CHILDREN OR SOVIETS OR BOTH: THE BOOKS THAT HAVE MADE ME LAUGH By Madeleine LaRue
Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of .
The news has been worse than usual this year, so I鈥檝e been particularly thankful for books that make me laugh. Here are some of the funniest contenders 鈥 in what I鈥檓 sure is just a coincidence, they all take place in the 1980s and involve either children or Soviets or both.
by Juan Pablo Villalobos (translated by Rosalind Harvey) is narrated by a little boy named Orestes who lives in a very small, very poor town in Mexico. His father鈥檚 favorite activity is cursing the police, while his mother spends most of her time making quesadillas to feed Orestes and his numerous siblings (all similarly named after figures of Greek tragedy). When the family鈥檚 two youngest children, the twins Castor and Pollux, disappear, it sets off a chain of wild events that culminates with the appearance of some extraterrestrial visitors.
But before the aliens get involved, Orestes runs away to make his fortune, and so the book becomes a kind of sad, but hilarious, parody of a poor boy鈥檚 rags-to-riches story. Villalobos鈥 novel, originally titled Si vivi茅ramos en un lugar normal (鈥淚f we lived somewhere normal鈥), criticizes a system of poverty and corruption that is, of course, not limited to Mexico, all while delivering lines so colorful and surprising that you can鈥檛 help but laugh.
Another tale narrated by a clever, resourceful, and chronically poor child, by Ondjaki (translated by Stephen Henighan) moves the scene to Angola. The novel is populated by a cast of odd, lovable characters, including the eponymous Soviet, called Comrade Gudafterov by the children for his habit of greeting everyone with a solemn 鈥淕udafter-noon,鈥 no matter the time of day. Though there are moment in the plot when things seem to be getting dangerous, nothing really terrible actually happens, and we are left with an unusually vivid sense not only of the Angola of Ondjaki鈥檚 own childhood, but of the general texture of childhood itself. Stephen Henighan has done a particularly fine job conveying the range of Ondjaki鈥檚 style 鈥 the Soviet鈥檚 comically broken Portuguese and the narrator鈥檚 fleeting moments of poetry, for example, seem to arrive in English with equal ease.
by Sergei Dovlatov (translated by Katherine Dovlatov) is not narrated by a child. Rather, our hero is Soviet version of the superfluous man 鈥 poor, highly sensitive to literature, perpetually drunk, and somehow badly equipped for life. After a divorce and at the end of his rope, he arrives one summer at Pushkin鈥檚 country estate, looking for work as a tour guide. His ensuing adventures are punctuated by witty-one liners worthy of a vodka-soaked Oscar Wilde (鈥淎re you good friends [with Mitrofanov]?鈥 someone asks the narrator, who replies, 鈥淚鈥檓 good friends with his bad side.鈥), but overall, the novel owes more to Bulgakov, whose humor builds slowly, almost imperceptibly, until suddenly the entire situation is absurd. The book, like all my favorite Russian tales, is a tragicomedy, one of the saddest and funniest to appear this year.
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