An Eye To The Plain

The page 200 of Yevtushenko's Wild Berries was reached last night before the soft tumble into dreamseas. The novel has been quite vivid both to location and to character. as to the latter, it reminds me of Turgenev's Sketches, tiny knots of human sensibility brushing one another in fornt of the hearth. The scenery of the tiaga must be amazing, breeding a not-necessarly nietzchean sense of the eternal return. It becmae quite clear that my travels northwward in upper Michigan and southern Sweden were not of this stripe.

The book reminded me initially of Bitov, especially given his tendency to lyricize the habit of fauna in place of recognizing the human government around him. This changes around p. 70 with a series of characters reminiscing on the Civil War and the famines which stripped the Ukraine in the 30s. Stalin himself is not named, at least so far in the novel but the entire spectrum of human endeavor is displayed, most notably amongst the geologists sent to the tiagra to locate a strata of mineral (a subtle contrast, perhaps, between urban/intellectual and rural).

I will finish the book this evening and am prepared to hoist the second volume of Foote's Narrative, though my wife proclaimed as that she will catch up today in the Magic Mountain. We will see.