Gorky Park the novel: what do Russians think of it?

February 17, 2019 4:18 AM

Nearly 40 years after seeing the reviews and thinking I'd read it some day, I've finally finished Gorky Park. I have some questions, the chief among them being, if you're Russian and lived through the time period in question, does it still seem to be a fantastic novel or is it full of jarring implausibilities? More questions below the fold and spoilers of course.

By about half way through I was like, this is not only extremely good as a thriller, it's as though John le Carré developed the script from an outline by Orwell and then they handed it over to Ursula Le Guin to write the final version. It's both truly genre transcending and stylistically rigorous. The long sweep of history, the unsayable facts shimmering below the surface of the prose, the imaginative feat of inhabiting the protagonist's point of view so completely and unobtrusively the whole structure of the novel is built around his subjectivity, the tight, compressed physical descriptions (damn, that peat fire) the characterisation blooming through such scant dialogue.

1. But does it read like this to Russians? Does Cruz Smith make mistakes? For instance, there's a place where he mentions someone's unheated flat, was that a thing cuz I somehow had the impression centrally heated state housing was one of the consistent benefits of the USSR? What about the way characters react to state power, the subterfuges they must undertake, the language they must use, all of that? What does it feel to read this if you lived the real version of what he's alluding to?
2. What does the reference to Irina's facial blemish, and the explanation it results from an injection, mean? What's the story there, what has happened to her?
3. What are Cruz Smith's other novels like? Can they possibly all be this good? All nearly 30 of them?

In short, is this book as good as I think it is? I mean there's an Inscrutable Beauty thing going on but we're in Renko's subjectivity so I'll give it a pass.

I particularly liked, but this is because of all those subsequent thrillers, that in the role of Monstrous Implacable Alien Evil, American Osborne occupies the same role in the book as all those Russian mobsters do in works such as The Equalizer. Renko being more human, vulnerable, plausible and likable than Robert McCall though so it's less of a fairy tale. And I did like both the contrast and the symmetry between Moscow and New York. Wherever you go, there you are - heart of darkness kind of thing. (All the best myths go there. Gorky Park: less of a fairy tale, more of a myth. If the book only works as long as you're not Russian, well, sadface)

posted by glasseyes to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

I'm an American, and I know no more about Russia than the average American, but I have read every Cruz Smith novel that fell to hand. Let me tell you a story.

I was a math major. I wrote one of the worst papers ever in freshman English on the subject of images. I just didn't get it. Scroll forward about 25 years. I'm reading Gorky Park and came across references to a shed with dead eider (ducks), first plump and satisfying, then rotten and repulsive. I nearly jumped out of my chair crying "It's an image, it's an image. I get it. It's an image."

So, thank you Martin.

About his other books. Some, e.g. Polar Star, are pretty much in the same gritty, realistic vein as Gorky Park. His more recent books have seemed less realistic to me in a "gee, could a kid really have done that?" sense. He remains interested in Russians, but the view of Russia as a failed, socialist state has waned with the end of the cold war and other things have come to prominence.

I listened to Red Square in the car. I got a feeling of deja vu, as if his publishers had demanded a new Gorky Park, and that's what they got, at the cost of originality.

I've also read at least two of his non-Russia novels. Stallion Gate I read long ago and don't remember much. Rose was grittier than I cared for.
posted by SemiSalt at 10:22 AM on February 17, 2019 [4 favorites]

For someone in the eighties, who had never been to Russia, writing at a time when the general public knew very little about Russia - and what they did know was mostly crap - it's very realistic.

Smith wrote the book with research from a Russian exile in the US, and he was friendly with many others. On publication, it was almost immediately banned in Russia, though quite popular with dissident types. I have no idea of its contemporary reputation there.

The sequel, Polar Star, is in my opinion an even better book. Red Square I found disappointing, a pale retread of Gorky Park with a very annoying "it was all a dream" kind of ending (note, that is not the ending, but the effect was the same). Havana Bay was even worse - not a bad book, but utterly unremarkable and generic potboiler mystery, very much a product of its time with a ridiculous central relationship that had some racial undertones I was not crazy about.

I haven't read any of his subsequent novels after that, though I understand they become more typical of mystery novels and some are better and some are worse. My mum has read them all and said none of them are as good as Gorky Park, though some are good as plain mystery novels.
posted by smoke at 1:46 PM on February 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

Polar Star is, in my opinion, the only other Martin Cruz Smith book that reaches the transcendent heights of Gorky Park. His others are generally good, but not great. The rest of the Arkady Renko books following Red Square also start to suffer from the same weird issue as Robert Parker's Spencer novels, in that at some point, history continues to move forward but the protagonist just stops aging.

Regarding the mark on Irina's face, here's the relevant passage, a conversation between Arkady and Levin:

"The mark on her cheek. They had her before, Arkady. They shot Aminazin into her years ago."
"I thought they stopped using Aminazin because it was dangerous."
"That's the point. They deliberately inject it badly into the muscle so that it's not absorbed. If it's not absorbed, it forms a malignant tumor, just as it did with her. Wake up. She's blind in one eye. Whoever cut the tumor cut the optic nerve and left that mark. That's their mark."

I believe we're meant to understand that when Irina was arrested as a dissident, the KGB injected her with Aminazin (which Google informs me is an anti-psychotic medication), which caused a tumor. Removing the tumor is what blinded her and left the mark. This was all done to her deliberately, as a form of torture.
posted by merriment at 2:02 PM on February 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Yeah SemiSalt, and it's the second view of the shed so it's like a revelation of the whole dynamic between what's his name and Renko - move further into the shed and what is there but rottenness and murder. And it's so lightly done, entirely fitting in with the logic of the events. That sort of structural deftness is part of what's so impressive.

Thanks so far, everyone. It'll be wonderful if someone familiar with the Russian pov can chime in before this falls off the front page.
posted by glasseyes at 5:38 AM on February 18, 2019

I recall there was a review by a Russian journalist in an American magazine after the book came out (can't remember where, but I'm guessing Harpers would print something like this). The reviewer was cynical and dismissive of an American author describing Russia while using conventional American crime fiction tropes (which is the expected response during the Cold War, so you can take that with a grain of salt too). I'd be curious to hear a more honest less-filtered Russian perspective on this question as well.
posted by ovvl at 3:16 PM on February 19, 2019

I did find this review at Russia Reviewed. Sorry to say, it doesn't really speak to the issues glasseyes is interested in. But it's a 2016 review and times have changed.

Summary: I don't like novels in this genre, and I didn't like this one.
posted by SemiSalt at 6:10 AM on February 22, 2019