A sometimes intense sometimes engaging account of the last months of the Uzbek author Abdulla Qodiriy interleaved with imagined scenes from his lost historical novel with many inclusions of Uzbek poetry which seems more self referential and generally opaque than anything from Tale of Genjii. ( )

A moving novel about the beloved Uzbek writer Abdulla Qodiriy, a victim of His (he’s too beastly to name in the novel) Great Purge in 1938, along with a raft of Uzbek writers and intellectuals, the most famous of whom also grace these pages. Qodiriy wrote ‘the first modern Uzbek novel’.

To be honest I avoid novels where writers write about writing. Possibly it’s not then fair to say that Abdulla in this novel is the portrait of a writer I have taken most to heart and found most true. Unpretentious, not self-involved… except he is so involved in his stories that his wife gets jealous when he weeps over a woman main he has killed off. He is so involved that he identifies with Oyxon and comes to see he is telling his own story, in hers. The background 19th century story is about tyrants, like the present. There are three women poets. There are three local rulers in different ways tyrannical and unworthy. There are two English spies, for the Great Game becomes an unplanned part of his novel; the Englishmen end up in prison too, and Qodiriy hallucinates them in his prison. Inside prison for a while there is held a symposium of intellectuals held for being anti-Soviet, nationalist, that is, for practising and preserving Uzbek culture. The public for this translation might be more familiar with China and Tibet. This is about Central Asia, or Turkestan, and cultural obliteration by the Soviet government.

But the 19th century was not a glory age, even though Qodiriy gets in trouble for writing the first modern novel on Uzbek history, Past Days – becomes the most celebrated Uzbek writer, and suspect to the government. Despite this, the khans and emirs of Bukhara and Khoqand are frivolous thugs equated with the authorities Qodiriy meets in the present day. In the political world the devils dance on, just to another tune. But the poetry is celebrated, as is Qodiriy’s prose – and both endangered, both stamped out of existence, burnt, declared unspeakable. A library is burnt in the 19th century too, Nodira’s, the poet and queen.

Of Nodira, at first I thought, ‘jealous wife, how dull’, but she is presented as an important poet – Abdulla Qodiriy has an exchange of views in prison about her significance to Uzbek poetry, wherein he argues for her and the other inmate against. Oyxon becomes wife to three emirs or khans – but these are three rapists. Three abusers more or less brutal. She turns to drink. She’s a poet too but her works are lost. Qodiriy searches for them, sure they would tell all about life and be a revelation, but then he is arrested.

Near the end, that unabashed entanglement of the author with his character that Ismailov tells us of, leads to a tender scene where Qodiriy and Oyxon each face the worst and encounter the other as a comfort. Devils’ dance too is what Abdulla’s mother and father used to warn him about: the devils taking over his head if he drifts so into his fictions. Abdulla does ‘go mad’ in prison, where his novel is the anchor to hope, its continuation a something-to-do aside from being interrogated; its figments visit him in prison. But that’s a dance worth risking devils for.

I was frustrated by the translation. For a novel that is about literature, and that celebrates diversity of language, it is a pity that there is no attempt to render the speech ways so important to Qodiriy the narrator. He listens to a fellow prisoner whose speech is ornamented with Persian phrasing, and Qodiriy says he was enchanted not for the content but for the speech – but we have read in plain English, not distinguished from the passages before and after. Nobody wants a dodgy accent, but you can differentiate and you can transport embroidery of words into English. As the translator notes in his afterword, the past and present stories are told in Uzbek’s high and low styles. There is no indication of this distinction in the English prose. I understand we’re to be grateful for English translations out of Uzbek, because there more or less aren’t any. But I can hope another attempt at translation lies in store for this significant novel. ( )