The Unpossessed City - Jon Fasman

Discussing The Long Midnight, I mentioned how White kept things moving, so I wanted to keep reading. That's not really Fasman's style, judging by this book.

We have Jim Vilatzer, though his first name is Seamus. He's in his early thirties, a few years past a broken engagement, working in his parents' restaurant. He's also in the hole 24 grand to some local bookies. As a way to get away for awhile (and perhaps raise a little more cash to pay off his debt), Jim takes a job with the Memory Foundation. it's goal is to gather the stories of people imprisoned in Soviet Russia. Jim's grandparents left the USSR, but Jim knows enough Russian from them he's hired. Off to Moscow he goes, to find most people who were alive during that time don't want to talk about. Until he meets a lovely woman named Kaisa, who has a grandfather who might talk. And that grandfather knows another fellow, who knows another fellow.

Interspersed with all this are the activities of a senior official in the Russian government named Skrupshin, and a businessman he works with named Vorov. They have certain weapon designs they'd like to sell, but circumstances have shifted against them, and they need some way to coordinate without being caught.

I think the plots secondary to Fasman. He spends a lot of time on his characters. Not only Jim, but his friends, his coworkers at the Memory Foundation, his Tartar neighbors in Moscow. Even the bookies get some background. It isn't only the people, but how they relate to others, how they regard concepts like family and friend, how that varies depending on where you're from. Fasman also seems interested in the effect Russia and the United States have on each other, which varies at the level the two interact. He devotes time to describing apartments and restaurants in Moscow that were designed to evoke America, as Russians perceive it. Meanwhile, it appears the U.S. is adopting some of the Soviet police tactics. Jim apparently looks to be from Chechnya, so the police single him out from a little abuse, then basically steal his money. When the CIA inserts itself into Vorov and Skrupshin's scheme, they tag Jim's passport so that if he tries to leave, he'll show up as wanted in connection with a series of child rapes. Oh, and they'll have the IRS audit the hell out of his parents until their restaurant goes under.

That whole sequence was off-putting. Not because Fasman depicted U.S. officials doing such things; I'm not so naive as to think there aren't people who work for our government doing worse than that to people right now. But because Jim goes along so well with it. I understand why he agreed to help, but I would have liked to see a little more push back. More mouthing off, more demands on his part, for answers, for assurances. What are they gonna do? Pin more rapes on him? Especially since one of his childhood friends is involved in the shakedown. He went entirely too easy on her for that. I value friends, but I think if one of mine participated in something like that against me, it'd be a bridge-burner.

The single biggest problem the book has, is actually its slow pacing, I was asked by a coworker what it was about when I was 60% of the way through. My first response was , "uhhh" because at that point, Jim and Skrupshin's stories hadn't come together in any particularly coherent way. I thought the early scene with the prison as a site for testing a weapon designed to kill non-whites (somehow) was more significant, I kept expecting it to rear its head, especially as Fasman is so intent on describing the ethnicity of characters as we're introduced to them.

Anyway, the problem I was going to mention is that the things Fasman clearly feels, I don't. The book leads with a quote: 'Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.' This is something Fasman comes back to with Moscow for Jim. That Jim, while feeling alone, also finds things in this city he loves, things he never knew about, things that feel right to him in a way he didn't expect.

Maybe it's the lack of cities I've spent time in, but I've never felt that way about them. Not as a whole. I might feel something akin to that in a particular store, like a bookstore or something, but never in a city. When I'm in a city, my goal is to get wherever the hell it is I'm going and get out, so I can get away from all the traffic and people. it might be akin to what I feel in the woods sometimes, but I don't think so. Fasman seems to be suggesting some genetic memory, something he knows from stories of his family, that was in him and he didn't know it. For me the outdoors is more about a serenity that I don't think has anything to do with my family. What Fasman describes doesn't resonate with me.