Сергей Жадан - Mesopotamia

“One of the most astounding novels to come out of modern Ukraine. Mesopotamia is seductive, twisted, brilliant, and fierce. It brings to mind our own fiction from a time when we still felt like we had something to fight for and a chance we could win.”

“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.”

“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.”

“To say that Serhiy Zhadan is a great Ukrainian novelist of whom you might not have heard does not begin to cover it. Serhiy Zhadan is one of the most important creators of European culture at work today. His novels, poems, and songs touch millions. This loving translation is a chance to see Ukraine in terms other than the familiar, but more importantly a chance to allow prose to mend your mind.”

“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.”

“Zhadan is the rock star of lyrical melancholy, and Mesapotamia 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.”

“With tales at once earthy and phantasmagorical, sentimental and anarchic, Zhadan is an exhilarating chronicler of a new kind of borderlands.”

“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.”

“ 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.”

“ 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.”

“ 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.”

“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. Costigan-Humes and Wheeler have brought Zhadan’s evocative prose to life for the English ­reader.”

Selected Poems (forthcoming)

Mesopotamia

Voroshilovgrad

Depeche Mode

The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

English translation copyright © 2018 by Yale University.

Originally published as Месопотамія. The original Ukrainian edition was published by Klub simejnogo dozvillja , Kharkiv, 2014. © Serhiy Zhadan 2014. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955589