The novel by Yekaterinburg resident Alexey Salnikov "Petrovs in and around the flu" independently made its way to print: this is the case when the text became known, read by thousands of people and discussed even before it appeared in the form of a book at all.
No advertising, a little-known author who had previously been published mostly in literary magazines, except as a phenomenon, such an event can be called in no other way. The 2017 edition of the novel by the finalist of the "Big Book" and "Nose" will appear only in December (and the book will have a terrifyingly gloomy cover, which would have definitely repelled me personally if I had seen it at all before I read the text), but if you don't disdain electronic versions or reading online, you can find out what looks like what has been dubbed "Russian magical realism" right now.
Meet Petrov, Petrova and their eight-year-old son, Petrov Jr. Petrov is a car mechanic who draws black-and-white comics, Petrova is a librarian who, in his spare time, only thinks about how to kill someone. Petrov Jr. is an amoeba boy who is not interested in anything except stupid cartoons and video games. They are divorced, but periodically live together in a standard Khrushchev in Yekaterinburg, and, as usual, they get the flu in December. Actually, Salnikov's novel is dedicated to several days in the life of flu sufferers.
I somehow magically missed all the publications in the media I read about this book, and when I saw an unfamiliar name in the next list of nominees for the literary prize, I decided that "Petrovs in and around the flu" was probably something funny and funny, like a poem about a sick husband dying at a temperature of 37.2.
The autumn melancholy covered me with my head, so I decided that even if it was something from the category of Glory of Se or Alex Exler, it would not be worse. Wahaha! Se and Exler, of course, did not lie next to each other here, "Petrovs in and around the flu" is some kind of strange mixture of Gogol and Bret Easton Ellis, seasoned with the dirt of Yekaterinburg roads and the Ural wind (is there a wind in the Urals? I hope so!).
I think everyone knows that a sick person is a person in a so-called "altered state". Writers love such people and often make them the heroes of their stories, especially if you really want to add some phantasmagoria and sura to these stories. Well, most often, it's clear, a person catches a cold, if there is an epidemic, then any sneeze is automatically attributed to the flu, that's just for the exalted romantics who loved all sorts of "altered states" most of all, a cold or flu is somehow petty.
Well, excuse me, here, among ordinary people, in principle, most of life, or even the whole life, is simple joys and base problems, we don't go crazy, but we wipe our snot with our sleeve regularly. So Salnikov decided so, so his Petrovs are, on the one hand, those potentially strange heroes of romantic writers who later migrated to classics like Gogol and Bulgakov, and on the other, ordinary people like you and me.
In fact, there is no infernal surreal in the novel, there is exactly the same thing that made me think of Bret Easton Ellis and his "American Psychopath" (by the way, just as I thought about this book, after a couple of dozen pages I read that Petrov himself reads Ellis's "Glamorama", so I clearly remembered not from a simple one): reality and fiction of a sick consciousness merge together in the text and it is impossible to understand what really happened, and that feverish delirium that captured the consciousness of fantasy or wishful thinking.
Well, yes, these most delusional fantasies of Salnikov, like Ellis, are connected with the fact that a completely average and uninteresting at first glance person, if he is picked off, turns out to be a cold-blooded brutal killer. Or it doesn't turn out, but wants to be. Or doesn't want to... but sometimes I still don't mind. But this is not accurate.
Most of the "Petrova in and around the flu" is a detailed description of everyday life: "shots" from public transport that meet Petrov Sr., a Christmas tree in the recreation center, where Petrov Jr. was taken, ambulance calls, cooking dinner and caring for a sick child.
Everything is extremely recognizable, even a little creepy. Salnikov recorded on paper exactly those things that "work" for any reader, moreover, these are such little things that you do not pay attention to in everyday life. When reading, I confess, I don't really imagine the appearance of the characters and their surroundings in detail, everything is somewhat blurry, ask me about the hair color of the main character, I won't answer, unless the author has focused attention on it 100500 times.
I'm focused on the inside, not the outside, but in the case of this text, for some reason, I imagined everything in great detail, even to the point that the light in the narrow corridor of the Petrovs was warm and dim, and how Petrova peeled potatoes, and what kind of blanket was covered on the couch of the ailing Petrov Jr.
Considering that there are three characters in the novel, although they have essentially one storyline for three, as usual, it is more interesting to read about someone, and less interesting about someone. Strangely enough, Petrov turned out to be the weak link for me: the first chapters are so nothing that I wanted to stop reading at all, and put on "Petrovs in the flu and around him" the stigma of "black stuff about how a car mechanic is drinking with a neighbor in the country", but I didn't do that, I got through the first chapters and then everything went like clockwork.
A special pleasure, for some reason, was delivered by an insert episode with a dream, in which Petrov Sr. recalls how his mother dragged his four-year-old to the Christmas tree. All my children's "Christmas trees" in the garden and recreation center came flooding at me, where I inevitably had to tell a rhyme to Santa Claus, shout "Christmas tree, light up!", and then lead a round dance (oh, and at the last such events there was a mandatory "Dance of little ducklings", because it is believed that children love to dance. It seemed to me that all this was nonsense, I just wanted my sweet gift and home).
If we talk about the idea of the work, then for me the central episode was the conversation between Petrov and Igor, in which the first admitted that his life, in general, is devoid of any meaning, and he just lives until he dies, knowing that nothing shines for him. At the same time, Igor recalled the myth of Sisyphus and the curse that the gods imposed on people: they say they are doomed to be dissatisfied forever and lose all meaning.
Salnikov also shows that in fact there is meaning in every movement, in every squiggle we make, in every sound, every word, because in this world everything is connected with everything: a random touch, to which you do not betray any meaning, for another person can become a guide to action, something that turns consciousness or pulls out of a lethargic dream. And while we are rummaging around in search of meanings, all we do is miss them.
397.213 SRY