in forms. New buildings whose purpose is unclear.
Things that have not been seen for some time: a good pen, a souvenir key
ring. Lying in bed, and ceilings .... The shocking breathlessness of climbing
just a few stairs, and shaving in the morning .... Old-style banknotes discovered
in jacket pockets, and the recollection of facts when the need for them has
passed. The relief of television, and its futility. The persistence of shit,
and its undue hold on the mind. The stuff that passes through the days: empty
food cans, old batteries, rotten fruit and notepaper. It
has all slipped away. It is writing like this that
keeps one reading, even when the architecture of the novel is a little shaky.
"Solo" is a large portrait of
smallness-a small country, stamped on by big historical forces, and an even
smaller life, knocked one way and another by those forces. Dasgupta tartly
captures, through restraint, the absurdity of historical inversion: in the
nineteen-twenties and thirties, the right-wing government imprisons and murders
leftist agitators (Ulrich's best friend, Boris, is executed for sedition);
after the war, the Communist regimes turn everything upside down, and those
accused of Fascism (like Ulrich's mother) are carted away: The
former villains were cast in bronze and put up in the parks, and all the
stories changed. The paintings of Geo Milev, who had been executed as a traitor,
were now put on the postage stamps, and his poetry was taught in schools,
while the old murdered prime minister, Stamboliski, was given a statue outside
the opera house. The years of enforced impoverishment
breed a familiar cynicism-the jokes that littered the Eastern Bloc like cheap
radios. Almost the last words of Ulrich's mother, as she lies in the hospital,
reprise something she heard from a doctor: "A woman goes into a store and
asks for six eggs. The shopkeeper says, You're in the wrong store. Here we have no meat. You have to go next door if you want no eggs."
And then, in the nineteen-nineties,
long after Ulrich's mother has been buried, the reversals happen again, and
the statues come down, and "this time they were putting up shrines to Ronald
Reagan," and capitalism is just "criminality raised to a principle." In present-day
Sofia, one of Ulrich's neighbors reads an obituary to him, about Ilia Pavlov,
"Bulgaria's richest man," who has been shot as he is leaving work. She delivers
a devastating judgment, the kind of thing that Dasgupta might have heard on
his travels in Bulgaria: 'When they brought in communism it was for the people,
so they killed the people. Now they've brought in capitalism, which is for
the rich, so they only kill the rich. This time you and I have nothing to
worry about." Dasgupta is at his best as a
cool, unillusioned analyst of futility, both ideological and personal; his
novel, which is full of chemistry and Ulrich's failed ambitions as a chemist,
becomes a kind of handbook for the study of useless energy dispersal, of
farcical entropy. When the Bulgarian leader announces that he will build
the biggest steelworks in the Balkans, Ulrich is appalled, because of the
inefficiency: Bulgarian ore is of the lowest grade, he publicly complains.
No one takes any notice, and the enormous Kremikovtzi steelworks goes up
in three years. The Bulgarians have to import the ore from Russia in order
to produce steel. But the protester is also sucked into his own version of
this futility. Once retired, Ulrich builds a small laboratory in his Sofia
apartment, and sets out "to discover plastic." It is the nineteen ties, and
life is surrounded by plastic, "but Ulrich's knowledge of polymers dated
from his time in Berlin, half a century before, when these materials were
still unknown." Like some latter-day Bouvard or Pecuchet, he embarks on a
labor of perfect uselessness, making a replica of his mother's imitation tortoiseshell
sunglasses. He succeeds, after many years and much money (and only by buying
a pair of sunglasses whose hinges he needed for his own). And then the police
arrive and dismantle his laboratory, "so that he could not continue his work
anymore." This cruel nullity is balanced by the fantastic fullness of Ulrich's
later daydreams, which occupy the novel’s second section. The contemporary
stories are a change in emphasis and style-the melancholic, autumnal dapple
is burned away by the energy of Dasgupta's vivid storytelling. (I was often
reminded of David Mitchell's amazing facility in "Cloud Atlas.") Particularly
engrossing is the story of Khatuna, a relentlessly ambitious, beautiful young
Georgian woman, forced, after the death of her father, to make a living in
a barely capitalist, post-Communist society. She hitches herself to Kakha
Sabadze, a faamous former footballer, now a thuggish businessman. Kakha is
killed, but Khatuna and her brother make it to America, where she prospers,
after a fashion, and her more sensitive brother, a poet, does not. These stories pose a challenge
to the book: they break the novel into two movements, one adagio and one
allegro. So Dasgupta takes pains to notate the tales from contemporary life
with motifs from Ulrich's past. We can see that these might be Ulrich's daydreams,
in particular his fantasies of revenge and fulfillment: Ulrich's father forbade
him to play music, but in his daydreams he watches Boris become a famous
violinist. Ulrich's valuables were confiscated by the Communist authorities,
but in his daydreams Khatuna avenges the theft of her family's possessions
by enlisting some of Kakha's men to kill the thieves. But the mobility of
the second section somewhat overpowers the chronicle of the first, and Ulrich
fades as a presence. And, necessarily, these are not really plausible daydreams
for Ulrich, since they reveal a grasp of contemporary life (cocaine-laced
parties, hip-hop, the Russell Simmons-like music producer Plastic Munari)
utterly beyond Ulrich's imaginative capabilities-unless he has been, all
along, a very good novelist. Perhaps they are best read as Dasgupta's own
fictional daydreams, as variations on some of the themes of the first section:
ambition, failure, futility, and the death march of ideologies. "It's difficult to sustain our
passions through life," a cousin tells Ulrich, "and we become mournful for
what we've given up." That is Ulrich's great theme, and the most powerful
single strand in this complex novel. One day, the pianist Sviatoslav Richter
comes to Sofia, and Ulrich and his mother go to hear him. Ulrich had dreamed
of being a musician, and tears run down his face as he hears Richter's savage
brilliance at work on Chopin. His mother coughs throughout the performance.
"Many years later, after her death, Ulrich heard a recording of those recitals
on the radio, and he could identify his mother’s cough," we're told. Ulrich,
in a sense, wanted to be Richter, and ended up only as a cough on Richter's
recording. He wanted to be a chemist of enduring fame, but sits in his apartment
replaying the moment when he picked up Einstein's papers. Late in the novel,
in one of his daydreams, Ulrich tells Boris the violinist that he has worked
out what Einstein meant by his gnomic comment: "How many stopped-up men and
women does it take to produce one Einstein? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand?
... So this is what Einstein meant when he looked me in the eye that day
and said, I would be nothing without you. It was not success he saw written
in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything at all."
+ THE NEW YORKER MARCH 21, 2011
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