Splices of Life

Mikhail Iossel’s Sentence is the perfect book to read on public transit. These stories both capture and reinforce the way thoughts drift and memories flood in as you watch the world go by.

Each of the collection’s thirty-eight pieces is a single sentence, ranging from twenty words to twenty-five pages. The first and longest story, “DMD,” set during the dying days of the Soviet Union, recounts a cognac-soaked ride with a stranger in the forced intimacy of a train compartment. As in the other longer entries, a plot emerges and a backstory of people and nations bleeds through in the details. But Iossel is equally, maybe even primarily interested in the traps and springs that give rise to thoughts and insights. We have the “dusky placid light of the Bologoye train station,” which brings about “the memories of our own lives.” In “Waltz No. 2,” the sound of Shostakovich played by a subway musician leads the narrator to be “suddenly overtaken . . . by one very specific and vivid, long-dormant recollection that had floated at that instant, out of nowhere, to the rippling surface of my mind.”

Other stories paint pictures of Iossel’s upbringing in Leningrad, communal apartments, unrequited loves, and literary breakthroughs along with moments of his later life in the United States, Kenya, and Canada. Lovers of finely rendered minutiae will enjoy descriptions like that of the box of Estonian pralines whose “unbearably pretty halcyon-blue cover featured a supernaturally blond little girl gazing lovingly at a few intensely yellow and irresistibly cute fluffy little chicks.” And the way émigrés experience every place in dialogue with others is all around. “Rain, rain outside, in pre-dawn Nairobi, stubbornly unstoppable, monotonous, relentless, like the unending yet somehow comforting and reassuring autumn rains of my Leningrad childhood and youth,” we read in the fleeting “Nairobi Rain.”

Iossel’s previous publications include books of short fiction, edited collections, and contributions to The New Yorker. Now living in Montreal, he has been an electromagnetic engineer and a samizdat writer in the Soviet Union, an immigrant in a New England boarding house, an organizer of international literary seminars, and a professor at Concordia University. Similarly, the single narrator of these stories has lived many lives and has found in his meandering monologues and dialogues with himself a capacious and penetrating form of retrospection.

Like many who write in an adopted language, Iossel is attentive and playful, resuscitating dead metaphors and thrilling in the corniest expressions: “nada,” “squat,” “yada-yada.” In regard to his self-imposed formal constraint, Iossel claims to simply be “a native speaker of Russian who knows English well and is capable of writing Russian sentences in English.” Perhaps. But do these contortions work? And are they even sentences at all?

Take “Other People,” which consists of this poignant example: “Most of our thoughts are memories, most of our memories are imaginary, most of what we are is other people.” Lovely, brief, resonant. If you cannot live with comma splices, Sentence is not a book for you. If, like me, you are happy to scream “Why not semicolons?” while reading, then it is exactly the book for you.

I’m not convinced that the brute force Iossel brings to bear to shoehorn his multi-page pieces into single lines is a recipe for great sentences, per se. Sentences become great not alone but in company: short jabs hit hard at the end of long bouts, while a sparse frame of short declarative sentences supports the luxuriant overgrowth of an endlessly ramifying digression.

If sometimes ungainly, Iossel’s constructions are consistently alive, mercurial, startling like flashes of light through a train window. His somewhat ragged form is the perfect conveyance for a ragged thing, consciousness, racing along at the speed of thoughts and no less circuitously. On my shelf, I’ll keep Sentence in the neighbourhood of Stanley Fish and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, between Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence and Nicholson Baker’s The Size of Thoughts. Whatever these stories are doing, it works.

One passage suggests Iossel feels the cost of stretching the English language as he does: “Who said (definitely not anyone I know) that a Russian sentence must be beautiful or make sense, when all it does have to do is keep going, keep going on, keep rolling, almost counterintuitively, despite itself almost, like life itself.”

In a melancholic vein, in a book haunted by the deaths of strangers, acquaintances, and those left behind to remember, one feels a heroic effort and an ancient need to keep on making sentences, to keep writing “almost counterintuitively, despite itself almost, like life itself.” As we age in a world that feels increasingly absurd (but has ever been thus, the author reminds us), maybe this is all we can do: just keep rolling. Our memories lie within and the world lies without, and sentences can tie them together, pulling us mercifully far from the matter at hand. All you need is a pen and a notebook to tease out the beauty in every synaptic connection and unanswered question, as Iossel does: “Birds are chirping like crazy, like a legion of lovelorn crickets just outside my window, in the dead of winter, amid all that snow, what do they know?”