Go On, Get Lost!

THE WEATHERING
Artem Chapeye
Translated from the Ukrainian by Daisy Gibbons
Seven Stories Press; 212 pp.; $18.95
Buy Online

THE DISAPPEARING ACT
By Maria Stepanova
Translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale
New Directions; 144 pp.; $15.95
Buy Online

Needing a total vacation from their stressful lives in Kyiv, The Weathering’s unnamed narrator and his wife Zoia drive their jalopy south and rent an old forest-service hut in the Carpathian mountains. Their landlord has stocked the place with canned goods and firewood; he promises to deliver fresh food to them every couple of weeks. They have no electricity or cell service.

In their peaceful disconnection from the world, they become a mountaintop Adam and Eve and take joy in each other. But after a long, strange storm, an eerie fog hangs over the lowlands. They no longer see any signs of living humanity; on the other mountain ridges they can’t locate cell service: “Questions that only needed two clicks to answer before, now required straining memory and logic...” They investigate their landlord’s village – everyone has disappeared. They load up their car with food, detouring to their parents’ places. They find no one and set out towards Kyiv.

Though originally published as Вивiтрювання in 2021, the “time” of this most marvelously exciting, frightening, and occasionally lovely novel seems like now – or maybe this coming summer. Chapeye (the pseudonym of the Ukrainian journalist Anton Vasilyovich Vodyanyi) says in his note to this brand-new translation: “references to the war in this novel and its effect on the fate of certain characters have little to do with my gift of prophecy and rather much to do with the armed aggression that Russia launched against Ukraine in 2014.”

In their Kyiv neighborhood, Rusanivka Island, the couple discovers a ragtag, armed community of survivors. After intense scrutiny, the community accepts our narrator and Zoia. He has media experience and is put to work writing promotional information and directives. There are apparently survivors also on the neighboring Dnipro island of Hydropark. Inhabitants of “small islands” (and remote mountaintops) around the world seem to have been resistant to the fatal infections: “The ones who survived, apparently, were those who actively resisted the weathering, who struggled against the euphorically suicidal moods, who got to the water. The smaller the islands, the higher the percentage of people who survived.”

The “weathering” is the survivors’ term for this environmental apocalyptic disease that occasionally affects even our narrator and Zoia: “Empty-headedness, a weakened heart, insides coldly putrefying. Flexible limbs, boneless rubber. Muscles atrophying, the weakening skeleton, the softening mind – all painlessly, which is the most frightening part of it: dissolving imperceptibly into your surroundings, slowly filing down like the moon, and then becoming translucent, and you weather away into thin air.” Zoia considers whether our species hasn’t deserved it:

“‘I’m starting to think the Earth just got sick of us and rid itself of humans. … Well, that’s if I thought the planet was sentient. You remember the old skits about how we arrogantly think we are the crowning glory of creation, but actually the biosphere just needs plastic, and that was our real function? We’ve fulfilled that function, so now we’re made for the junkyard.’”

What makes this a compelling literary novel rather than a sci-fi exercise is Chapeye’s (and his narrator’s) attention to and interest in the dynamics of a good marriage. How would you and your partner do in the midst of a “natural” catastrophe? Do devoted couples know each other as well as they thought?

In a post-apocalyptic world, as we’ve seen in the Mad Max movies, humanity’s chance to learn from our mistakes and this next time do things right and justly is not a given. Based on The Weathering, I would estimate we have cause for eight parts despair to one part hope. The narrator’s kindly neighbors, a simple mother, her son and her Russian handyman partner, are Chapeye’s major argument for “hope”: “…in Lyuba, whose name means ‘love,’ you could feel an all-encompassing love of being. Her love could encompass the whole planet. People like Lyuba will restore humankind, said Zoia.”

On the other hand, there are private apocalypses. In The Disappearing Act, we encounter the quiet despair of a single, middle-aged novelist, a political exile from a nation she won’t name, writing in a language she doesn’t trust (clue: she has fled from that big country east of Ukraine).

The author Maria Stepanova left (disappeared from?) Russia in 2023, and now lives in Germany. The protagonist of this novel that Stepanova finished in 2024 (as Фокус) is the middle-aged “novelist M,” who fled her unnamed homeland in 2023 and has resumed her mostly non-literary life in an unnamed European country. The first half of this clever short novel is about her interrupted, delayed, diverted train trip to a literary festival in another anonymous nation:

“In the country of her birth, the audience at a literary event was mainly composed of those who already knew the author’s texts and wanted to hear the author reading or talking about the work; but here, a ‘meet the author’ event was more like a bride show – people came along blindly, in the strange hope that the woman sitting at a low table with two bottles of water on it would give them good grounds to fall in love with her, that she would say or do something to make them buy her book and spend time engaging with her words alone, without an intermediary. …in any case, M liked the way audiences gathered to hear about the purpose and the subject of a piece of writing, and how they never lost their belief that they might just hear something new, something vital for them.”

Since leaving her homeland, M has detached from parts of her own past and identity. Who is she to herself and others? Is she even a writer when she isn’t writing (which is most of the time)? To her, people have become as mysterious as she has become to herself. But in this way, her perceptions are naïve and awakened and, for us, vivid. Having left her halted train for a transfer, “The novelist walked on, slightly embarrassed by the unceasing rumble of her suitcase, which didn’t seem to mind where it was being dragged to. She noticed as she walked that her inner self had stopped wheeling and fluttering, banging itself against the walls in search of an exit, and had gradually quietened, becoming soft, childlike, even poking out curious snail horns to see what would happen next.” Such perception (those “curious snail horns”!) is thrilling and reminds us that Stepanova’s usual medium is poetry.

The first half of The Disappearing Act seems as true and brilliant as a dream. In the second half of the novel – though there’s no particular division indicated – Stepanova finds the metaphor of “disappearing” for her plot and proceeds to steer her protagonist into a vanishing point.

– Bob Blaisdell