The temptation is very great to review Mikhail Iossel’s book Sentence by taking up the challenge he put to himself, emulating the style and the cadence, the constant interjection of parentheses loaded with incidental asides and bits of private exposition; finding a way while doing this of moving back and forth between registers—from description to lament to slapstick—and thereby showing how Iossel expresses the profound psychological split between his years growing up in a Jewish household in Leningrad, and the life that befell him after he emigrated in 1990 to start a new life in America (though we realize while reading that there is no such thing as a new life, it’s more like the new life carrying the old one on its back, like the hero Aeneas carrying his old father, Anchises, on his) [no period].
Exhale: I’m not going to carry on in this vein, though my doing so for the one long paragraph might convey more than some other tactic what it feels like to move the eye from line to line in Iossel’s memoir—no stop signs, no yellow or red lights to impede.
Sentence is sui generis, though there is some precedent in Jack Kerouac’s ‘spontaneous bop prosody,’ and the prose of Tomas Bernhard, Laszlo Krasznahorkii, or the recent Nobelist Jon Fosse. But Iossel’s aim is less experimental and more about finding an optimal way to represent the inner shifts and associations of a man nearly overwhelmed by the memories of a childhood and youth in one world, and long decades in another.
Nabokov is, of course, the master of memorious prose, and his Speak Memory lingers long on his childhood in Czarist Russia, but also captures aspects of his life as an exile in Germany, France, and England. I’m guessing that Iossel has read Nabokov deeply, not so much for the life story, but for his uncanny mode of presentation.
Iossel has taken up Nabokov’s mode of obliquity, rendering his subjective world by way of seemingly inconsequential episodes—an encounter on a train, learning the letters of the alphabet as a child...The associations of his seemingly—but only seemingly—undisciplined memory-stream allow his attention to go anywhere, and it does, past to present and back.
Iossel’s style of presentation, the sustained unbroken sentence is hard to discuss in the usual manner. Every quoted bit has to be extracted from the ongoing momentum of the prose, as this excerpt will suggest:
Some people (no one) sometimes (never) ask me (they don’t) why I write these long (not always) one-sentence stories, and I tell them (I don’t) that…[ellipses mine] when I was just starting out writing in English (a long time ago, a lifetime away, shortly after my arrival in America at age 30), I could, of necessity, only operate with very short declarative phrases…being able to render a story…in a single 500/1000/5000 word sentence represents…a metaphysical victory of sorts over myself in my mind...
Sentence essentially enacts that ‘metaphysical victory,’ though there might be some question as to what the victory is. I would argue, on the strength of the writing, that it is less about having coped with the loss of the homeland, and much more about having achieved via writing a unification of sorts. Early and later life are brought together, not only into narrative, but into the several sentences that comprise this book.
Two more excerpts, the first to show the richness of his recollected early life—
I remember remembering being stood up on the wide white windowsill in our communal kitchen in the dark, my mother’s hands clasping tightly my pudgy ankles, an always smiling old woman from the room across the endless corridor from ours, crazy Old Alexandra,her toothless mouth gaping terribly in wonderment...
—the other to show just how psychologically complex it is for this writer to carry the two worlds inside:
The world consists of worded things, what I have no word for, I cannot understand, and since I know more words in Russian than in England, the world defined by the extent of my Russian is larger than that of my English, yet it is also much smaller, since I no longer live in it.
~
Admission: I was in a writing group in Cambridge back in the 1990s, and Mikhail—Misha—joined. New to this country, he was young, shy and anxious, but his writing, I remember, was strong and imaginative. We have not been in touch for decades. What a surprise now to encounter the writer now. There must be a word in Russian, atmospheric and freighted with innuendo, that would do justice to this most readable writer, the Misha I knew so long ago. He is at once melancholic, acerbic, playful, romantic, and, above all else, full of heart. The book is billed on the cover as ‘stories, but to me it is a memoir unique among memoirs.
Sven Birkerts is the author of numerous books of essay and memoir. Former Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
SENTENCE by Mihail Iossel
184 pp.
Linda Leith Publisher