It's an old saw of creative writing workshops that the engine of fiction is desire. The motivations of many of literature's greatest heroes can be sketchily summarized as the desire for love, fame, success, knowledge, self-actualization, pleasure, or even survival. We as readers eagerly turn the pages to find out whether our protagonist's desire will be fulfilled or frustrated. Of course, the crucial element that gives these desires meaning is life's ultimate time limit -- death.
And then there are novels like Carl-Johan Vallgren's "Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler," in which the titular hero is immortal, so that all his desires are meaningless besides his impossible hope for death. When life stretches on endlessly, what's left to keep the protagonist, not to mention the reader, asking the most basic and necessary of questions for a novel: What happens next?
Rubashov achieves his immortality by accident. When the novel begins, in St. Petersburg on the last night of 1899, Rubashov is a young cad who cares little for anything but gambling. Penniless, heavily in debt and the black sheep of his family, he attempts and fails to beat the devil at cards. And yet, oddly enough, Rubashov isn't in the game for the money. "This was the ultimate in stakes and choice of opposition," writes Swedish author Vallgren, "playing for his immortal soul without asking for anything but the thrill in return." When he loses, Rubashov expects to be whisked away to hell. Instead, the devil hands him an even direr fate: a life without end, sealed by contract on a strangely indestructible piece of paper.
At first, immortality seems to suit Rubashov. He amasses a fortune by making lucrative bets on his life in games of Russian roulette, or on the unusually resilient contract, which he and others attempt in vain to burn, tear or otherwise destroy. Investing his winnings, he becomes a tycoon, gets married to a woman he adores and extends his largesse to the poor.
However, his luck changes after his family and house are destroyed in a fire and his investments fail. Rubashov supports himself by taking a series of odd jobs, including working as a taster for Tsar Nicholas II's Machiavellian adviser Grigory Rasputin, who fears being poisoned: "'There's no better taster to be had,' Rasputin had said when they had gone on their first journeys together. 'Not even a pound of dynamite primed for the stomach could do him any harm.'"
Rubashov lingers on through the 20th century, inserting himself Forrest Gump-like into major historical events on which he has no effect and in which he holds no stake. Rubashov witnesses two world wars, the rise of Nazism, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the conflict in Northern Ireland, the atrocities in Bosnia, and even the polluting of the environment in our own time. Occasionally he attempts to find a way out of life, both through futile attempts at self-destruction and with the aid of a mysterious fellow immortal named Doctor Paracelsus. Unfortunately, the aging doctor isn't much help, particularly since he has a way of vanishing and then popping up at unexpected times. By the book's end, Paracelsus has been alive so long that he has shriveled into a helpless and horrible baby:
In the pram lay Paracelsus -- that is to say, what little was left of him. He was now no bigger than a child of three. ... In his hand he held a baby's rattle, raising his chubby child's arm now and then to shake it above his chest. ... He gurgled quietly when Josef Rubashov whispered his name. ... Women would occasionally come up to see what was in the pram. But when they caught sight of Paracelsus, that living corpse the size of a child, they crossed themselves and ran away.
As Vallgren lurches from one time period to another, it takes a fair amount of work to simply figure out what's happening. "Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler" isn't the kind of book that sweeps you along with a strong central plotline. It's more a picaresque series of set pieces, some highly involving, others all too listless.
The book's most poignant episodes are the ones that deal with the difficulties of being immortal, or with Rubashov's encounters with others like himself. One especially memorable storyline involves a mortal fortuneteller he meets and falls in love with in London. She follows him through Europe and even agrees to join him in his misery by becoming immortal as well, only to renege on her promise at the last minute and abandon him in Budapest.
Vallgren also writes with conviction and indignation about the tragedies of war, genocide and, especially, the earth's decay:
[Rubashov] walked through woods where the trees were rotting from inside. He looked out across lakes in which all life had been snuffed out, with shores where only poisonous hogweed could grow. Desert landscapes stretched away where luxuriant meadows had been not long before. Immense wounds gaped in the earth, bleeding craters where metals had been mined; seams and veins they had sucked dry and then abandoned. The seas were dying, the fields poisoned; there were places where a mouthful of soil was enough to kill a person.
The novel tends to falter in more cartoonish moments, as when Vallgren resorts to awkward, thumbnail sketches to orient the reader in a place and time. "'We're no longer allowed to work,'" a Jew in Nazi Germany explains in a bit of laborious dialogue. "'We're no longer permitted to teach. We're not allowed to shop in German shops... We're not even allowed to keep pets, not so much as a dog!" There are also several deadly boring passages of abstract musings that strain all too mightily to sound profound.
The book's other major weakness is Rubashov himself, who is sympathetic because of his plight, but too vague. Vallgren skates so quickly over the initial scene of the bet with the devil that it's hard to understand why the young Rubashov would be so extremely careless about his life. As Rubashov's story progresses, his attitude toward his "life sentence" vacillates wildly from chapter to chapter. Sometimes he's resigned to his fate, sometimes he's trying to die, sometimes he's trying to find someone to help him reach the devil. However, all these attitudes, while understandable in themselves, aren't connected to a single person we get to know well.
In the end, "Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler" works best as an allegory about the pain that human beings, and especially Europeans, were willing to inflict on each other in the 20th century. Just in case we've missed the metaphor, Vallgren points us to it: "[Rubashov] understood that he was himself and everybody else, he was Europe and its people through a century, he was a torrent of events, a wandering seer, a pawn in an illusory game between good and evil."
It turns out that Rubashov is many things, but to the detriment of this at times intriguing novel, he's not a fully realized character.
Aaron Hamburger is the author of the short story collection "The View From Stalin's Head" and the novel "Faith for Beginners."
And then there are novels like Carl-Johan Vallgren's "Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler," in which the titular hero is immortal, so that all his desires are meaningless besides his impossible hope for death. When life stretches on endlessly, what's left to keep the protagonist, not to mention the reader, asking the most basic and necessary of questions for a novel: What happens next?
Rubashov achieves his immortality by accident. When the novel begins, in St. Petersburg on the last night of 1899, Rubashov is a young cad who cares little for anything but gambling. Penniless, heavily in debt and the black sheep of his family, he attempts and fails to beat the devil at cards. And yet, oddly enough, Rubashov isn't in the game for the money. "This was the ultimate in stakes and choice of opposition," writes Swedish author Vallgren, "playing for his immortal soul without asking for anything but the thrill in return." When he loses, Rubashov expects to be whisked away to hell. Instead, the devil hands him an even direr fate: a life without end, sealed by contract on a strangely indestructible piece of paper.
At first, immortality seems to suit Rubashov. He amasses a fortune by making lucrative bets on his life in games of Russian roulette, or on the unusually resilient contract, which he and others attempt in vain to burn, tear or otherwise destroy. Investing his winnings, he becomes a tycoon, gets married to a woman he adores and extends his largesse to the poor.
However, his luck changes after his family and house are destroyed in a fire and his investments fail. Rubashov supports himself by taking a series of odd jobs, including working as a taster for Tsar Nicholas II's Machiavellian adviser Grigory Rasputin, who fears being poisoned: "'There's no better taster to be had,' Rasputin had said when they had gone on their first journeys together. 'Not even a pound of dynamite primed for the stomach could do him any harm.'"
Rubashov lingers on through the 20th century, inserting himself Forrest Gump-like into major historical events on which he has no effect and in which he holds no stake. Rubashov witnesses two world wars, the rise of Nazism, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the conflict in Northern Ireland, the atrocities in Bosnia, and even the polluting of the environment in our own time. Occasionally he attempts to find a way out of life, both through futile attempts at self-destruction and with the aid of a mysterious fellow immortal named Doctor Paracelsus. Unfortunately, the aging doctor isn't much help, particularly since he has a way of vanishing and then popping up at unexpected times. By the book's end, Paracelsus has been alive so long that he has shriveled into a helpless and horrible baby:
In the pram lay Paracelsus -- that is to say, what little was left of him. He was now no bigger than a child of three. ... In his hand he held a baby's rattle, raising his chubby child's arm now and then to shake it above his chest. ... He gurgled quietly when Josef Rubashov whispered his name. ... Women would occasionally come up to see what was in the pram. But when they caught sight of Paracelsus, that living corpse the size of a child, they crossed themselves and ran away.
 Shai Ouaki Carl-Johan Vallgren |  |
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The book's most poignant episodes are the ones that deal with the difficulties of being immortal, or with Rubashov's encounters with others like himself. One especially memorable storyline involves a mortal fortuneteller he meets and falls in love with in London. She follows him through Europe and even agrees to join him in his misery by becoming immortal as well, only to renege on her promise at the last minute and abandon him in Budapest.
Vallgren also writes with conviction and indignation about the tragedies of war, genocide and, especially, the earth's decay:
[Rubashov] walked through woods where the trees were rotting from inside. He looked out across lakes in which all life had been snuffed out, with shores where only poisonous hogweed could grow. Desert landscapes stretched away where luxuriant meadows had been not long before. Immense wounds gaped in the earth, bleeding craters where metals had been mined; seams and veins they had sucked dry and then abandoned. The seas were dying, the fields poisoned; there were places where a mouthful of soil was enough to kill a person.
The novel tends to falter in more cartoonish moments, as when Vallgren resorts to awkward, thumbnail sketches to orient the reader in a place and time. "'We're no longer allowed to work,'" a Jew in Nazi Germany explains in a bit of laborious dialogue. "'We're no longer permitted to teach. We're not allowed to shop in German shops... We're not even allowed to keep pets, not so much as a dog!" There are also several deadly boring passages of abstract musings that strain all too mightily to sound profound.
The book's other major weakness is Rubashov himself, who is sympathetic because of his plight, but too vague. Vallgren skates so quickly over the initial scene of the bet with the devil that it's hard to understand why the young Rubashov would be so extremely careless about his life. As Rubashov's story progresses, his attitude toward his "life sentence" vacillates wildly from chapter to chapter. Sometimes he's resigned to his fate, sometimes he's trying to die, sometimes he's trying to find someone to help him reach the devil. However, all these attitudes, while understandable in themselves, aren't connected to a single person we get to know well.
In the end, "Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler" works best as an allegory about the pain that human beings, and especially Europeans, were willing to inflict on each other in the 20th century. Just in case we've missed the metaphor, Vallgren points us to it: "[Rubashov] understood that he was himself and everybody else, he was Europe and its people through a century, he was a torrent of events, a wandering seer, a pawn in an illusory game between good and evil."
It turns out that Rubashov is many things, but to the detriment of this at times intriguing novel, he's not a fully realized character.
Aaron Hamburger is the author of the short story collection "The View From Stalin's Head" and the novel "Faith for Beginners."