Quercus

368 pgs/£14.44

The Light and the Dark is an epistolary novel – as soon as I opened the book and caught on to that, I thought of the 18th, 19th century. I thought, uncharitably, I was in for turgid romance. Or Dracula. But reading was another matter – there was the whiplash to deal with, of being thrown into the claustrophobic heart of the story, and there was the sparking, glorious prose.

The story is a love story of two sweethearts separated and writing back and forth to one another, recounting their happy moments and their present discomforts and biting loneliness. The lovers are Volodenka, a soldier in an unnamed, but clearly not modern conflict, and Sashenka, the young woman who waits at home. Here she recounts their time at their dachas in the countryside, where they met:

And the smells from the garden! So rich and dense, like fine particles saturating the air. You could pour those smells into a cup like strong tea.

And everything all around has only one thing on its mind – I simply walk through the field or the forest and absolutely everyone tries his very best to pollinate or inseminate me. My socks are just covered in grass seeds.

And remember, we found a hare in the grass with its legs cut off by a mowing machine.

Brown-eyed cows.

Little goat nuts lying on the path.

Our pond – murky on the bottom with blooming slush, full of frogspawn. Silver carp butting at the sky. I climb out of the water and pluck the weed off myself.

I lay down to sunbathe and covered my face with my singlet, the wind rustles like starched linen. And suddenly there’s a ticklish feeling in my navel, and it’s you pouring a thin stream of sand onto my stomach out of your fist.

The detail is thick, romantic with both a small and large r, but this feels valid for what lovers, nineteenth century, early twentieth perhaps, would write. They would see the exuberance of nature as a mirror to their own currently unfulfilled desires. And when Volodenka writes of the landscapes of war, he appends them with qualifiers of love. War and distance can only be endured because of the continued existence of Sashenka in the world.  Continue reading →