I managed to get my hands on the UK edition of this book last year, but people in the US will soon be able to get the American edition thanks to Deep Vellum Press! I actually finished reading it a few weeks ago, and hadn’t gotten a chance to write about it, and then Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine…
Grey Bees is a wonderful, and wonderfully surprising, novel. It’s fantastically atmospheric and understated— an astonishingly mild-mannered sort of book that brilliantly illuminates the complexities of its lifeworld, and the feeling of perpetual war. The novel tells the story of Sergey Sergeyich, a beekeeper living in a village called Little Starhorodivka, in what was called the Grey Zone — the no-man’s land between Russia and Ukraine that has been the center of ongoing military conflict since 2014. Everyone has fled the village except for Sergey Sergeyich and his high school frenemy, Pashka. And for the first third of the novel, he’s just…there. In some sense, nothing happens, but in another sense, there’s constant action, sniper attacks, and bombings, and soldiers passing through, and just an ongoing sense of unease and vague danger. And the bees, buzzing away. But Sergeyich mostly putters around, and thinks of his ex-wife and daughter, and we learn a little bit about their relationship, but what I love so much about this novel is that it never does the thing you expect it to do, as far as manufacturing drama from these various circumstances. There’s a wonderful realism to the way it doesn’t wring more plot out of any possible lead — it just lets things be.
The novel is getting a lot of attention at the moment, understandably, as providing some insight into the situation in Ukraine, and indeed, it is a really compelling and nuanced portrayal of what it’s like to live amidst geo-political conflict and not be strongly on any particular side. There’s a pretty scathing critique of Russia woven through, but it’s not trumpeted, and is always firmly grounded in people’s day-to-day experiences. It’s just that those quotidian encounters can so easily turn terrifying. Again, it just seems so true to life in the particular scale of both events and affects: it’s not thoroughly miniaturized, and it does use the various characters to connect to larger narratives, but it’s also contained, in part by the way that a given person may be a symbol of something bigger, but may also just be one more person, of middling significance. Yanukovych himself makes some cameos, in the most perfect way. I guess the thing is, in this day and age, more than ever, perhaps, we are aware of how everything is connected (not that it wasn’t connected before; we just didn’t realize it as much), and this in some sense makes everything seem significant, because, wow, connections! But what do they really mean, other than to confirm that yes, wow, connections?
Part of what made me want to read Grey Bees was that it was marketed as being a loose retelling of the Odyssey. And I think this is actually one of the most fantastic things about it, because it absolutely is, in a way that is completely unobtrusive, but when you start to notice it, incredibly brilliant. It really makes you stop and think about what the Odyssey looks like, updated to the present moment; how the themes and ideas of war, home, voyage, quest, romance, adulthood, friendship, hospitality, have changed. It’s so cool.
I don’t want to say much more about it, because you should just read it yourself. But I’ll add that Dralyuk’s translation reads beautifully — I had previously read another novel of Kurkov’s translated by someone else, and… well, let’s just say that I hope that Dralyuk is taking over Kurkov translation from here on out. He does an excellent job.
And let’s hope for an end to the horrors in Ukraine, and peace, as soon as possible.
Kasia Reads 