These days, Bayer is no less known in Moscow than in New York, writing regularly for Vedomosti. And a book of his short stories, titled "Eurotrash," has just come out from Moscow publisher OGI.
It's a very American book. Or rather, it's a very New York book, since the stories are almost all set in New York City and bursting with specimens -- Koreans, Poles, Haitians, Hungarians, not to mention Russians -- of that indefinable breed known as New Yorkers. Who but New Yorkers would count joggers in Central Park, attend the birthday party of a girl long since dead, buy a plot of land in Finland to capitalize on global warming, or throw away a ridiculously expensive bicycle immediately after having bought it? All of Bayer's characters are obsessed with money -- some because they are close to starving, some because they are very well-off. But no conclusions are drawn. It is remarkable for someone who hasn't been a professional fiction writer for most of his life to have captured this brand of modern storytelling so comprehensively.
Originally written in English and featured in several American journals, the stories were translated into Russian by Andrei Gelasimov. Against the background of today's increasingly sloppy translations, Bayer's voice, through Gelasimov, comes out clear and steady.
Hints of Vladimir Nabokov also abound. Not unlike Nabokov's short prose, Bayer's plots also often peter out to nothing, leaving it to the writing itself to carry the work. And not unlike Nabokov, who also left Russia as a teenager and held jobs in America unrelated to his writing (he was the curator of the butterfly and moth department in Harvard's Museum of Comparitive Zoology), Bayer's writing measures up to the task.
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