A book club pick

The flow of language is like the slow flow of a river over stones – gurgling gurgling, gurgling. It took me a while to get into the rhythm, and I spent the first couple of chapters wondering “do I like this, yes, no, yes, no, yes?” Once I found the key to the book (or vise versa), I couldn’t stop.

The book goes deeper than a story of human resilience and survival under horrible circumstances – you see people getting used to war, getting used to an abnormal reality that becomes the norm. That is why the main character’s dreams and nightmares are so prominent, I think. When your life, your reality is taken away from you, what is real?

Parts of Grey Bees seem almost pastoral and cozy, with absurdities lurking in the background. The coziness makes the hell just waiting to be unleashed on every page even more terrifying. Sometimes you catch glimpses of the monsters of hell, sometimes they show their teeth, and sometimes they bite. This is brilliantly done.

The structure of the novel is Everyman’s version of a hero’s journey, with shadows and reflections of the Odyssey. The story is circular – Sergey is back where he started by the end. And hell is still there.

The more I think about Grey Bees after finishing it, the more things I find to think about.
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Sergei has a special interest in bees, and that's what he's all about. Sympathetic, but had higher expectations. ( )

https://shawjonathan.com/2023/10/19/andrey-kurkovs-grey-bees-at-the-book-group/ ( )

Ukraine. Donetsk. The gray zone.

Sergei is middle-aged, divorced, a beekeeper--and one of two men who stayed behind in their abandoned gray-zone village in Donetsk. Hemmed in my Ukrainian forces on one side and Russians/separatists on the other, the subsist with no electricity and limited foodstuffs, hoping the next bomb does not land on them.

Come spring, Sergei leaves with his bees, looking for a bee-friendly place to stop. He finds his way to Crimea, to visit a beekeeping acquaintance he met at a conference years earlier.

Sergei is surprisingly naive and kind for a man living in a war zone. He cares only about his bees and their honey--not about religion, or nationality, or ethnicity, or language. He is continually surprised and unprepared for the hostility he meets--toward himself, and toward others. His naivete, old car, sloppy paperwork, and bees get him through safely. As a nearly homeless beekeeper, he also has plenty of time to consider his past actions, ex-wife, daughter, hometown, friendships, and more. ( )

I began Andrey Kurkov's Grey Bees slowly, trying to get a sense of Sergey Sergeyich, the 49-year-old beekeeper who lives in the gray zone between loyalists and separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region. He receives a visit from his former school rival Pashka, the only other resident left in the village. I had to strain at first not to lose sight of the beekeeper, not to mix him up with his rival, but then I read further to the next scene.

Sergeyich is outside walking through his garden.

I cannot even say what touched me so deeply, only that I, too, have walked through a garden I knew well, noticed the silence dotted by the small sounds particular to that area and then that something in the air that made me wonder what was different. I never discovered a body, nor did I hear distant shelling, but the familiar details of that walk, the feeling of it, made the contrast of war so palpable. I felt for Sergeyich, for all those who have found themselves in a war not of their choosing.

For me, that was when I landed in the novel. I continued to read, more quickly now, aware of the soft buzzing, if you will, coming to me from the gentle character Sergeyich, who, stuck living in the gray zone, has one focus: the well-being of his bees.

The beekeeper is a good-natured, creative, resourceful character who resonates at a time when we are witness to heinous war crimes taking place in Ukraine, when nuclear brinkmanship brings us closer to World War III, when failing climate leadership makes us fear the future that awaits our children, when mass shootings have become commonplace, when polarization stunts our conversations with friends and family, when disinformation floats around us like swirling dust, making it difficult to spot common signposts that can guide us back to better ground.

The world is on fire in all respects, it seems, and so it is with no small sense of wonder that we follow Sergeyich as he makes do with no electricity and water, as his tea is interrupted by a shell that lands nearby, as he dreams of spring when he can set up a mattress on top of his bees and let their vibration heal his aches and revitalize his spirit. Scarcity brings another level of joy to tea, a slice of bread, an egg, and a bowl of borscht...

I enjoyed this story immensely. ( )