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the complete review - fiction

The Last of the Vostyachs

by
Diego Marani

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A : clever and wonderfully entertaining; very nicely done

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Indeed the strength of The Last of the Vostyachs is less Marani's intellectual musings than the manner and momentum with which he moves his characters around at the service of the plot. (...) It is therefore a shame, when one finally pulls the plastic template and triangle-toothed gears away, that the resultant mandala feels slightly less than the sum of its parts, slightly less complex than the process of drawing it had hinted at." - Matthew Clayfield, The Australian
  
  
• "So, we have: 1. An intellectual puzzle. 2. A wild man of nature adrift in a big city. 3. A policier set near the Arctic Circle. (If that alone doesn't make you put down your copies of Fifty Shades of Whatever then I despair. It has that Killingesque atmosphere.) 4. Magic, and a sense of the immensity of the primeval universe. 5. An unmistakable dash of humour, even when your nerves are being shredded. 6. Wolves, and a Siberian tiger, let loose from a zoo. 7. A happy ending against all odds. And 8. All hanging together." - Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
  
  
• "Part murder mystery set in the Arctic, part study of language, part Norse saga -- though spiced with its own modernity, magic and humour -- and part evocation of the Arctic wilderness, Marani's novel shows his extraordinary skills and erudition. He is well served by his translator, Judith Landry, who has produced a novel that appears to have been conceived in English." - Cathy Peake, Sydney Morning Herald
  
  
• "(A) riot of comic unpredictability. (...) The Last of the Vostyachs cleverly explores notions of freedom, possession and imprisonment - erudition keeping pace with a rollicking plot. Marani's sentences are controlled explosions of impressionism, his narrative structure a thematic echo chamber." - Max Liu, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Last of the Vostyachs begins with the guards at the Siberian forced labor camp in which long-mute Ivan has grown up deserting their posts and the prisoners finally able to leave it. Ivan had been brought here as a child with his father, and hadn't spoken since his father was murdered there after trying to escape:

It was twenty years since Ivan had uttered a word, twenty years since the language spoken by the oldest tribe of the Proto-Uralic family, the Vostyachs -- cousins of the Samoeyeds, the wild bear-hunters who once lived in the Byrranga Mountains and whom scientists believed to be extinct -- had been heard anywhere in Northern Siberia.

They're all there, the consonants which mark the transition between the Finnic languages and the Eskimo-Aleut ones. Even the fricative lateral with the labiovelar appendix ! I haven't finished mapping the phonetic analogies, but will have done so in time for the conference, even if I have to work on my new paper round the clock. So goodbye Samoyedic dialects, hello Vostyach ! If you wanted the Helsinki conference to be a turning point in the study of the Finno-Ugric languages, your wish is granted.

     'Well, statistics tell us that one of the six thousand languages still spoken on this earth die out every two weeks, my dear,' retorted Aurtova, almost gleefully.
     'And with each one that dies, a little truth dies with it,' Olga retorted in her turn, stiffening a little and rubbing her sweating hands.
     'Whereas I would say the contrary is true: the fewer there are left, the more we're moving towards the truth, towards the pure language which contains them all,' said Aurtova

- M.A.Orthofer, 18 February 2013

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Links:

• Dedalus publicity page
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• ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
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• The Celestial City
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• The Interpreter
• New Finnish Grammar

• See Index of Italian literature
• See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers

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About the Author:

       Italian author and linguist Diego Marani was born in 1959.

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© 2013-2024 the complete review

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