Killing Generals

This post takes its name from Bogdan Hrib's novel Kill the General, a good mystery/thriller I am quite fond of. The main reason is not that I was involved in its English edition, working on the first draft translation with Ramona Mitrica and Mike Phillips. The main reason is that Kill the General is a well crafted book, endowed by its author with separate levels of narration which converge into an exciting story.

The plot could be resumed in the phrase "Stelian Munteanu, a book editor, is forced to accept a contract on the head of a general whose memoirs of the Romanian revolution might have explosive political results".

Going on with the book, we find out how Stelian got himself in a position to be proposed a contract killing, and what is his relation to the general. Thus, we learn that he first met the general back in the Ceausescu's time, when Stelian was an army conscript, and the general only a captain in a military unit in the middle of nowhere. We are also introduced to a shady character called Misha Pushkin, a former KGB man who apparently never quit the job, and who is both a well-meaning friend and a Mephistophelean influence on Stelian.

The book is told in the first person by Stelian, and it begins with a restless early morning in a Vienna hotel. Stelian has a story to tell - the story of General Simionescu, the man he was contracted to kill. But to understand this story, we have to understand who Stelian is, and how he got to be who he is now.

And here Bogdan Hrib does an amazing turn presenting the world of 1980s Romania. The author's descriptions of army life during one of the worst periods in recent Romanian history are vivid, realist - from the mind-numbing drills and marches, to freezing in the barracks due to lack of fuel:

"The first thing I looked at in the morning was the half-filled glass of water on the metal bedside-table. By the thickness of the ice in the glass I tried to estimate the temperature of the room. Several millimetres of ice, several degrees below zero. Outside it was -25. I kept wishing that the glass would break one day. The laws of physics which I still had in my head told me that water increases in volume as it freezes. Therefore, my glass should have cracked. But it never happened."

The action proceeds with episodes from the present interspersed with episodes from Stelian's past, and it all grows into a rounded story that gives the background of the story, presenting in the same time a good view of recent Romanian history and mores.

As the background image gets clearer, the story gathers momentum. We know Stelian has to kill the general, the same man who took him under his wing back in his conscript days, but we do not know why. And, most of all, we do not know if Stelian will be able to pull the trigger.

And I am not going to tell you what he will do - you will have to read the book for yourselves. It is well worth it, trust me. Kill the General is a very good book, written with great attention to details; a thriller/mystery and character study in equal parts, a smart, contemporary Noir that does not only thrill, but actually has something intelligent to say about people, places, and ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. 

You can read a free preview of Kill the General on the site of Profusion, the book's British publishers. 

To whet your appetite for reading, I add here that Kill the General also contains a yummy recipe for a pasta dish, which you are free to try.

With Bulgakov. At the Theatre

I went recently at the National Theatre to see Collaborators, a new play by John Hodge. Starting from the famous incident of the phone-call Bulgakov received from Stalin,  Hodge has imagined a what-if story that brings together the author and Joseph Stalin himself in a collaborative effort to come up with a play celebrating the big man's 60th anniversary. 

The production was excellent from all points of view (I am talking as a theatre lover, but not a connoisseur), with a straight, uncomplicated yet strong scenography reminscent of the great Russian avant-garde stage designs.

 

Snapshots of the stage-setting (with apologies to the National Theatre)

The play opened with a  cartoonish dream sequence in which Bulgakov was chased by Stalin around the house. The music and acting was suitably vaudevillian until Joseph Vissarionovich lifted a typewriter and was ready to crash it down on Bulgakov's head... moment when Mikhail Afanasyevich woke up. "Did he catch you this time?" was the leitmotif as the wife and the flatsharers entered the stage, setting the action firmly in a cramped Moscow apartment.

Alex Jennings and Simon Russell-Beale were amazing as Bulgakov and Stalin, with Russell-Beale creating an irresistible mixture of black humour and evilness. All in all, I think the play captured well the madness reigning supreme in 1930s Soviet Union, and also the spirit of Bulgakov's writings from the Diaboliad, Heart of a Dog, A Dead Man's Memoir (aka Black Snow), and The Master and Margarita.

Bulgakov was a gifted playwright, and Stalin was apparently a big fan, going to see The White Guard (or The Days of the Turbins) some fifteen times - although it was about a bourgeois, Czarist family that sided with the Bolsheviks during the civil war only to escape death.

I saw the version by Michael Upton staged by the National Theatre in 2010, and I enjoyed it as well. It was very well acted, and the scenography was again very good, going towards the spectacular as the action progressed to scenes of street fighting involving pyrotechnics. The strongest point of the show was the script, adapted skilfully from Bulgakov's play (which, in its turn, was adapted by Bulgakov himself from the banned novel of the same name). A very good text about the play and its author was written by Will Self for The Guardian.

For a wonderfully dark and satiric view of the world of theatre in 1930s Soviet Union, A Dead Man's Memoir is an absolute must. Among other luminaries of the Soviet literary scene, it features, albeit in a disguised manner, Stanislavski, father of the Method, and Alexei Tolstoy, the Red Count.

The (in)famous phone-call from Stalin had more than one effect on Bulgakov's life and career. He was banned for taking a too critical view of the system, but survived the purges and disappearances. To what extent this was due to Stalin being, as the character declared in Hodge's play, his "number 1 fan", will probably be never known.