TWO LEAPS ACROSS (A CHASM A RUSSIAN MYSTERY)

Rating:
Summary: Lost in translation.
Review: I write this review more out of pity than of anything else; a sort of testament to the fact that someone out there has forced their way through this tale. The best things I can say about it are that it truly embodies the flavor of its' time and place, and that it is relatively short.

Over the course of twelve or perhaps thirteen years, I had made as many attempts to read this book through. Starting each time at the beginning, I found myself always stalling out at the same point, which is shortly after the introduction of the first character. Yuri Kirilov practices Obstetrics while the Soviet Union crumbles around him, something neither he nor anyone else in this tale ever seems to acknowledge more than passingly. An odd phone call from a long-ago acquaintance summons him to a distant provincial city, and he makes furtive preparations to leave. That is about where I would usually put the book down.

The story may in fact be poorly crafted, but having never read, nor being able to read, the original Russian text, that is a difficult thing to pass judgement about. The English translation is certainly clumsy, and often confusing, and so that may just be the nature of the book. I do believe, though, that there might be a good story in here, yet I do not think that the western audience is given the opportunity to see the whole of it.

Having finally succeeded in my annual quest to choke down this morsel of a novel, I cannot say it was worth the struggle or the wait, though it is not completely beyond redemption.

The "Two Leaps" described in the title are ostensibly undertaken by the aforementioned Dr. Kirilov, and by a Lieutenant Colonel of the MVD, Iosef Vashok. They are the main characters in their respective halves of the story, both of whom seem hell-bent on throwing away what pitiable lives they have carved out for themselves in a suicidal quest to assist a man they do not know in exposing a group of party higher-ups as... everything we the reader have been traditionally taught they should be.

Herein lies the one critical flaw in the story: could anybody care? Communist Party bigwigs in the USSR protecting their positions and using their influence to secure resources for their mutual benefit? (insert sarcasm here) I never would have suspected. Perhaps I am the victim of a free press in this instance, having known about that sort of thing from a time when I was old enough to be aware that there was a place called Russia... Maybe this would have been a sort of edgy topic in the motherland, circa 1991. But that would be as difficult to believe as this novel was for me to get around to finishing.

In a nutshell, a correspondent for a national magazine has uncovered a scandal as vaguely described above. Henceforth, he involves seemingly every person he knows in what he has wrought, ranging from a an old sixth grade chum (Dr. Kirilov) to the Policeman who is investigating him (Vashok). In the process, he inadvertently destroys the life of everyone around him, impregnates the woman he loves, and then gets expelled from the country, leaving everyone else behind to pay the price for his journalistic integrity.

Character development is kept to a minimum here, which helps to prevent one from empathizing too deeply with the silhouettes of people who are left to their unresolved fates. Likewise, descriptions of settings are relatively bare, filled in mostly by what you already know of them. Altogether, the effect is to leave a person only feeling that they might have read something, but not positively knowing it; and so, if that was a stylistic goal the author had in mind to achieve, he has done so with perfection. Even more, maybe everything within is by design, and true to the original form, which would explain why I can find no further published works from this author.

Nonetheless, I cannot recommend against reading "Two Leaps Across a Chasm"; since it is impossible to truly communicate the utter futility and thinness of this work, it would be better for you to experience it first hand. Almost anything is worth trying once.