Compartment No 6
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- 2,49 €
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- 2,49 €
Publisher Description
A sad young woman boards a train in Moscow. Bound for Mongolia, she's trying to leave a broken relationship as far behind her as she can. Wanting to be alone, she chooses an empty compartment - No 6. Her solitude is soon shattered by the arrival of a fellow passenger: Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov, a grizzled, opinionated and foul-mouthed ex-soldier, 'a cauliflower-eared man in a black workingman's overcoat and a white ermine hat'. Vadim fills the compartment with his long and colourful stories, recounting his sexual conquests and violent fights in lurid detail.
At first, the young woman is not so much shocked as disgusted by him, and she stands up to him, throwing a boot at his head. But though Vadim may be crude, he isn't cruel, and he shares with her the sausage and black bread and tea he's brought for the journey, coaxing the girl out of her melancholy state. As their train cuts slowly across a wintery Russia, where 'everything is moving, snow, water, air, clouds, wind, towns, villages, people and ideas', a grudging kind of companionship grows between the two inhabitants of Compartment No 6 and the girl realises that if she works out how to listen, Vadim's stories may just contain lessons for her.
Compartment No 6 is a wickedly mischievous, darkly imaginative and completely unforgettable ride.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Liksom's impressionistic travelogue of a novel, a young Finnish woman, referred to only as "the girl," and a hard-drinking, middle-aged Russian worker ("the man") are unlikely companions on a long, delirious railroad journey across Russia. The girl, a graduate student of archeology, dreams of going to Mongolia to study ancient petroglyphs, despite the restrictions placed on her as a foreign national, while the man is headed to work on a construction site. Both survivors of difficult childhoods, these travelers are escaping complicated lives in Moscow: the girl has been conducting an unexpected and dangerous affair, while the man is an abusive, frequently repentant husband. As their train traverses Siberia on its way to the Mongolian city of Ulan Bator passing through Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and Ulan Ude, stopping or breaking down often along the way the girl becomes a silent and at first unwilling, but increasingly rapt audience to the man's wild, unreliable tales of Soviet life: full of sex, violence, and as much prejudice as wisdom. The sleeping compartment they share is thus both refuge and battlefield, the girl resisting the man's constant come-ons and provocations. But Liksom's interest is less in the personal quandaries of this sketchily rendered pair than in the Russian landscape "the red dark of night, the dismal, frozen silence," and the character of "that strange country, its subservient, anarchistic, obedient, rebellious... patient, fatalistic, proud... loving, tough people."
