STEPPE

A daughter comes to terms with a complicated father on a road trip across Russia.

In the second novel by Russian novelist and poet Vasyakina, an unnamed narrator in her early 30s attempts to make sense of a father with whom she has spent very little time, and who has recently died of “a combination of AIDS myths, institutional red tape, and his own carelessness.” A gangster and drug addict who was sent to prison when the narrator was a baby, her father became a freelance trucker hauling steel pipe across the deserted Russian steppe. The narrator looks back on a week she spent with her father on one of his long-distance runs, 10 years after she had last seen him, and found him like “an old raccoon, ravaged by ticks and disease.” The trip gives her plenty of time to observe him, but the connection they both want stays elusive. With the trip as a throughline, the narrator branches out thoughtfully to other memories, some from the far past, like those of time spent in the country with her beloved great-grandfather, and some more recent, like those of a revealing recent visit with her mother. In trying to make sense of her father, she frequently refers to Russian pop songs and television shows, references that may leave an American reader less enlightened than baffled. More universal are her comparisons of their relationship to the landscape of the steppe, an “empty, treeless” place full of a “bright, relentless light” but offering no possibility of change or growth. The novel, though digressive, slowly reveals the narrator’s growing awareness of her father’s “mindless cruelty” and of the unbridgeable chasm between father and daughter.

An elegiac tribute to a fatally flawed bond.