Salam, Dalgat !

Salam, Dalgat! describes a young man's experiences during a single day in the city of Makhachkala. Dalgat needs to find his uncle to deliver a document to him (as with many other details in this very compact story, Ganieva leaves us in the dark about what the document is and why it matters). As he chases the uncle around the city, never quite catching up with him, he's forever being interrupted by friends, relatives and strangers who greet him (hence the title) and try to draw him into something complicated. Through these Ulysses-like episodes, Ganieva gives us a lightning (and relatively light-hearted) tour of the problems and joys of Dagestan. Amongst other things, we spend some time in the aunt's house, attend a Soviet-style book show more launch (with speeches so boring that even the dignitaries who give them are disheartened by the whole thing), take part in a rowdy wedding party, and look over Dalgat's shoulder as he reads the opening chapter of a lyrical travel book about Dagestan. Dalgat is urged to become a better Muslim, to avoid (and by someone else, to join) the Islamist extremists who clearly threaten the stability of the republic, to join the senseless fighting of teenage gangs, to buy pictures or poetry, to marry a nice girl, to pay more attention to the corruption of the Russian administration, to run away from all this to St Petersburg, etc. Ganieva obviously had a lot of fun coming up with things to happen to Dalgat, but she doesn't make him interesting or curious as a personality: he never reacts to anything that's proposed to him other than to brush it away more or less politely, like a teenager who hates decisions almost as much as he hates other people trying to push him into taking them. I suspect there's more than a little Meursault in his make-up, as well as a big chunk of Stephen Daedalus.

This is an idea that would probably have grated on me in a longer book, but it works really well in the 70-page novella format. I learnt something about Dagestan without being made to feel I was getting a geography lesson, I enjoyed the glimpses of street life, and I found Joëlle Dublanchet's French translation very readable and quite unobtrusive. show less