WOUND, by Oksana Vasyakina. Translated by Elina Alter.
Oksana Vasyakina’s debut novel ‘Wound’ tells of a road trip that is both an elegy for the dead and a homecoming. The heroine, who like the author is an award-winning Russian poet and LGBTQ activist named Oksana Vasyakina, has watched over the death of her mother, Angella, from breast cancer. Now Oksana carries her mother’s ashes 5,000 kilometers from a steppe city in western Russia to Ust-Ilimsk, the industrial city in the Siberian taiga that was their birthplace.
“I thought trumpets would sound above me as I walked,” writes Vasyakina. “I introduced myself as Charon, as Persephone, as a funeral announcer. I traveled to hell.”
Sure, the “Wound” family history reruns are hellish, a trail of “poverty, environmental problems, alcohol, and bad behavior.” The matriarchs of the family are tough, resourceful women, each overthrown by a “mean, drinking, cheating husband” who steals her money and beats her to a pulp. Oksana’s own father was a flirt who was addicted to heroin and died of AIDS. The only decent-sounding man – Oksana’s great-grandmother’s lover – was shot as a counter-revolutionary in Stalin’s Great Terror. “We are all cursed along the female line,” Oksana’s cousin Valya concludes, a curse she suspects Oksana is trying to avoid by being a lesbian – “which means I’m not a woman, but some sort of half-man, or half-woman, or half child.”
What is a woman is a central question in Vasyakina’s novel. Angella, according to her daughter, was “a real woman. A woman squared.” A “woman-woman,” according to Oksana, is one who “even while waiting for a doctor while on the verge of death, asks for help putting on her ten-pound silicone breast form so that the doctor wins” . I can’t see she’s not whole.’
“A woman-woman,” we learn, is also one who is too focused on men, whether abusive husbands or passing lovers, to mother her own child—a pattern of intergenerational neglect that produces daughters who become haunted by abandonment, loss and self-loathing. Thus, the wound of Angella’s amputated breast mirrors the metaphorical wound of Oksana’s own “wild unrequited love” for a mother who refuses to acknowledge her: an insensitivity revealed in darkly comical accents, such as the fact that Angella sees her daughter in a T-shirt sends to a sailing camp. decorated with a still from the movie ‘Titanic’.
A road trip, especially in literature, is rarely linear. ‘Wound’, the author explains, is constructed like a ‘stone thrown into water’ and ripples into ‘rings of little stories’. These ‘rings’ include the characters Oksana encounters on her journey – the man who gives her a ride to the crematorium and boasts that ‘our Russian children can handle a machine gun in diapers’, as opposed to the western violets ‘who jump around in sparkling underwear’ . They include an account of Oksana’s own sexual unfoldment, culminating in her redemptive marriage to a woman named Alina, whose “warm, broad gaze… collects me in herself as if I were a little insect and her gaze a drop of oozing warm honey.” And this includes the author’s “Ode to Death” and her essayistic reflections on female weavers (such as Homer’s Penelope and Ovid’s Philomela) and the spider mother featured in the art of Louise Bourgeois.
When Vasyakina’s raucous, hypnotic book ends – with an unexpectedly joyous vigil in a Siberian banquet hall and a final speech to Angella creating a new language out of their shared pain – Oksana finally understands that the wound at the heart of her writing practice “will begin to heal on its own.” close, and I shall hear the crackling of flesh come together.
Fernanda Eberstadt’s book, Bite Your Friends: Stories of the Body Militant, will be released next spring.
WOUND | By Oksana Vasyakina | Translated by Elina Alter | 229 pp. | Catapult | $27
