Azerbaijan Tales by Albert Power
Part Two of this review, as continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/07/23/azerbaijan-tales-by-albert-power/
My previous reviews of Albert Power: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/29098-2/ and of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/egaeus-press/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
nullimmortalis August 7, 2021 at 8:44 am
THE SANATORIUM AT CHAKHIRSHIRINCELO
Pages 165 – 167
The scene is set and I am already captivated, and not only because I am already a lover of sanatorium plots as written by great writers ever since my first youthful reading of Mann’s Magic Mountain and my later reading of John Cowper Powys’s The Inmates and Aickman’s Into The Wood…
This one is situated in a sanatorium for those suffering with their mental health under the sway of the ‘Supreme Soviet’ in 1968, and we are introduced to an intriguing character of middle-aged Dr Yevegeny Bondarchenko and his ‘annexe’ of an office like a prow of a ship nested in a building in the land contiguous to Iran as gouged within a similar cleft as the annexe, I infer. The Power descriptions of the Soviet influence on nomenclature and on the chosen geography of the awesome place itself cannot be done justice here. Just to mention that I happened to read a short book yesterday (here) entitled ‘Annex / Anexo’ and I have already felt an initial frisson of possibly unintentional thematic connection…or cross-section?
Pages 168 – 178
To a new “dirty digging”…!
At least one thing of which I can be sure — you will never forget this initial meeting between Yevgeny and imposing and elegant and unmarried Lyudmilla Andereievna Parkostina, a Soviet official who has come to assess a woman patient’s possibly too early release. A patient’s anecdotal backstory involving aspersions of the Sapphic as well as of the murderous (akin to that earlier in the Kish work?)
And the implied reflection on our doctor hero, and his own mixed feelings about Lyudmilla herself as a woman, as he she imposes herself: at his own place instead of him, at the powerful position at the apex of the annexe window…
The build-up of characterisation and plot is uniquely Powerful. Each word punching above its weight within its context, such words as ‘helmed’ ‘river’ as a verb, ‘already’, ‘ice-crack’, ‘verge’, in fact almost every word! And I am only scratching the surface, even though many will think this review is already too long, no doubt.
This is one of those books to be hidden under my blotter, perhaps, when certain people visit me?