The Vital Needs of the Dead

This book is less a novella and more a random collection of incidents mostly in chronological order that someone would eventually turn into a novel. It never really goes anywhere, there are a number of random bits which have nothing to do with the central theme, and the characters never really move on or change.

While this style of book is never really my cup of tea, I think even the people who do like this style would have problems with it. It's not quite magical realism, as there's nothing really magical or unreal (in the sense of fantasy) in it, but it feels like that was the aim.

It follows an older teenager and his life as a mostly independent unit, along with a series of implausible and brief love affairs. He is so apathetic about show more most things that I found it hard to keep reading (let alone understand why any woman would just randomly initiate sex with him). There were also a few highly ridiculous things, like the fact that he was apparently hospitalized for multiple days because of a broken nose.

It's difficult to judge a translated book, because a poor translation can ruin even the best novel. Some of the writing felt awkward in a way that didn't fit the general style. While this edition doesn't specifically say it's a pre-pub, there are some editing issues as well - the main thing being that punctuation was always left outside of the quotation marks. show less

This might be a good book, but I really can't tell because the translation seems to be terrible. Witness: Through images of that autumn and the premature onset of winter, there showed a haphazardly primed canvas onto which the autumn and winter were superimposed in a slapdash manner (pg. 65). See what I mean? If there was any clarity or subtlety or beauty of language in the original Russian, it has been lost. Twice(!) I actually didn't realize that sexual intercourse had taken place between characters because the description was so cryptic and vague. Most of the book is like that, with the events and characters obscured by the phrasing.

And there are so few actual events or distinct personalities that this was quite a chore to read, I'm show more sorry to say. I felt no connection to any of the characters, and nothing really happened. The few concrete details I managed to suss out -- that Sidelnikov gets his nose broken and subsequently stays several days in the hospital -- were inexplicable to me. Is this novel meant to be so surreal and unlikely? I get the sense that maybe this book's strength is its atmosphere -- the country during the Brezhnev era -- but it was entirely inaccessible to me because of the awkward prose. show less

The Vital Needs of the Dead is a hard novella to love. Sidelnikov, a teenager in an obscure Urals town, seemingly sleepwalks through his life. His passion is submerged, making it hard to care one way or another about him. And yet… he observes the events that seem to flow over him with both a dry poignancy and occasional inadvertent hilarity. I suspect this book has lost a bit in translation -- the phrasing in English is sometimes awkward. If you can see past that, I think this book has its merits. A worthwhile read if you're interested in recent Russian history.

This book was hit-and-miss for me. I really liked some of the visuals and the way they were described by the author as well as some of the relationships and their dynamics that felt both interesting and real to me. Yet, overall, I found most of the novel to be pointless. There are several themes running concurrently at different times without any real central theme at any one time to give it all meaning. It doesn't work as a coming-of-age story, a story about youth in Soviet Russia, or as a story about dealing with the loss of a loved one, although it does come closest to the latter.

The Vital Needs of the Dead gets across what it sets out to do. The reader gets a picture of what the tumultuous period between the end of Stalin's Soviet Union and the gangster/oligarchy run Russia of the 90s was like. In a way this book belongs to the Russian version of the beatniks. It has the same stream of thought that a lot of beatnik poetry shares. That sort of lost generation, breaking apart from their parents', or in this case grandparents', lives but not yet having established an identity as a generation. Of course, this also hurts the novel because it isn't poetry and so the prose can be difficult to pay attention to and the plot was nebulous at periods.

My first thought with Vital Needs of the dead when I started reading it was that not everyone is going to understand this book. As I continued reading I continued to feel that way. For those born in a privileged western world that have not had to deal with the experiences of something like Soviet run Russia they cannot always identify with what is going on.

Now I am one of those who was born in the Western world but I have done a lot of reading of this era and like to think I can connect with what is being told. Igor Sakhnovsky writes a very detailed story that is full of images that seemed to speak of me. Gosha is a character that I could really connect with and so I was interested in his story and what was happening to him show more throughout.

Some of the translation could be a little bit rough but for me that did not really take away from the book. A lot of times I think you have to read a book in its mother tongue to get all of the subtle nuances of what is being told. I would recommend this book to someone who is willing to take the time to understand what the story is telling you. show less

The Vital Needs of the Dead had some interesting things going on but it wasn’t exactly a riveting read. Even though it’s not very long, I couldn’t help but think it would have been better if it was shorter.

The language is really weird and I’m not sure whether the author or the translator is to blame.