God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories | Tom Bissell

God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories | Tom Bissell | Wonderful Collection

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God Lives in St. P...

	God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories Tom Bissell Pantheon, 2005 - 212 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Here are six fictional stories about Americans colliding with a remote and often perilous part of the world:

Two journalists, stranded in wartime Afghanistan, are taken in by a warlord who becomes the arbiter of their fates.

A female scientist investigating the Aral Sea disaster is drawn into a trap by a former KGB officer.

On a hike through Kazakhstan, Jayne and Douglas?s marriage unravels when their guide, a veteran of the Soviet-Afghanistan war, takes an unseemly interest in Jayne.

The son of an American ambassador addicted to the seamy underside of a Central Asian city finally gets in over his head.
In the Pushcart Prize?winning title story, a tortured missionary struggles to reconcile his sexual urges with his faith.

A young man just back from a long stint in Kyrgyz-stan finds his relationship with his fiancée all but destroyed.

Sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, but always eerily affecting, these stories show us deeply foreign lands and peoples through our own eyes. Impressive in both range and emotional acuity, God Lives in St. Petersburg is a stunning fictional debut by a ?wildly talented? (Outside) young writer.

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Terrific Realistic Tales of Contemporary Afghanistan&Other Small "Istans"!

From the first few pages of this book, we know we are reading a master who knows the facts in Afghanistan and the smaller new nations just north of it , and south of Russia. Every yarn is unique, some with tons of black humor, others placing you right inside the Afghan war. The first tells of a journalist trying his best to get some penicillin for his malaria sticken pal, including risking his life in a mad rush near the battlesgrounds, to a supposed plant/field that can kill the disease. The end is shocking, and horrific. In "The Ambassador's Son" we are inside the wild west flavor of a new "Istan" nation,including some of the zaniest writing imaginable. To compare this author with Hemingway, Kiplang, and Greene is indeed not a stretch. In fact, I even prefer this short collection to many of the past "Classics" of foreign intrigue and war.

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Wonderful Collection

As I read, I was looking at the structural underpinnings of theses stories. I was interested in what happened to a story that was told in a foreign land. What role does place play in the exotic story? How does a writer balance the need to explain the exotic with the need tell a story? What stories can be told only in an exotic land and why?

And of course, there were no real answers. In some of the stories ("Aral," and to a lesser degree, "Death in Defier") place is integral to the telling of the story. The place is an import part of the plot and is treated as another character that acts within (or upon) the story. Place influences the lives of the characters and their decisions. The movement of the story depends on the place. It is difficult to imagine the story unfolding in any other location, just like it is difficult to imagine the same story with different characters. Change the place and you change the story.

Other stories ("The Ambassador's Son," "God Lives in St. Petersburg," "Expensive Trips Nowhere") are less dependent on place. The real action in the story involves the characters. Although the stories unfold in Central Asia, they could (perhaps) just as easily take place in Africa, Mexico, or rural Alabama. The stories are character driven.

It is also interesting to see how politics are woven into the stories. The characters in "Death in Defier" all hold different political views, and those views are drawn in contrast to the shared reality of life between Mazar and Kunduz.

I also noticed that although place can have some of the same characteristics in a story as character, they are not the same. And even if you have a character that is moving through and engaging with an exotic landscape, it is not the same dynamic as characters interacting with one another. A character interacting with an exotic place is not nearly as interesting, from the perspective of engaging fiction, as characters interacting with one another. Even in the stories that depend on place, it is still the character that carries the story forward.

There is also the issue of back-story. It can really slow the action, particularly in the short story. But back-story seems sometimes vital in developing character and motivation. Bissell does not shy away from back-story, nor does he seem to have a problem with switching POV. In "Expensive Trips Nowhere," the POV switches among the three characters. Back-story stretches across pages and between characters. The main event of the story, an attempted high-country mugging, is actually told as back-story. And I am not sure if it works. This sort of forward, back, in and out, motion certainly does not make for a clean narrative trajectory. And there is some information that is redundant (like the guide's twice told history of service in Afghanistan). But I can also say that I found the story engaging and did not get the sense that it ever stalled.

All in all this is a great collection. And it can be simply enjoyed by an adventure seeking reader, or mined by the beginning writer for craft.

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A Rare Find

It's possible I'm biased because of my interest in Central Asia. I'm not sure how this book would be received by someone with no interest in the region, but I suspect it would still be a great read.

For me, this was the first book in a long time that brought out the 'just a few more pages' type of mentality that keeps you reading until the wee hours of the morning (it's a short book though, so start it early in the day so you don't stay up too late!).

One of the greatest parts of this is how each story seems to speak to a different part of me.

I really enjoyed it. And with the used prices below a dollar, I think you'd be missing out not to pick it up.

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Home is Where the Hurt Is

Tom Bissell is fond of sprinkling aphorisms throughout the stories in this fine collection, so let's lay one on him: Only a young man with his entire life stretched out before him could afford to be so pessimistic about life's possibilities.

Granted, he's writing about places it's easy to be pessimistic about, god-forsaken Central Asian Republics spawned by the collapse of the Soviet Empire, places that are a "combo of Soviet paranoia and Muslim xenophobia" as one character puts it. Five of the collection's six stories follow this pattern: take a (young) American; drop him or her into a central Asian country; stir; chronicle the resulting disaster.

The first story, Death Defier, is probably the best. A free-lance American photographer gets caught in a difficult situation in Afghanistan while trying to help a British reporter felled by a virulent strain of malaria. The story poses an interesting question: can you dive so deeply into the mechanics and aesthetics of war that you become immune to death-terror? Bissell grapples honorably with the complex sensibility of war correspondents, people who are voyeuristic and deeply engaged, often at the same time. Aral is about Amanda, an American biologist sent by the United Nations to study the shrinking Aral Sea (a hall of fame ecological screw-up). Amanda consistently misreads the intent of the people around her. She displays that combustible American mix of idealism, aggressiveness and ignorance of the local culture that's served us so well in Vietnam and Iraq.

Expensive Trips Nowhere and The Ambassador's Son are ugly American stories. In an Author's Note, Bissell acknowledges his debt to Hemingway's The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber for Expensive Trips Nowhere, which is about courage or the lack thereof on the steppes of Kazakhstan. The Ambassador's Son is about what you'd get if you dropped the Jay McInerney of Bright Lights, Big City into the capital of Tashkent. It should be noted that Bissell writes well about sex, giving it neither more nor less significance than the situation he's describing merits. The final story, Animals in Our Lives, is the only one set in America. Franklin, a recently returned expat English teacher, and Elizabeth, a med student, spend an afternoon at the zoo and experience the moment when it comes clear they don't have a future with each other. It's a sensitive rendering of the kinds of pain your intellect can't protect you from.

The title story, which won a Pushcart Prize, is about Timothy, a missionary in Samarkand whose faith gets subverted by physical urges. Bissell gets the succumbing to temptation part just right, along with the heartbreaking juxtaposition of sex with hope that pervades the world's downtrodden places. What's missing is a visceral sense of the struggle to hold on to God. God may not live in St Petersburg, but Dostoievksi did, and the master understood that sin gains heft through the hubris of the sinner. Something enormous was at stake for Dostoievski's spiritual criminals; they pitched themselves willingly on to the pyre, inviting and accepting oblivion for their defiance. Timothy settles for the tiny oblivion of orgasm, then sits in a fug of post-coital remorse waiting for God to ring him up. He's simply not a big enough person to carry his part of the argument, so the story falls short of the tragic dimension it tries to achieve.

There's a lot to like about Bissell as a writer. He's willing to engage with far-off, difficult cultures, and willing to wrestle with big ideas like death and sin. He writes a prose that's both erudite and plainspoken, which is hard to do. He can be both trenchant and expansive in his observations, often in the same well-turned phrase. His efforts to describe the ways in which the personal and political infuse and alter one another takes him into territory mined so productively by Graham Greene. While each of the individual stories may not be perfectly realized, it feels like there's something at stake here, maybe something important.

He's an author work rooting for, and I'd definitely buy his next book.

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Good

This book touches on a subject of life in the former soviet republics in asia and Afghanistan. It is predictabely grim, yet author tries to make the stories unique and interesting to read. I liked the stories for their exposition of desperation in peoples lives. Having been born in the former soviet union myself I can attest to how alien that world is. There a note in the book that indeed much has happened since the stories were written and it should be noted that oil wealth has changed the situation for very few people but has transformed the main capitals.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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