Googling for Soul

A sculptor who left the village decades ago takes a call from a nephew he has never met, picked up by the migration police without papers. An old woman wakes before dawn with pain in both legs and reads Sufi verse instead of saying her morning prayer. A boy who is supposed to learn the rubob wants a guitar, and quietly drops a letter from his own name so it will sound Spanish. Snakes come swarming out from under the floor of the only school in the village.

Eleven stories, and by the end they are one book.

Ismailov calls Googling for Soul a novel in short stories, and the title piece shows how it works. A letter reaches the author through his friend Robert Chandler, the translator of Platonov, and it turns out to concern his own name. He tries everything to find the man who sent it: the phone directories, the search engines, friends sent into address agencies on his behalf. He never finds him. Something else comes back instead.

The people here live between the village and the metropolis, between tradition and whatever replaced it, between the language they were born into and the ones they had to learn. Some carry Uzbekistan with them. Some were carried away from it. Set side by side, their stories assemble a portrait that no one of them could hold alone.

The first story states the method out loud, borrowing from Michelangelo: sculpture is not building up, it is carving away everything that is not needed. Ismailov writes the same way, and asks the reader to hold the pieces without assembling them too early.

Translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Dani Ismailov, Irina Buss-Zolotareva and Andrew Bromfield. Edited by John Farndon. Cover illustration: Caspar David Friedrich, Easter Morning (c. 1828 to 1835).