Mesopotamia

The setting of Serhiy Zhadan’s latest book is the Eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, here and now, a modern Babylon: a city in Mesopotamia, set at the riverbank of diverse languages and cultures. In the West, there is the river Dnepr, in the East the Donez, a sidearm of the river Don – all of the rivers that could represent the Ukraine and Russia. Zhadan’s Kharkiv is a place that changes its shape in each of the short stories: a Russian, a Ukrainian, and a Tartarian version of this multilingual and multicultural city exist.

In the prologue the author cites from a folktale of the ancient Sumerians, who settled at two rivers, and spoke one language that lent itself to singing as well as to cursing; the women gave birth to brave children and thus to serious problems. Zhadan’s Kharkiv is a place that changes its shape in each of the short stories: a Russian, a Ukrainian, and a Tartarian version of this multilingual and multicultural city exist.

The book consists of two parts, the first of which comprises nine »Stories and Biographies«, all telling the story of a person’s search for the meaning of their life, all carrying that person’s name as their title. The first part is followed by »Explanations and Generalisations«, consisting of thirty long poems, a lyrical-musical postlude in which the themes of the stories about Matthew and Luke, Bob and Marat, Mario and Romeo, Jurik and Foma and the others re-emerge. The protagonists of these stories seem to communicate across the borders of the individual stories that take the reader from the Ukraine to the USA. Somehow they all know each other, met in passing before, share dreams and fantasies.

In recent months, since the revolution in the Ukraine and the disintegration, of eastern Ukraine, Serhiy Zhadan – himself an activist of the Euromaidan in Kharkiv - has described the dramatic changes in the Donbass, his native region. That’s why his attempt at continuing the geo- and mythopoetic survey of the Ukrainian East after Voroshilovgrad, now in the futuristic metropolis of Kharkiv, is all the more impressive. Serhiy Zhadan, currently the most famous Ukrainian author, belongs in the first league of European literature.

»One of the most astounding novels to come out of modern Ukraine. Mesopotamia is seductive, twisted, brilliant, and fierce.« Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure and Absurdistan

»Mesopotamia is an impressive collage, less of a city than of its inhabitants, mostly in their twenties and thirties, struggling to make their way through a post-Soviet Ukraine that is still trying to figure itself out.« M.A. Orthofer, Complete Review

»Unlike Joyce’s Dublin, the cradle of Zhadan’s civilization is a place of refuge for young people fleeing hardscrabble lives in the provinces, and a hardscrabble home for natives buoyed by desire yet adrift amid the flotsam of a spent empire. The men and women in these comic and heartfelt pages endure the dynamic paralysis that comes over those who are all dressed up with nowhere to go. They aspire, struggle, fight, fail, drink, fuck, and then they fight some more. Amid the city’s detritus, they refuse to become part of it by continuing to love and dream. There is nothing marginal about them. They insist on being seen, heard, understood. They will charm and madden you. They will haunt your dreams, and you will never forget them.« Askold Melnyczuk, author of House of Widows

»To say that Serhiy Zhadan is a poet, a novelist, a rock star, a protester, a symbol of his country’s desire for freedom and change, is to say the truth – but what is truth? Zhadan is a literary master of enormous force. At times he combines the energy of Jack Kerouac and atmospheric spell of Isaac Babel, at other times he is a balladeer of his country’s struggle. ›Such strange things have been happening to us,‹ he writes, of the streets where ›winters are not like winters / winters live under assumed names.‹ In Mesopotamia’s nine stories and thirty poems we find ourselves in the newly independent Ukraine, stunned by its grit, its rough backbone – and its tenderness. What do we discover here? That ›Light is shaped by darkness / and it’s all up to us.‹ We also discover that Serhiy Zhadan is one of those rare things – almost impossible to find now in the West – a national bard, a chronicler. This is a book to live with.« Ilya Kaminsky

»Zhadan is the rock star of lyrical melancholy, and Mesopotamia is not just a book of short stories but a cosmos with Kharkiv-Babylon at its center. We meet its lovesick citizens at weddings and funerals; their visceral, fantastical lives unfold in the intensely prophetic atmosphere of the upcoming war.« Valzhyna Mort, author of Factory of Tears

»With tales at once earthy and phantasmagorical, sentimental and anarchic, Zhadan is an exhilarating chronicler of a new kind of borderlands.« Sana Krasikov

»Mesopotamia offers a sublime experience of taking you right to the middle of a very specific world, where you eat and drink and love and fight and die with the characters, until you notice that that world has transcended the time and place and became part of the eternal human story.« Lara Vapnyar, author of Still Here: A Novel

»Serhiy Zhadan’s dazzling novel – here fantastically well translated – evokes voices that get under our skin and take us into the rich inner life of people about whom we have long known nothing.« Marci Shore, author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution

»Mesopotamia finds poetry in the most unlikely places – in the bars, tower blocks, and concrete boulevards of a Ukrainian city. By turns funny, shocking, and touching, weaving between the lyrical and the grotesque, Zhadan’s stories provide a lesson in belonging.« Uilleam Blacker, University College London

»To know Dublin, read your Joyce, for Macondo, García Márquez, and for Mesopotamia, Serhiy Zhadan. Of course this Mesopotamia is not the Birthplace of Civilization (or is it?), it’s Kharkiv, the Ukrainian Center of Nothing, located smack-dab on the Russian border, which, in Zhadan’s brilliant vision, is smack-dab in the middle of life lived beyond the fullest because any second could be your last, creaming with joy, madness, war, orgasm, stupidity, and a blinding light that smells like the essence of human spirit. We need to learn from Ukraine. Zhadan is a masterful teacher. The use of poetry as Notes – so far as I know, this has never been done before and is positively Nabokovian. This book is world-class literature.« Bob Holman, author of Sing This One Back To Me

»Mesopotamia is a portrait of post-Soviet Ukraine’s lost generation, of people who came of age in the disorienting conditions of crumbling Soviet order and stagnating social transformation. Serhiy Zhadan gives voice to his generation from Ukraine’s eastern regions bordering Russia. These are the people who have been missing from contemporary literature, whether in Ukrainian or in any other language. To understand the background to the crisis in this region, which has had such a major impact on the world recently, perhaps no other writer can provide insights as powerful as Zhadan.« Vitaly Chernetsky, University of Kansas

»Serhiy Zhadan has written a love song to contemporary Eastern Ukraine – vices, passions, and ghosts included. His Kharkiv is filled with gritty stairwells, red nightgowns, raw love, and a bit of magic.« Amelia Glaser, University of California, San Diego, author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands

»[Zhadan] writes in a poetic language full of power and sound that profits from the fact that he isn’t just a narrator and poet, but also a musician. He places his words – tender, painfully sweet, brash – with a delicate sense for melody and association.« Die Zeit

»Serhiy Zhadan is the most daring Ukrainian writer at the moment. [Mesopotamia] is a knockout. […] This author’s and narrator’s voice is so powerful, full of rhythm, concentrated energy and straightforward descriptions and still of profoundly delicate poetry.« Süddeutsche Zeitung

»[Zhadan] has realised [a] hybrid genre. However, there definitely are connections between the stories filled with details and action and the atmospherically charged, pondering poems: In both instances, poetry dominates causality, the secret dominates logic and the metaphors create a timeless magic, the same that is befitting of fairytales and epics. […] And then there’s the language that uses all available nuances between the ordinary and the sublime, the casual and the emphatic and only refuses to do one thing: to judge timidly, let alone denounce something entirely.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»[Zhadan] has written a book in such a wistful, cheerful and pugnacious manner that hasn’t been seen for a very long time. A vivid memorial for the city of Kharkiv, the threatened city, the threatened country. In doing so, he isn’t corny or folkloristic for a second – for that, his characters are way too wasted, naïve, narcissistic and, every now and again, too brutal.« Der Spiegel

»With Mesopotamia, Zhadan has written is most political novel to date. [It’s] so poetic that the reader hardly notices that the novel turns into a poem in the end – into a lyrical commentary on the text itself. Serhiy Zhadan’s Mesopotamia – a moving and wonderful pleasure to read!« NDR Kultur

»If you could immerse yourself in these tender-brutal, hopeful without prospects, post-Socialist biographies without knowing the author’s history, you could recognize a Ukrainian Clemens Meyer in Zhadan – a literary voice of a generation living through change, that finds the matters worth telling the most in places others wouldn’t even dare to look« neues deutschland

»Serhiy Zhadan’s Mesopotamia is a novel in the spirit of music: rhythmical, pulsating and powerful. It tells of the turmoil of life in an endangered country. […] [it's] to be read like nine rock ballads plus the inevitable encore. And it’s what Zhadan does simply ravishingly.« Stuttgarter Zeitung