Review: Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov

Strange things are happening in Lviv, a cosmopolitan metropolis in western Ukraine, in Andrey Kurkov’s Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv. In the novel that made it to the International Booker prize longlist this year, seagulls are circling and the air smells salty even though Lviv is a considerable distance from the sea.The narrative begins at a cemetery, where a group of elderly hippies gather to pay tribute to Jimi Hendrix and, more specifically, to his buried hand, which was allegedly stolen after the musician’s passing. Captain Ryabatsev, a former KGB agent who once spied on hippie Alik Olisevych, unexpectedly shows up at the party. These two individuals with a shared past are at the centre of the story translated from the Russian by Reuben Woolley. The cast of characters includes Taras, who makes a living driving kidney stone patients over cobblestones in his ancient Opel Vectra. He is courting Darka, who, despite being allergic to money, works nights at a bureau de change. Meanwhile, Taras’s neighbour, the recovering alcoholic Yezhi, is pursuing Taras’s friend Oksana, an actress and a volunteer at a shelter for the homeless. Yezhi is interested in giving Oksana a haircut but ends up providing haircuts to the whole homeless population of the area. Though the characters are absurd they are extremely relatable and the reader can’t help but fall in love with them.The fates of each of these intriguing but odd people intertwines in the melancholic city of Lviv. Kurkov, who wrote this book in 2012, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, says that, in some ways, this book is also a love letter to the city. Incidentally, the author has stopped writing fiction in favour of reports based on observations in Kviv and eyewitness accounts related by his friends, some of whom are in the occupied area.There is an elegiac quality to the writing that probably owes much to an awareness of the shifting history of Lviv:“This had Alik thinking about how every little corner, be it a square or a courtyard, lived its own constant, and constantly repeating, life, starting at sunrise, with the opening and closing of windows, the flicking on and off of lights, the screeches of wooden steps in the hallways of old Polish houses, and the slamming and shutting of entrance doors.” Lviv has been in transition for centuries. It belonged to Poland, Austria-Hungary and the USSR before becoming a centre of modern independent Ukraine. Kurkov’s novel brings out this history.“The old world was held together by conventions, and that’s why it fell apart,” he said thoughtfully. “This world is held together by conventions too, just different ones! It’ll fall apart too, with time. The most important thing is to protect your personal, internal world from all these conventions!”The book, which includes elements of magical realism and surrealism, is drenched in dark humour. The joke is on the reader too when it is revealed that the characters, who all yearn for solitude and freedom, are based on real people. Alik is modelled on a real hippie named Alik Olisevych, Yurko is inspired by Yuri Vynnychuk, a writer, and Oksana is the fictional counterpart of Oksana Prokhorets, a social activist and actor.A comforting and warm book suffused with optimism, Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, is a pleasure to read. It demonstrates why Andrey Kurkov is considered one of Ukraine’s top living authors.Hritik Verma is an independent reviewer. He blogs at allayingart.wordpress.com. He is @Hritik38233434 on Twitter and @allayingart on Instagram

Review: Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov

The lives of a group of odd characters intertwine in a novel that’s a darkly humorous love letter to the Ukrainian city of Lviv