Jerome Stenger<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Go to Google Maps (not right now, later), click satellite view, type Spain.\u00a0 Look to the southern coast, west of Almeria.\u00a0 Turn off the labels.\u00a0 What you\u2019ll notice is a white patch, a salt flat.\u00a0 A bleached desert maybe.\u00a0 And as you plummet hundreds of miles like an anvil you\u2019ll be amazed because what you\u2019ll actually see are greenhouses \u2013 thousands of them, pressed together like grains of rice. Half of Europe\u2019s vegetable crop is grown here. By most accounts, the place is something of a dystopia.<\/p>\n
Now do Moscow (later) and this one is a little trickier.\u00a0 Outside the blotch of city, look to the southwest to a solitary blue-gray form that resembles a moldy blini.\u00a0 The Agrikomibinat Moskovsky contains 300 acres of growing space beneath Communist glass and provides fresh produce to 800 Moscow markets daily.\u00a0 Growlights kick on at night and hopefully the workers sleeping nearby in housing units have effective window blinds.<\/p>\n
In his debut novel (and second book), Josh Weil invents his own solar spectacle, the Oranzheria, which shares the scope of Almeria\u2019s hothouses and the basic function of Moscow\u2019s agri-city.\u00a0 But Weil goes a few steps further \u2013 his Oranzheria is a glass roof structure that covers the entire Russian town of Petroplavilsk; \u201cVast hectares of panels stretching across an endless scaffolding of steel, it spread northward from the lakeshore, creeping over the land like a glacier in reverse.\u201d The novel, set in an alternate present, is haunted by the zerkalas, orbital mirrors that hover above the city and redirect sunlight to produce \u201cthe first place on earth illuminated by the sun for every hour of every day for all the seasons of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Animals flee to the countryside, away from the nightless cycle.\u00a0 Roosters stop crowing.\u00a0 Indigenous flora shrivels.\u00a0 The Oranzheria is devised and funded by The Consortium, whose research division develops GMOs to grow under extended photoperiods (think Monsanto).\u00a0 The rusty town is revived \u2013 most citizens work on the Oranzheria, where shifts are long and arduous and pay is minimal, but at least they are working and the grocery stores are stocked again.\u00a0 We follow two loving brothers, Yarik and Dima Zhuvoz, opposite in every way, who work on the Oranzheria and for the better part of four hundred pages are manipulated by various ideological factions until they become essentially unrecognizable to each other.<\/p>\n
The story itself is a nod to Russian folklore and to the empire\u2019s storytelling tradition.\u00a0 Dima quotes Pushkin aloud in the town square and this public recitation eventually sows seeds of revolt.\u00a0 At times, Weil goes straight Chekovian; \u201cWhen he pulled the covers off, her whole body\u2014so small! so shrunken!\u2014tightened at the cold, her hands flapping for her nightgown\u2019s hem.\u201d\u00a0 Weil splices the present with flashbacks to the brothers\u2019 childhood with Dyadya (Uncle) Avya, a drunk storytelling farmer. The flashbacks serve not only to develop character but also to acknowledge and celebrate Russian cultural heritage.\u00a0 The most significant memory, which opens the book and tremors throughout, involves young Yarik and Dima paddling out to sea on a dinghy at risk of being swallowed by the Chudo-Yudo, an heirloom sea monster.\u00a0 Another interlaced memory involves their father\u2019s suicide.<\/p>\n
Most striking is the length Weil goes to cover his scientific bases.\u00a0 His description of nature\u2019s response to the mirror light, to the endless glass ceiling, is nothing short of fantastic.\u00a0 \u201cFar off the river, the egret rose towards the sky until its wings brushed the glass, then dipped again, skimming the water, and flew on, and tried again.\u00a0 Sipping his tea, Dima watched it\u2014its sudden rise, the shock and flutter, swooping down in frantic flight and panicked rise again\u2014until the flicker of white disappeared into the small space between the distant river and the distant glass.\u201d<\/p>\n
Weil writes the brothers with tenderness.\u00a0 Yarik is the family man, the realist.\u00a0 Dima takes care of their senile mother and dreams of resettling the old family farm to live off the land, but they must save enough money to buy it back.\u00a0 Yarik entertains Dima because he loves him and that\u2019s really the only reason \u2013 but reason enough.\u00a0 They have good hearts and virginal desires.<\/p>\n
Prodding them are wacky Gilliamesque characters sans humor, who are responsible for raising most of the stakes.\u00a0 One of them is Yarik\u2019s Consortium boss Bazarov, nicknamed The She Bear, who ventures into Bond territory.\u00a0 In one scene he makes a surprise entrance by crashing through the wall of a worksite trailer using a large earth-moving machine, like a kid on a plaything, almost killing people.\u00a0 Another secondary character, Vika, serves as Dima\u2019s love interest and is the pseudo-leader of an anti-Consortium guerilla group.\u00a0 Her foulness, in language and appearance, is beyond Thunderdome.<\/p>\n
The book is strongest in movements not harnessed to its plot, and once that kicks in, priority falls to sequence of events, away from richness of world.\u00a0 Larger themes of runaway capitalism, corruption, agribusiness, work vs. leisure and environmental ownership are accurate and intriguing but stretch dialogue in the story\u2019s interior.\u00a0 The brothers, especially Dima, are often confused or cornered, creating expository loops of dialogue \u2013 \u201cWhat do you want?\u201d \u201cWhy do we have to want anything?\u201d<\/p>\n
Weil expertly establishes an eerie realism in the first quarter of the story.\u00a0 The world of the great glass sea is foreboding and beautiful.\u00a0 And as he channels the inflated nature of folklore, introducing villains so villainous, rebels so mutinous, actions so grand and symbolic, the realism grapples with a whimsical outrageousness.\u00a0 That Weil lands on his feet is impressive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jerome Stenger Go to Google Maps (not right now, later), click satellite view, type Spain.\u00a0 Look to the southern coast, west of Almeria.\u00a0 Turn off the labels.\u00a0 What you\u2019ll notice is a white patch, a salt flat.\u00a0 A bleached desert maybe.\u00a0 And as you plummet hundreds of miles like an anvil you\u2019ll be amazed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-written-by"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":222,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions\/222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}