As the crow flies

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A satisfying quest novel by Ekaterina Sedia leads to an alternate world and has the feel of a good Dungeons & Dragons campaign (plus Nabokov overtones.)

March 23, 2008

By Ed Park

After "American," the most overused but irresistible prefix for titles might be "The Secret History of." Unscientific trend-spotters (me) attribute the popularity of this modern-day usage to Donna Tartt's 1992 novel, "The Secret History." Now bushels of articles and books promise to reveal secret histories of disco, the Beatles, Paris, the potato, emotion, various wars, myriad subcultures. (If someone writes a biography of Tartt, it should be called "The Secret History of 'The Secret History.' ")

It's unfair to compare a writer of a certain nationality with one of her most illustrious compatriots, but there is an eye for detail and gift for simile that conjures another Russian who wrote in English: Vladimir Nabokov. Sedia sees an "average" pigeon "blooming with greens and purples, like an oil slick on a puddle, when the sun rays struck its feathers at the proper angle." From the "You Can Judge a Book by Its Cover" Department: I was attracted to the juxtaposition of the mechanical crow and the word "Moscow," and as I read the novel and saw that a crow and a cow figured prominently (see the aforementioned Zemun), I wondered whether the word "crown" would come up -- thinking of the "absolutely extraordinary, unbelievably elegant case" (identified by Charles Kinbote in Nabokov's "Pale Fire") in which three words are separated by a single letter in both English and Russian -- vorona-korona-korova.

Sure enough, on Page 229, Fyodor wonders, "Was there any significance to the fact that Peter the Great was the first czar to be crowned with a crown made in Western style, indistinguishable from those of European monarchs, and scorned the Helm of Monomakh?"

If this game of crowns and crows and cows seems too tenuous a connection, I will simply end by identifying a rara avis that appears in Sedia's pages, a legendary bird of paradise named Sirin, about which I knew nothing before reading this book, save that it was Nabokov's pen name.

Ed Park is an editor of the Believer and the author of the forthcoming novel "Personal Days." His column Astral Weeks appears monthly

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.