Set in a
Dagestani village, this incisive novel explores conflicts between tradition and
modernisation through the lens of tussling approaches to marriage – it’s a love
story with more twists & turns than most.
Global
Literature in Libraries about Ganieva’s Bride and Groom (USA)
Ganieva’s
novel grapples with the powerlessness of its protagonists amidst old social
(and political) structures that persist in a new post-Soviet age of faux
democracy and social media.
The Moscow
Times about Bride and Groom and The
Mountain and the Wall
Readers (Americans in particular) would do well to acknowledge what the novel beautifully illustrates: that there are many different Islams, each infused with local particularities, and that it is often impossible to tell truth from heresy, self from other/God, spiritual guide from charlatan.
It is a work that can taste the fascinating and intense narrative of Russia. This work awakens the world's largest continent, which has been forgotten since the 90's.
Future
of Korea about Offended Sensibilities (Republic of Korea)
A story of two young people who return home to Dagestan from Moscow to satisfy their families’ insistence that they marry. Both are forced to balance their respect for tradition with their cosmopolitan understanding of love and romance, but as much as they try, their individual stories are mere fodder for the dysfunctional social order built on systemic corruption and terror.
The
World Literature Today journal (USA)
Ganieva has both expanded the capacity of the Russian language in her prose and used her public platform as an author to advocate for important political causes.
The
Baltic-based Meduza
Selv om hun er del av en politisk dreining i russisk litteratur, skiller hun seg likevel ut blant samtidsforfattere.
What was background now becomes foreground: the corruption, the state repression, the simmering conflict between the two mosques in town, but also the Sufi mysticism that infuses the book.
Globe
and Mail (Canada)
Ganieva’s writing is visual: the characters and settings come easily to the mind’s eye. If a film script is not in the offing, someone should consider it. (It has already been adapted for radio by the BBC.)
Moreover, as a woman writer, Ganieva injects a different gender dynamic into the Caucasus narrative.
As writers, we shouldn’t dismiss politics and imagine we can retreat into a realm of pure aesthetic forms but instead should do as Alisa Ganieva does and consciously use aesthetics as a form for our politics.
Ganieva’s writing is consistently witty and energetic, crafting an appropriately complicated image of a place and people united and divided by tradition and progress, old grudges and new unions.
Ganieva explores Dagestan’s most urgent socio-political issues – highlighting ‘nepotism, corruption, gang-clans rule, unemployment, intra-Muslim religious clashes’ – not only to provide a window into a poorly understood area, but to highlight the complications of a region in transition. The book’s central characters, Marat and Patya, must decide whether to pursue a life on their own in Moscow or bend to the desires and expectations of their parents and wider communities in Dagestan, where arranged marriages are the norm.
Rather than crafting a character study or a love-at-first-sight romance (though the novel includes elements of both), Ganieva attempts to encapsulate Dagestan’s complexities, interrogating its customs, politics, and religion.
Bride and Groom is a nice little novel of contemporary Dagestan life, Ganieva's light touch allowing for a low-key but still very revealing socio-cultural profile. A consistently humorous touch, and the weaving in of Sufi-tradition – explained more fully by Ganieva in her Afterword – make for a sprightly novel.
Ganieva leads the narrative into some unexpected places, grappling with the weight of history and questions of corruption along the way. In an afterword to this edition, Ganieva also explores the influence of Sufism on her novel — one more layer in a meticulously arranged narrative.
Ganieva conjures up a colourful world full of strange, comic and menacing characters that feel like they came out of a literary cross between Goodfellas and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
On the face of it, then, a conventional tale, but Ganieva sets Patya and Marat in a world riddled with superstition and ancient folklore as well as gangs of young Muslim men protecting their territory. Marat visits a fortune-teller; Patya talks to her grandmother over the samovar. Every action, no matter how insignificant, has a meaning. The Welsh accents of the Dagestanis make it hard to believe we are in deepest Russia but the drama has a mythic quality, as if we are hearing stories told for generations, characters trapped in history yet also very much of the present.
Yes, Ganieva is touted as the first Dagestani author to appear in English — this is truly a cause for celebration! But let that not overshadow her merits as a writer: that she is unafraid of depicting alienated, imperfect people whose purpose is to expose those universal paradoxes we hold dear. Bride and Groom is funny and perceptive and concept-dense, which proves to be a winning combination. I want more.
Undeniably
well-written, her clear commitment is to creating dialogue between Russia and
its own peripheries.
Raised
in a nonreligious household in Dagestan, a mountainous republic in Russia’s
North Caucasus region, Alisa Ganieva has aimed to write in clear-eyed fashion
about her homeland, a region that has been racked by violence fueled by
criminal and clan elements and an Islamic insurgency. Her long story Salam,
Dalgat! aims a merciless lens on a Dagestani town roiling with drug
gangs, Islamic fundamentalists, water-supply breakdowns, burning garbage cans,
abusive police officers and women fawning over Gucci knockoffs.
Salam,
Dalgat! is
a lively account of today's Dagestan, where the nomenclature corruption
multiplies to result in social problems, unemployment matches the rise of
Islamic fundamentalism, which interferes with the gadgets of modernity -
Mercedes-Benz cars, prostitutes and drug addicts.
Alisa
Ganieva is not a tightrope-walker, but is similarly gifted with a rare talent
to suspend disbelief and traverse gaping chasms. Brought up in the capital of
Dagestan, Makhachkala, Ganieva mines intimate knowledge of her homeland. She
combines this with the sophistication of a wordsmith who confesses to
identifying firmly with Russian culture, while acknowledging the rich
traditions of her Avar Dagestani roots.
At
first, the Republic of Dagestan, in spite being a very real region at the
southwestern tip of Russia, seems far away and utterly unreal. Perhaps that is
because, Ganieva's debut novel, published and translated by Deep Vellum, is one
of the first books set in this part of the world published in English. Or
perhaps that is because of Ganieva's writing, which has a kind of magic.
Alisa
Ganieva, 26, wrote about her native Dagestan, a mountainous region rocked by
Islamist insurgency. She told me that religious extremism has become a form of
rebellion among the youth, as fashionable as a trendy nightclub.
The
circumstance surrounding the terrorism and counter-terrorism campaigns deeply
impacts the characters in Alisa Ganieva’s work. As The Mountain and the
Wall accurately depicts, it is not the number of fighters or the
ideology that provides the Salafist extremists their strength but the state’s
failures to care for its people
Ganieva
is very courageous to write about what is happening in her native country,
thinly veiled in the traditional Russian literary use of fiction.
Alisa
Ganieva’s The Mountain and the Wall (2015) is one of those
novels that reminds us why reading world literature can be so compelling.
One
of the privileges of working in a bookshop is the discovery of new writers and
new literary landscapes—and being able to pass on these discoveries to you
lovely folks. This novel from Dagestan certainly does the trick. Ganieva’s
polyphonic book has been making waves on the continent and looks set to provoke
equal amounts of debate and excitement here. This is a portrait of a society
fragmenting into violent ethnic and ideological divisions, where the voices of
moderation are at risk of being drowned out by extreme interpretations of
religious doctrine. It is a plea for plurality and humanism and a celebration
of the cultural diversity of Dagestan. Vivid, timely, gripping, and really
quite magical, it cements Ganieva’s position as one of the most exciting young
voices in Russian fiction.
Salam,
Dalgat! (Hello
Dalgat) a short story translated in this first collection of young literary
prizewinners, is a powerful glimpse of a generation of young Dagestanis who
live on a tightrope in a region torn by violence. Survival is based on a set of
skills, mostly skills of evasion to avoid the worst fate. The worst fate seems
unknowable, but could involve criminals, the police, prostitution or the Imam
and his devotees proclaiming violent jihad.
People
interrupt, talk over each other, insult one another. Through Ganieva their
voices are passionate, clear. Some families survive the arguments, others
fracture; some people change beliefs, others are resolute.
The
Mountain and the Wall is broad and sweeping in its historical consciousness, its
mythologizing, and its narrativizing–its ability to make some of the most
mundane acts the basis of an engrossing story. Ganieva achieves this in a story
that takes place over the course of a couple of days in Dagestan, a country
of about three million people on the Caspian Sea.
Overall,
though, The Mountain and the Wall is a book I’d recommend,
as much for the exotic (?) setting as for the story. A well-written
insight into a foreign land, Ganieva’s novel shows the western reader a
completely different side of Russia, one few of us would have encountered
before. It’s just another example of why we need translation – and more
women in translation, of course…
Im
Dagestan der dort aufgewachsenen Autorin Alissa Ganijewa, selbst erst Anfang
30, spielen noch die Religion, lokale Banden und die Unterdrückungsgeschichte
mit Russland hinein - die Namen mögen fremd sein, doch die Grundkonflikte sind
vertraut und die Pointen dieses turbulenten Romans treffen.
Schon
damals stach die junge Alissa Ganijewa als erfrischende und gewitzte Stimme aus
dem Verbund aufgekratzter Jungautoren heraus. Nun, nach der Lektüre
von Eine Liebe im Kaukasus, ihrem zweiten ins Deutsche übertragenen
Roman, muss man festhalten: An dieser Autorin führt kein Weg vorbei.
Noch
vor wenigen Jahren galt Tschetschenien als Laboratorium für
Terroristen – heute hat das benachbarte Dagestan diese Rolle
übernommen. Die gnadenlosen Einsätze der russischen Anti-Terror-Einheiten
treiben immer mehr junge Männer in die Arme der militanten Islamisten, und die
im zweiten Tschetschenien-Krieg völlig zerstörte Stadt Grosny zeigt, wo dieser
Weg endet. Alissa Ganijewa schildert in ihrem Roman „Die russische Mauer“,
zwischen hartem Realismus und einer bedrückenden Traumsphäre wechselnd, die
entscheidenden Wendepunkte einer furchterregend aktuellen Apokalypse.
Ganijewa,
welche Rolle die zunehmend militanten Islamisten spielen, was passiert, wenn
sich Islam und Altkommunismus argumentativ verbünden und wie dabei besonders
der Spielraum für junge Frauen immer enger wird.
Die
junge Autorin Alissa Ganijewa lebt in Moskau und schreibt über ihre Heimat,
Dagestan. In ihren Romanen schildert sie einen spannungsgeladenen Nordkaukasus
mit frommen Lügnern und verunsicherten Säkularen.
Ganijewa
nutzt die Szene, um den Irrwitz von Aberglauben und Hokuspokus ad absurdum zu
führen.
Alissa
Ganijewa gelingt es, ein Panorama einer verwirrten, überhitzten und latent
gewalttätigen Gesellschaft zu entwerfen, in der die Jungfräulichkeit nach wie
vor den zentralen Wert einer Heiratskandidatin bildet (und ihrer gesamten
Sippe!), diese Kandidatinnen aber ganz modern ihr Profil ins Internet stellen,
damit sich interessierte Männer vor dem ersten Rendezvous schon ein Bild machen
können. Ganijewa selbst, heute eine der profiliertesten kritischen
Intellektuellen Russlands, hatte übrigens ihre erste Erzählung aus dem Alltag
Dagestans unter einem männlichen Pseudonym veröffentlicht, weil es undenkbar
war, dass eine junge Frau sich, wie sie es tat, mit Strassenszenen beschäftigte.
Alissa
Ganijewas Prosa ist von dieser Polyphonie geprägt. Sie lässt die Menschen ihres
Heimatlands in einem vielstimmigen Chor selbst zu Wort kommen. Einem symbolisch
aufgeladenen Literaturraum namens Kaukasus setzt sie einen differenzierten
Innenblick aus der Gegenwart speziell eines Landes entgegen: der Gegenwart
Dagestans.
Es
ist ein beunruhigendes Bild, das Alissa Ganijewa da in temporeichen Szenen und
hitzigen Dialogen hineinzeichnet in das baumlose Flachland am Rande des
Kaspischen Meers. Zwischen die rostigen Pipeline-Rohre, die ärmlichen Baracken
und die Eisenbahngleise, die die namenlose Siedlung nicht nur räumlich teilen:
Der soziale Zusammenhalt ist zerstört. Stattdessen herrscht ein feindliches
Klima, genährt vor allem von den vernagelten Eiferern in den konkurrierenden
Moscheen, aber auch von tief sitzenden Konventionen und blühender Doppelmoral,
von Aberglaube und Gerüchten. Alissa Ganijewa schildert die Siedlung und ihre
Bewohner als ideologisch engstirnige Gesellschaft, die keinen Platz kennt für
Nonkonformisten.
Ganijewas
schwarzhumoriger Roman leicht und gibt, erweitert durch ein Nachwort der
Übersetzerin, Einblicke in das Leben der nur wenig bekannten Republik Dagestan.
Ganieva
utilizza l’andamento narrativo come un macchinario che mette ordine, che mostra
le analogie dove non si vedevano e che progressivamente collega strati sociali,
personaggi, vicende apparentemente disomogenee. È un libro di montaggio,
combinatorio. All’inizio viene gettata una rete che si allarga a più
personaggi, addirittura a più generazioni. Poi questa rete viene tirata: inizia
a raccogliere. I personaggi si scontrano. Le generazioni si incrociano. Il
presente si chiarisce e diventa più facile fare una previsione sul futuro.
Quella tensostruttura di realismo e fantasia distopica è l’esito coerente
dell’andamento narrativo della Montagna in festa.
Alisa
Ganieva ha immaginato, prima di Houellebecq e di Sansal, l'irrompere
dell'estremismo coranico in realtà occidentalizzate. Ambientato in Daghestan,
il suo è un romanzo-romanzo, con un vero intreccio e una folla di personaggi.
Aile
baskısı mı, koca baskısı mı? Şer cephesi devlet yapıları mı, kılıcından
kan damlayan mücahitler mi? Bütün rejimlerin ilk önce ve her zaman
kadınlarla uğraştığının vesikasıdır bu roman. Ganieva anlattıkça daha çok
dinlemek istiyorsunuz.
İki
yol var: Kaçıp gitmek ya da kalıp şeriata koşulsuz teslim olmak...
Asyaüçüncüsünü seçiyor, kalıp başkaldırmak! Rusya’daki pek çok
edebiyat ödülünü toplayan Alisa Ganiyeva, ‘Bayram
Dağı’ romanında ‘harikalar diyarı’ Dağıstan’ın
bugününü anlatıyor.
Dans
son récit, Alissa Ganieva soulève le thème particulièrement sensible du
banditisme parmi les wahhabites daghestanais, suscitant une grande résonance,
mais aussi de la colère et du mécontentement. Au Daghestan, d'où est originaire
Alissa Ganieva, c'est une honte d'écrire de telles choses lorsqu'on est pieuse
musulmane. Mais c'est justement l'absence du sentiment de peur qui a fait de
cette téméraire jeune femme un grand écrivain. Alissa, elle, répond sur le
site russe Openspace que « les réactions déchaînées, surtout négatives, à
mes débuts, les nombreuses lettres reçues des Daghestanais et des autres, les
critiques, verbales ou écrites, de nature et niveaux différents, tout cela m'a
tellement appris : sans le prix « Début », je n'aurais sans
doute jamais osé me révéler comme écrivaine ».
“Cosas
así” son los avatares de una sociedad que Ganíeva dice haber retratado
fielmente: mezcla de nostalgia comunista, corrupción postsoviética y
radicalismo islámico.
Ganíeva
muestra cómo el terror no surge como un fenómeno aislado, sino que se integra
en la sociedad y es el fruto de los conflictos entre etnias y clases que se
arrastran desde hace décadas porque el gobierno no los ha sabido gestionar.
