Book Review - The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years
(Please note that in writing this, I'm going to have to give away some of the book, so if you intend to read it and don't want any of the story to be spoiled, you'd best read it first and then come back to this post. But in my opinion, knowing ahead of time the facts of a novel like this doesn't detract from reading it any more than looking at a beautiful sweater beforehand spoils the pleasure of wearing it.)
This novel, written by ethnic Kirghiz Chingiz Aitmatov during the Soviet Union, is four-way juxtaposition of Central Asian folk stories, the lives of Kazakhs working at an small, isolated railway junction in the middle of the southern Kazakhstan desert, the story of single day in which the same Kazakhs try to bury their deceased elder according to Islamic tradition, and the encounter of American and Soviet space agencies with an advanced alien civilization from the planet "Lesnaya Grud" (Forest Breast). The result is, as you'd expect, a book that is thickly knitted with metaphors, from which the reader is free to find all sorts of symbolic meaning, and I was lucky enough to find a meaning that relates directly to my life here.
The main character, Burrani Yedegei, is throughout the novel given the privelege in every plot and subplot of standing on the edge of loss. His birthplace, which he longs for throughout his dry and desolate days in the Sara Ozek desert, is the steadily disappearing Aral Sea. The novel opens with, and is framed around, the death of the oldest and most respected Kazakh of their railroad station, who knew all the legends of the Sara Ozek. A long-suffering Kazakh family is torn apart by the injustices of Stalin's rule. The people of Earth, unable to resolve their petty political differences in the broader interest of humanity, decline contact with the aliens of Lesnaya Grud. And in the final moments of the novel, Burrani learns from a Russian-speaking Kazakh that the Sara-Ozek's most ancient cemetery, the Ana-Beiit, will be destroyed for a housing settlement as the military rockets that will seal Earth's orbit off from helpful intrusion by the enlightened alien race fire off from the desert all around him, causing him and his camel to flee in uncomprehending terror.
Although the only connection between the storyline about the aliens and Buranni Yedegi occurs at the very beginning and end of the story, when Buranni is mystified and terrified respectively by inexplicable unscheduled rocket launches, the implication is that a race without a sense of history, traditional morality, and place is incapable of overcoming its petty political, beurocratic, and personal imperfections for the long-term benefit of the planet. Where Buranni becomes, through his struggles, a good and worthy man, the Soviet world in which he lives not only stifles, torments, and corrupts the good in the people around him, but fails in its basic role to provide for a great society when given the chance.
When this novel was written, I imagine that there was little if no expectation in Aitmatov's mind that Kazakhstan would ever have a chance for the revival of its traditional culture that is now being undertaken. And as I'm living here in Kazakhstan now, trying to learn and live this culture as it's being born anew, this begs some questions. Aitmatov's novel takes place in the 50's, and at that time the old Kazakh culture was in its dying days in Burannly junction, where the novel takes place. Certainly the main character, who sees himself as the last vehicle of the old ways in his small town, would be dead by now. Is it too late for a sincere revival of Kazakh culture? After all, what is being lamented is not loss of superficial aspects of the culture but a feeling of continuity with them. For example, the ability to play the dombra is not celebrated per say as the way in which Burrani is able to listen to it and hear the voices of his ancestors.
And if it does exist, is that culture continuity available to me, as a Peace Corps volunteer? Although, of course, many aspects of traditional culture are positive, very often, people around me call out cultural differences to justify things that I find objectionable, for example, marital infidelity, nepotism, corruption, or wife-napping (that is, kidnapping a woman and forcing her to marry you -- if anyone tells you it isn't a reality in modern Kazakhstan, they're lying to you). This isn't the kind of culture that Aitmatov was referring to. I would like to call this kind of culture surface culture, where Aitmatov is lamenting the loss of deep culture, by which, again, he meant a sense of historical continuity and place. (Burranly's character, by the way, spends most of the novel wrestling with, and conquering, the desire to be unfaithful to a wife he loves, and it's hard to imagine him accepting a bribe.) As someone who's living here for only two years, will I be afforded the chance to take part in Aitmatov's deeper culture, if it exists? Or is that only for people who spend their life here?
When I ask this, I think of my fellow volunteer with whom I studied Kazakh together when we first arrived. She's living in the South, which of course embraces a much more traditional Kazakh culture than the North. She's living with a host family as if she were a Kazakh woman in that family - that is, when she gets home from her thirty hours of classes, she works for hours to cook, clean, and provide a household for the family. Bless her, she is willingly and without complaint trying to take upon herself what women all over this country are expected to do unquestioningly and without complaint. If she can't answer these questions after two years, then nobody will be able to.
So Aitmatov, by writing a novel many years ago that lamented the way things were turning out, had unwittingly provided a description of what might be learned for a group of Americans that I'm certain he never imagined would be living in Kazakhstan and asking these questions. History has turned his exclamation point of a novel into a question mark, and it will be fourteen months before this volunteer, at least, will be able to try to begin to answer some of them.
This novel, written by ethnic Kirghiz Chingiz Aitmatov during the Soviet Union, is four-way juxtaposition of Central Asian folk stories, the lives of Kazakhs working at an small, isolated railway junction in the middle of the southern Kazakhstan desert, the story of single day in which the same Kazakhs try to bury their deceased elder according to Islamic tradition, and the encounter of American and Soviet space agencies with an advanced alien civilization from the planet "Lesnaya Grud" (Forest Breast). The result is, as you'd expect, a book that is thickly knitted with metaphors, from which the reader is free to find all sorts of symbolic meaning, and I was lucky enough to find a meaning that relates directly to my life here.
The main character, Burrani Yedegei, is throughout the novel given the privelege in every plot and subplot of standing on the edge of loss. His birthplace, which he longs for throughout his dry and desolate days in the Sara Ozek desert, is the steadily disappearing Aral Sea. The novel opens with, and is framed around, the death of the oldest and most respected Kazakh of their railroad station, who knew all the legends of the Sara Ozek. A long-suffering Kazakh family is torn apart by the injustices of Stalin's rule. The people of Earth, unable to resolve their petty political differences in the broader interest of humanity, decline contact with the aliens of Lesnaya Grud. And in the final moments of the novel, Burrani learns from a Russian-speaking Kazakh that the Sara-Ozek's most ancient cemetery, the Ana-Beiit, will be destroyed for a housing settlement as the military rockets that will seal Earth's orbit off from helpful intrusion by the enlightened alien race fire off from the desert all around him, causing him and his camel to flee in uncomprehending terror.
Although the only connection between the storyline about the aliens and Buranni Yedegi occurs at the very beginning and end of the story, when Buranni is mystified and terrified respectively by inexplicable unscheduled rocket launches, the implication is that a race without a sense of history, traditional morality, and place is incapable of overcoming its petty political, beurocratic, and personal imperfections for the long-term benefit of the planet. Where Buranni becomes, through his struggles, a good and worthy man, the Soviet world in which he lives not only stifles, torments, and corrupts the good in the people around him, but fails in its basic role to provide for a great society when given the chance.
When this novel was written, I imagine that there was little if no expectation in Aitmatov's mind that Kazakhstan would ever have a chance for the revival of its traditional culture that is now being undertaken. And as I'm living here in Kazakhstan now, trying to learn and live this culture as it's being born anew, this begs some questions. Aitmatov's novel takes place in the 50's, and at that time the old Kazakh culture was in its dying days in Burannly junction, where the novel takes place. Certainly the main character, who sees himself as the last vehicle of the old ways in his small town, would be dead by now. Is it too late for a sincere revival of Kazakh culture? After all, what is being lamented is not loss of superficial aspects of the culture but a feeling of continuity with them. For example, the ability to play the dombra is not celebrated per say as the way in which Burrani is able to listen to it and hear the voices of his ancestors.
And if it does exist, is that culture continuity available to me, as a Peace Corps volunteer? Although, of course, many aspects of traditional culture are positive, very often, people around me call out cultural differences to justify things that I find objectionable, for example, marital infidelity, nepotism, corruption, or wife-napping (that is, kidnapping a woman and forcing her to marry you -- if anyone tells you it isn't a reality in modern Kazakhstan, they're lying to you). This isn't the kind of culture that Aitmatov was referring to. I would like to call this kind of culture surface culture, where Aitmatov is lamenting the loss of deep culture, by which, again, he meant a sense of historical continuity and place. (Burranly's character, by the way, spends most of the novel wrestling with, and conquering, the desire to be unfaithful to a wife he loves, and it's hard to imagine him accepting a bribe.) As someone who's living here for only two years, will I be afforded the chance to take part in Aitmatov's deeper culture, if it exists? Or is that only for people who spend their life here?
When I ask this, I think of my fellow volunteer with whom I studied Kazakh together when we first arrived. She's living in the South, which of course embraces a much more traditional Kazakh culture than the North. She's living with a host family as if she were a Kazakh woman in that family - that is, when she gets home from her thirty hours of classes, she works for hours to cook, clean, and provide a household for the family. Bless her, she is willingly and without complaint trying to take upon herself what women all over this country are expected to do unquestioningly and without complaint. If she can't answer these questions after two years, then nobody will be able to.
So Aitmatov, by writing a novel many years ago that lamented the way things were turning out, had unwittingly provided a description of what might be learned for a group of Americans that I'm certain he never imagined would be living in Kazakhstan and asking these questions. History has turned his exclamation point of a novel into a question mark, and it will be fourteen months before this volunteer, at least, will be able to try to begin to answer some of them.
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