The most celebrated Ukrainian author in contemporary history, and a veritable master of absurdism, is back with an absolute bang! Lost Soldiers bears the Kurkov imprimatur with such exquisiteness so as to leave the reader revelling in the essence of the book long after the covers have come down upon it.
At the nub of the plot is the inexplicable and fantastical disappearance of an entire squad of Red Army soldiers (the novel itself is squarely placed in the tumultuous ‘Kyvian’ times of the Bolsheviks and White Army confrontations) from a bathhouse situated in the bustling Halytska Square. The responsibility for solving the case falls upon Samson Kolechko, a young and optimistic investigator who calls the Lybid police station, home.
Kolechko himself has been the subject of an unfortunate and violent investigation, during the course of which one of his ears stands dismembered. The severed ear is carefully placed by its former owner in a snuff box. Kolechko finds a fantastical use for the ear by stitching it in the jacket of the attendant in charge of the bath house. A drunken revelry at the bath house enables Kolechko to eavesdrop on some controversial conversations while sitting at the police station (yes, I am not making this up).
What follows is extreme chaos, cacophony, and confusion. A phalanx of mean and murky characters makes steady and bizarre appearances like perpetual motion machines. Kolechko is sucked right into the crazy ‘carousel’ and keeps spinning as one thin lead to another obscure one and on and on, in a seemingly unending path of unpredictability. A benevolent doctor whose services are repeatedly sought by Kolechko as his right arm unfortunately keeps coming into contact with objects of harm, a slimy Belgian scamster with a femur bone constructed out of silver, a chiropodist, who is anything but one, a former priest turned into a police man all contrive to concoct a plot that leaves the reader positively breathless.
I personally relate Kolechko’ s magical ear to the ubiquitous surveillance that is characteristic of the world and times we inhabit. The menacing presence of Red and White soldiers is now substituted by invisible roving eyes of Artificial Intelligence that hover without rest tracking every trivial and significant movements of civilians and politicians alike. Even though there is more than a shard of moral intent underpinning the innovative methods adopted by Kolechko with his ear, the same cannot be said of the modern technological mechanisms and measures.
Resorting to a judicious blend of wicked wit and studied wisdom, Kurkov places into perspective, the cataclysmic times where ordinary citizens are caught in a deadly crossfire between warring and bloodthirsty factions competing for power. Exploiting the situation is a brazen lot of mercenaries, eager to eke out mileage from every ounce of misery. This is the aspect of Kurkov that distinguishes him from a multitude of his peers and contemporaries. There is a cathartic element that bursts through the veneer of humour and absurdist narratives.
Special mention to the award-winning translator, Boris Dralyuk for the seraphic effort with the translation!
Lost Soldiers – an author in vintage form!