Boredom.
What we mean by this word? The Oxford English Dictionary defines boredom as follows:
‘To be in a state of boredom; to be excessively bored. The state of boredom is often created by a notable lack of originality; by being forced to go through the same dull experience over and over and over again’
Tape up my sides, they’re splitting again. How I do love the beginning of Leo Barnard’s charmingly tiresome study A Rather Long History of Boredom. If only he kept up this spirit of gentle mockery throughout its two thousand pages, instead of attempting to fashion a world-changing theory. But then this is what Barnard does best: he tries, ever in vain, to create a palatable soup out of life’s many inedible ingredients. He nearly always fails, of course, but his failure is never less than interesting. I’ll give the old bore that.
Why does Barnard’s book come to mind just now? It comes to mind for two good reasons. Reason one (the major reason) is that I have just finished reading it – and, as any man would – I feel obliged to show off the fact that I have read it. Did you catch that? I’ve read all two thousand pages of Barnard’s A Rather Long History of Boredom (including the footnotes). Got it? Yes? Good. Now, where was I? Ah yes. Reason two is that it (Barnard’s study) seems relevant to the other book in question (Naramaratov’s novel). Pah! Why else would I bring it into the discussion?
In accordance with the expectations of all and sundry (whoever they may be) it might have come to your attention that Barnard has been criticised for overstating the importance of boredom. His theory that history hinges on it may indeed be a little ‘in excess of the summit’ (as Georgy Riecke might say). ‘Sort out boredom’, writes Barnard – ‘and you’ve sorted out most of the problems in the world’. Elsewhere: ‘violence and boredom go hand in hand: so long as people are bored, we will continue to have wars’. One thing is for sure; so long as people are bored, we will have overlong studies of the nature of boredom. Maybe we’ll even have people willing to read overlong studies of the nature of boredom. Well, what can I say? Ever since I sold the television set, it’s been…
And here’s another man who’s bored: the hero of Niklas Naramaratov’s ninth novel, With a Brief Grin: Memoirs of a Gun-Toting Madman. His name is Konstantin Chebutkin, and as early as Chapter Two we’re made aware of the fact that for some time now his life, like some lop-sided bowling ball, has been slipping into the ungrateful gutter of utter tedium. But how about I let Naramaratov fill you in with a few more of the details? Here goes:
I lay flat on the grass. The turf was suitably soft, the sky reassuringly blue. Birds twittered merrily in the great green Yew that stood at the far end of the hundred-metre lawn. Into this Arcadia – and into my eye line – drifted a dandelion seed, safely fixed to its personal parachute, hanging in the hardly perceptible breeze of this soft summer’s day before dropping, for no good reason, onto my face. Of all the places to land! This was not fertile ground, not in the least.
I blew the seed away and watched it drift off towards the house. I imagined it landing on Ivan’s face, taking root in the man’s unruly moustache and sprouting in seconds: insanely, impossibly, perversely. I then imagined Ivan being eaten alive by the dandelion. It would serve him right, I thought, somehow. After all, the man had no sense of beauty, none at all. Here he was, paying me to make his garden beautiful –but to what end? Our conceptions of beauty had always differed wildly. So what if the money was good? I wanted the satisfaction of knowing that my efforts were worthwhile.
‘Without gardening, I am nothing’. I have always said this a lot. Not because it was ever true, mind you, but because I’ve always wanted it to be true. To be gripped by an unhealthy obsession – to be a man! And yet, the truth was ever thus: gardening was not enough for me. I wanted something more. I wanted to branch out.
That’s enough of that. So, Konstantin is bored of gardening. Poor chap. He’s working for a brute with no sense of beauty. My dear little heart is bleeding. He needs something new in his life. Of course he does, the unfortunate fellow. Let’s see what Naramaratov can do for him. But first, back to Barnard.
What do bored people do? They do something – anything to get them out of the state of boredom. Boredom often blinds their senses, leading them to do silly things. Doing something silly frequently seems better than doing nothing at all. Ask my good friend Heidi Kohlenberg. Back in the late nineties, a decade ago now, Heidi found herself working as a junior reviewer for the cultural journal Groping for Allusions. She had high ambitions, not met by the job, which consisted mostly of writing short articles on writers of little or no importance (Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy: you know the sort). She soon grew bored by the repetitive nature of the work, pushed by monotony into a series of random acts of which she is now less than proud. It was at this time, I recall, that she started doing a touch of what they call ‘train-spotting’. She was, in her words, ‘breaking the last taboo’. Sex and death no longer shock us, she claimed, but train-spotters sure do. It was a fair point, though as far as the experiment went, it was not all that successful. The kick that Kohlenberg got from moving from her boho London literary circles during the week to her Clapham Junction train-spotting groupings during the weekend was a short-lived one. Nevertheless, it proves Barnard’s point. People will do all manner of silly things to ‘break through the boredom barrier’. They might write books on philosophy or hang out in train stations. They might even resort to senseless acts of violence.
The appearance of Kohlenberg in the last paragraph was not contrived simply for the sake of laughing at her past (though god knows I do). The fact is, I met her once during the time she was enjoying her second life as a train spotter. I had no idea, of course, of the truth behind her ‘weekend activities’. I remember bumping into her one evening at Waterloo and asking her from whence she came. ‘Nowhere,’ said she, with a brief grin. I presumed she was having an affair – nothing more than that. Little did I know…
The brief grin is, however, the important thing. It was the signal, the sign: an echo of the second life she was leading. As with Kohlenberg, so too with Konstantin Chebutkin. Tired of trowelling weeds from the ground of a Russian country manor, he embarks upon an auxiliary existence. No more the simple life of a gardener, says he, flinging down his rake and hoe. No! No! No! There must be something else for me. And there is, it seems, which is all well and good for him – but for the reader?
The title appeared to give it away. And what it was giving away didn’t seem worth giving away. Memoir of a Gun-Toting Madman. There it was. Konstantin’s second life – surely it wasn’t going to be a case study from Barnard’s epic treatise? Bored gardener, frustrated by buddleia and high on cheap weed-killer, freaks out, buys a gun and starts killing people left, right and, on occasion, centre. Dramatic, maybe – but dreadfully predictable. Is this what was in store? I hoped not.
As it was, I got lucky, though it took a while to realise it. For indeed, at first, Naramaratov is keen to promote his story as being thoroughly conventional. Despite patches of ambiguous prose, to all intents and purposes it seems as though Konstantin is doing just as we expected him to. He is freaking out, albeit quietly so, with all the misplaced panache of that admirable group of human beings: the psycho-killers. He has his gun and he is, to put it bluntly, ‘wreaking havoc’. Women are his target and he has no mercy. Not even a little bit of mercy hiding in a large coat pocket with last week’s bus ticket. Not a shred of mercy in sight. The quiet man is turning up the volume. The bored gardener is cutting loose. Ya-di-ya-di-ya.
When the initial twist comes, it doesn’t necessary come as a relief. If I confessed to finding the jaded grass-cutter-turns-gun-happy-maniac plotline a tad banal, I can barely move beyond this unpromising position when faced with Naramaratov’s next move. It turns out we’ve been tricked. The writer has been leading his troupe of readers down a shady glade or two. When Naramaratov explained how Konstantin was getting merry with his gun, he didn’t actually mean gun. As in, he was not referring to a firearm in, well, the normal sense of the word. What he actually meant was, well, um, hmmm (rubs nose bashfully), well, you know… His, um, ‘weapon’. That is to say, Konstantin’s penis. He is referring to Konstantin’s penis. This – not an automatic pistol – is the gun which Konstantin is toting, so to speak. He is not killing women – he is merely impregnating them. Right.
Right. Ho. Where are we? I’ll tell you where we are. We’re more than a few chapters into Niklas Naramaratov’s With a Brief Grin: Memoir of a Gun-Toting Madman and – let’s be honest with ourselves – we’re beginning to wonder whether or not we should keep reading. Oh, he can write well enough, sure. There ain’t nothing wrong with Naramaratov’s words. But who will profess to admire the way this story seems to be turning out? A bored gardener attempts to break out of the damp soil of depression by becoming a regular Don Juan. And there’s another weird thing. These women don’t seem to be any too bothered by Konstantin’s advances. Mad he may be, but they’re open to his madness. Why so?
Or to put it another way – Why care why so? One begins to wonder whether the ‘brief grin’ of the title is being replicated on readers’ faces. If it is, it is a grin at its very ‘briefest’ – for this tall tale has yet to pull in a consistently positive gesture. And so long as it trades in dreary and churlish clichés, this state of affairs will not change any time soon.
Luckily, Naramaratov has one more twist lurking up his sleeve. How could we ever have doubted him? He is, after all, a seasoned author, with a good eight novels behind him. It’s no guarantee, not at all, but it should stand for something. It should at least have warned us, as readers, that our worst fears would not necessarily come true; that Naramaratov is a little more cunning than your average scribbler, if not your average fox.
The women, as I have written, are happy to play along with Konstantin’s madness. How could this be? How is he able to live these two lives so successfully – that of shy hedge-trimmer and reckless lover – without so much as batting an eyelid? The idea of him as a killer may have been typical, but it was at least vaguely believable. After all, Konstantin is a bit of an outcast. But to transform oneself from this situation into that of a Casanova, as the clunking pun on ‘gun’ allows him to do, well, this will never stick. Pervert perhaps. Everybody’s favourite bed mate? I think not.
But what do I know? Once Naramaratov’s final card has been revealed, things don’t look so bad after all. So what if the gun is still a reference to the flower-tender’s winkle. Put it all in the context of this new set-up and, sure enough, like a plain person in a good suit, it impresses far more than you ever thought it would. It also makes sense as a story: it is given a reason for being. Konstantin’s ‘second-life’ is charged with new meaning.
Before I take you forward, let me take you back. I didn’t mention it before, but this novel begins with a prologue. It doesn’t mean much to you at the time, but it grows it meaning later on. And here it is:
These memoirs are made up. I’m not saying that Konstantin Chebutkin – their author – does not exist. It’s just he never wrote any memoirs. He wasn’t that sort of person. The task has fallen to me instead; the task, that is, of filling in the gaps in his story. Someone had to write his memoirs for him, and it seemed right that it should be me. Think of me less as a writer, than as a secretary in retrospect. A.R
Who in the world is A.R? Let me tell you. A.R is one of Konstantin’s children. One of the children that resulted from his gun-toting madness. But it took A.R time to track his or her father down, since Konstantin was not what you would call a conscientious daddy. Indeed, it would be a lie to say that he was on the scene at all. And if he was never on the scene, it wasn’t because he didn’t want to be there – it was because there wasn’t a part for him to play. He belonged on the sidelines – that was his job. That was the part he was ordained to play.
Konstantin’s ‘second-life’ was, as ‘second-lives’ go, one of the most interesting, if not controversial. It was in one sense dramatic, but it didn’t seem so. The gun-toting mayhem is a smokescreen; a flamboyant metaphor for a relatively quiet, but highly charged act. For Konstantin Chebutkin’s second life was no more than this: he donated some sperm.
And so we have it: the best Eastern European imaginative sperm donor novel of the last decade. That Konstantin’s ‘memoir’ should be written by one of the children created by this donation goes some way to explaining the flamboyance of the metaphor. If this ‘second-life’ wasn’t a big deal to the shy gardener, it was to someone else – the literal second life: the child.
You may begin to see how Naramaratov’s tale – at first so discouraging, so thematically redundant – is given a second-life itself by the way in which the sperm donor theme is weaved into it, not through radical revelations, but with the sort of subtlety that we, dear sad deluded readers as we are, would never have expected, but nonetheless deserve. Of course, I have barely done in justice here: it is not my place to do so. For this, you must pick up the book yourself, and witness its slowly unfolding wonders for yourself.
One sometimes forgets that a novel exists as a whole, that one’s progress through it is a journey towards a destination. Though the journey may be enjoyed of its own accord, to arrive at a rotten destination sours the preceding experience. I need say no more than this: Naramaratov does not deal in rotten destinations.
A word or two about his style, and of other elements of this grand novel that have struck me. As you may have noticed for yourself, Naramaratov’s style is slyly antiquated; playful, yes, but without ever drawing undue attention to its playfulness. His grin, as he says, is indeed brief; not because he cannot force a wider smile, but because he has other places to go; because he is far too shrewd to fish for grins all day long.
Is his prose beautiful? It comes as some relief to say that it isn’t. Beautiful prose, after all, can be awfully tiring to a reader. At times, however, he does take us into a world that is full of rather wonderful words. How could he not? After all, his main character is a gardener – and no writer was ever in better company than when writing about gardens. What words, what words! Azalea, chrysanthemum, agapanthus, brambles, buttercup… I’ll stop whilst I can, otherwise I never shall. Talk about the garden of lovely words. Yes, you are assured of good prose amongst the roses, of words that sparkle and glow: that endlessly radiate mystery. The vowels blossom forth as the consonants crackle on the tongue like October leaves trampled underfoot. The garden was ever the writer’s friend.
One last thing. I have of late caught people talking of so-called ‘unfinished’ endings. Novels that break off in the middle of a story, or drift aimlessly before stopping suddenly. I will not venture so far as to say what I think of such endings. But I will say this. You need not fear this sort of laziness when dealing with Niklas Naramaratov. That life is, in a sense, ‘ever unfinished’ is, in a sense, very true. There is, yet, one possible ending in life. I talk, of course, life’s singly effective full-stop (to say nothing of the afterlife, the only sequel which is not yet coming to a cinema near you). I talk of… well, you know very well what I talk of. And I know very well that it is considered bad form to give endings away, which leaves me in somewhat of a quandary. I shall end, therefore, with this brief assurance: I don’t know how to end a review, rest assured Niklas Naramaratov does know how to end a novel.
Review by Jinpes Terenk
Further Reading:
