Ivan & Phoebe

 

Ivan & Phoebe / Oksana Lutsyshyna
trans. from the Ukrainian by Nina Murray
Dallas, TX: Deep Vellum, 2023, c2021.
425 p.

This is a very recent release that I was fortunate to find through my library. Nina Murray is one of my favourite translators from Ukrainian so I was happy to see that she had worked on this novel by Oksana Lutsyshyna, an author who is new to me. 

This book follows the experiences of Ivan and Phoebe - no surprise there, from the title. However, Ivan is much more the main character, with Phoebe only getting a chance to speak a few times. 

The story is set in the 90s, a tumultuous time in Ukraine. Ivan was a student at the time of the Revolution on Granite, also known as the "First Maidan". He joined the ranks and participated in the revolution, which had many students camped out on the Maidan in Kyiv, many on a hunger strike, protesting the political state of parliament. This is the heart of the story, with repercussions that shape Ivan's behaviour following. 

During the protest, Ivan is befriended by someone who turns out to be a government agent; the harassment and fear that follows drives Ivan away from Lviv and his university friends back to his hometown of Uzhgorod. He moves back in with his family, finds a job as an IT support person, and starts dating his boss' daughter. He also looks up his old school friends, many of whom are troubled and unsuccessful in life. 

The story melds the conversation about a free Ukraine and revolution/protest with the closer look at domestic life and the relations between the sexes. There are the same problems showing up in different ways between the political body and real bodies. Not only is there a lot of misogyny, there is also friction between women, like Phoebe and Ivan's mother, once Ivan and Phoebe get married and she moves into his home. 

Phoebe's voice comes out in poetic monologues between the narrative, just a few. She relates the way she's been verbally abused but it's not clear by whom - Ivan? Her mother-in-law? Her own parents? All of them? As a young woman when they were dating, Phoebe loved art and culture and wrote poetry. Ivan destroyed her work when they were married, but she holds on to her words, and eventually finds the strength to leave him. 

The ending is somewhat inconclusive - Ivan has decided to make a change and find his independence from the domestic round, from the expectations on a man of his class, and break away from the drunken fatalism that he was falling into. But what is he moving toward? There are some indications but it's not fully clear. 

In any case, the joy of the book is just in reading the daily round, of encountering all the characters and situations that Ivan is trying to make sense of. He's not a hero, but also not an anti-hero. Just a regular guy. The parts of the book set during the Revolution on Granite are very strong and memorable, but life is Uzhgorod shows the way that life can deflate from great moments into daily mundanity. I would have liked to have a little more from Phoebe in this book, to understand her role here a bit better. But the author does a good job of showing the internal fear and trauma that causes Ivan's behaviours, things he would never talk about or acknowledge. 

I became engrossed in this story and the characters. Through this story, not only do we encounter families and relationships but also the larger story of history and politics, and how they are all enmeshed. Very timely and compelling reading.