Frederic Tuten, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

I ought to like Frederic Tuten (Self Portraits: Fictions), a second-generation american as I am second-generation english, but the music isn't there; he moves between romance and cultural icons as in an amusement park under a layer of volcanic ash. Last Year at Marienbad is one of his favourites, and indeed mine. Finding someone else under the sway of Delphine Seyrig is not as reassuring as I would have thought; he would like to meet a woman who has her weariness and detachment; leave her at the hotel in Marienbad, I say, with that bit of chiffon about her throat.

One way of clarifying why a writer doesn't do it for me is to read another in the same breath.  Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky for example, the story 'Thirty Pieces of Silver', a fantastical history of the common era, so-called, through the metaphorical yet obstinately real thirty pieces of silver, one of which could turn up in your weekly pay packet, dear reader. And 'Postmark: Moscow', a series of letters to no one in particular. (I used to write those.) These are dry, long-legged sketches, savage yet polite, a riff more than a story, written in Moscow of the 1920s and 30s by a Ukrainian in a state of perpetual bewilderment and ever-narrowing focus; he pays fine attention to walls and windows, the lay-out of streets.

Frederic Tuten inhabits a cosier world of women, films and nostalgia. He cruises about in his cultural Luna Park. Krzhizhanovksy is edgily, defiantly, darkly closer to his (subfusc) meaning. Tuten, whose family is from Sicily via the Bronx, doesn't need meaning, when he quotes Marx it is to bask in old ideals before returning to a park on fire. Dreamlike but not dreamy.

What is the difference between the fire of state-repressed writing, the habit of concealment and the word-image-bath of the second-generation migrant to the free world? The prisoner who paces about Moscow is largely on his own; the free man has the companionship of an entire culture. Frederic Tuten dedicates this book to his friend Alain Resnais. The writings of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovksy, on the other hand, were not published until 40 years after his death.

A cold storm called Jake came out of the north-northwest today, so I was in, by the stove, with two unread books by Krzhizhanovsky and Lispector, who are adjacent in the alphabet and both born in Ukraine, if thirty-three years apart. He moved to Moscow in 1922, age thirty-five; she, age two, had already been moved to Brazil. There is nothing similar about their subsequent lives, probably nothing similar about their Ukraines either, but wheresoever they gathered it up, they wrestle with reality as the only way to be sure it's there. Krzhizhanovsky is more analytical, more parallel universe and absolute reversal, subject to forces he doesn't name, mysterious strangers, gods and philosophers. Lispector is more emotionally brazen, her reality streams out strange and ordinary, overtaking people on trains, in cities, mingling and separating, prone to enormous changes at the last minute.

I read one then the other for the afternoon and gradually the two writers came together, their soul storm and soul seepage as one by evening.

The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

All the signs are propitious, including the difficulty of pronouncing the author's name and the illustration on the cover—an empty classroom with paint peeling off the desks (Chernobyl).

The members of the letter killers club are a bunch of conceivers, matterphobic and phobic in general. Look to the political and social tensions of 1920s Russia if you like, or to a philosophical stance (K as an adolescent read Kant), it is disconcerting to read a tale of a club that meets in a room of empty black bookshelves and tells tales that test the limits of conception. Letters (on the page) should be killed. This book shouldn't exist but I am reading it. Like being stabbed but not yet dead.

After reading the book twice, it beeps in the dark, a map of obscure and plaintive indications; it floats about in the brain emulsion, along with fellow travellers like Daniil Kharms and Andrey Platonov; leaves the reader awash with paradox, like the morning after an all-night dream.