Books & Poetry

Ismailov’s wonderful, ironic, sometimes devotional novel details, through the course of the last century, the lives and stories of the multi-ethnic inhabitants of the Uzbek railway town of Gilas, on the ancient Silk Road some miles north of Tashkent. Ismailov, who writes in both his native language and Russian, has seen a lot of his work languish unpublished or banned; he suffered expulsion in 1994 for his ‘unacceptable democratic tendencies’, and now lives in London, where he heads the BBC’s Central Asia and Caucasus Service.

The language he uses in ‘The Railway’ is as extraordinarily rich as the traditions he draws from; there are ethnic folk-tales, Communist-era jokes, ancient Sufic allegory, Marxist dialectics, Muslim poetry, alongside literary antecedents from fellow Russians Nikolai Gogol to Andrei Platonov. The book’s readability is a tribute to his translator, Robert Chandler.

Teeming with a daunting army of characters from a vast array of peoples and races – Uzbeks, Tatars, Persians, Koreans, Ukrainians, Jews and Kurds  – the  book interweaves their adventures, building a portrait of a country that is as full of lightly held historical and political erudition as it is of affectionate bathos, playful puns and satirical barbs. Chandler, correctly, describes the book as ‘exuberant’, but underneath there’s no mistaking its moving, melancholy spine.