AlmatyTransit edition by Dana Mazur Literature Fiction eBooks
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"Almaty-Transit" is an offbeat ghost story set in contemporary Los Angeles, California and Almaty, Kazakhstan and traces the journey of an American jazz producer and her Kazakh husband through a grotesque and tragic landscape of love and death.
The tale conjures the temperament of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Lullaby,” the magic realist family saga of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and the blend of the mundane and fantastic of Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore.” It is narrated from multiple characters’ points of view, only to demonstrate that the truth is a very private matter.
An excerpt from "Almaty-Transit" is published in Edition 26 of McSweeny’s as a short story entitled “The Black Shaman.”
AlmatyTransit edition by Dana Mazur Literature Fiction eBooks
Dana Mazur’s Almaty-Transit opens not in Kazakhstan but in California, where struggling, self-centred jazz producer Merry is trying to get the cash for a special microphone for a recording that she believes could be The One. Meanwhile her family deal with the mess that she is always making of things. Her Kazakh husband Aidar, a marine biology graduate, waits tables. To pay for the mic, their child Sultan must give up the money his Kazakh grandmother has sent him for a new bike.Over the next two or three chapters, we see Merry interact with her family, and with musicians, and with the dodgy people she meets in her work. Far away in Almaty, we meet Aidar’s mother Alma, deeply saddened because her youngest son has married what she sees as some American tramp; she has never met Sultan.
So far so good. All the characters, both American and Kazakh, are extremely well-drawn. Merry in particular is extremely credible. It seems we’re going to get a good modern novel about selfishness, dislocation, possessiveness, migration and family. And so in a sense we do, but not in the way we expect. Because Aidar dies in a bizarre accident. But he is dead and not dead, in a half-life in which he can interact with others. That half-life is in Kazakhstan, and he is desperate to see his wife and child in California. The rest of the book revolves in part on his attempts to win that right although the underworld is not likely to permit it; Aidar is from Kazakhstan and the norm of this half-life is that he must live it there.
This switch to the supernatural could have gone badly. It doesn’t, because Mazur is a true queen of the weird. In the course of what is not a long book, we’re hit with pig-faced children, stuffed and mounted humans, anthropomorphic apples and more besides. A chauffeur with a jackal head called Nube (a contraction of Anubis) ferries people between one world and the other. There is a lesbian savant called the Black Shaman. Much of this imagery is bizarre. Some of it is actually disturbing. Moreover it is intertwined with banal scenes from Merry’s life in suburban California as she tries, and fails, to get her life together, and then realizes almost too late that she may lose her son.
Good though it is, I found myself wondering where the hell this book was going. Magic realism, OK; but to what end? What does Mazur want us to take away from all this? Every reader will have to guess. For what it’s worth, I thought the alienation of migration was one theme; but much of the book seems to be about the passage – transit – of souls between one plane of existence and another, and whether that can ever be a two-way process.
It seemed, in fact, to be about who is and is not truly alive, and what defines life over death. I found myself thinking about a very different book (it’s J.B. Priestley’s excellent Bright Day), in which the hero’s friend has a very strange sister, who communicates with the dead and perceives other worlds – not unusual at the time the book is set (1913), when spiritualism was in vogue. One night she remarks vaguely that: “It’s all... quite different ... from what you imagine ... Like the dead and the living ... some people you think are alive are really dead ... and others you think are dead are really alive. ...”. Later Priestley’s narrator considers a cynical businessman of his acquaintance and concludes that he never truly enjoyed anything; was, in fact, never really alive. Bright Day and Almaty-Transit could not be more different, and are set a century apart, but there is an oddly similar theme – do you have soul, and do you belong with the living or the dead? The journey that Merry makes in the book suggests that Mazur is thinking of something similar. But this is not the sort of book that serves up its message on a plate.
In any case, Almaty-Transit has plenty to hold the reader whether there’s a message or not. Mazur isn’t writing fantasy because it’s easy (it isn’t if done well, anyway). She is a good writer. The characterization is excellent; I found Merry and Aidar and Alma very real indeed. The people from the jazz club are well done too. The imagery from the half-life is sometimes gripping (though very creepy; this is not a book for people prone to nightmares). The reader might or might not figure out what Mazur really wants to say, but they’ll have a good time trying.
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AlmatyTransit edition by Dana Mazur Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
Hard to cover the plot here. It defies explanation, in a good way. If you're looking for a genre-straddling novella with a heavy dose of magical realism, pick up this one.
It makes sense that the scenes of Los Angeles felt real to me--scenes of kids who make up odd scenarios while they're waiting too long to get picked up late from after-school care, and who wait too long to eat a shoddy dinner while their parents bicker, of parents who are sacrificing too much for their careers, of the difficulty of families that cross too many cultural and geographical divides. I already know about lives like those. But what makes this book alluring is that this obviously familiar scene glides imperceptibly into scenes that are less familiar--contemporary Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan of several decades ago, the world of the dead, the criminal underworld within the world of the dead, and places where times stands still. This book is wonderful. It's like a Salmon Rushie novel but less smarmy and self-congratulatory than his sometimes are. I hope Dana Mazur writes another novel like this one soon!
Wow! This book defies proper positioning in a genre, unless weird supernatural with overtones of horror & romance is a genre. It's different with a blend of various myths skipping about in time, space & characters yet it all comes together in a captivating blend. I was sorry when I got to the end, even though I had no real idea where we were going until a third of the way through the book. That says a lot for the writing - I usually don't care for that - but in this case it worked for the overall story. Various threads are told from different character's viewpoints & slowly they come together into an amazing tapestry.
There is a minor downside in the editing, but I've seen worse from well known publishers (many Ace reprints are far worse) so that was a bit of a distraction.
I'll look forward to more by this author.
Sweet story but too strange in the end. I liked the parts from Kazakhstan.
Nothing about the world of Dana Mazur's Almaty-Transit is ordinary, yet, as a reader I could clearly see and understand each of the characters of the book, ghost or not...The story starts as a family-drama in the life of Merry, a jazz musician, and her husband Aidar, an engineer in Kazakhstan but a cabdriver in LA. Aidar's tragic death set the story into motion and very soon, we are pulled into a new kind of macabre fairy tale in speed of light and fortune-tellers and ghost-mobs and apple-fetuses give us a hint of Dana Mazur's endless imagination.
Almaty-Transit is an absolute must-read and I would recommend it to everyone.
Dana Mazur’s Almaty-Transit opens not in Kazakhstan but in California, where struggling, self-centred jazz producer Merry is trying to get the cash for a special microphone for a recording that she believes could be The One. Meanwhile her family deal with the mess that she is always making of things. Her Kazakh husband Aidar, a marine biology graduate, waits tables. To pay for the mic, their child Sultan must give up the money his Kazakh grandmother has sent him for a new bike.
Over the next two or three chapters, we see Merry interact with her family, and with musicians, and with the dodgy people she meets in her work. Far away in Almaty, we meet Aidar’s mother Alma, deeply saddened because her youngest son has married what she sees as some American tramp; she has never met Sultan.
So far so good. All the characters, both American and Kazakh, are extremely well-drawn. Merry in particular is extremely credible. It seems we’re going to get a good modern novel about selfishness, dislocation, possessiveness, migration and family. And so in a sense we do, but not in the way we expect. Because Aidar dies in a bizarre accident. But he is dead and not dead, in a half-life in which he can interact with others. That half-life is in Kazakhstan, and he is desperate to see his wife and child in California. The rest of the book revolves in part on his attempts to win that right although the underworld is not likely to permit it; Aidar is from Kazakhstan and the norm of this half-life is that he must live it there.
This switch to the supernatural could have gone badly. It doesn’t, because Mazur is a true queen of the weird. In the course of what is not a long book, we’re hit with pig-faced children, stuffed and mounted humans, anthropomorphic apples and more besides. A chauffeur with a jackal head called Nube (a contraction of Anubis) ferries people between one world and the other. There is a lesbian savant called the Black Shaman. Much of this imagery is bizarre. Some of it is actually disturbing. Moreover it is intertwined with banal scenes from Merry’s life in suburban California as she tries, and fails, to get her life together, and then realizes almost too late that she may lose her son.
Good though it is, I found myself wondering where the hell this book was going. Magic realism, OK; but to what end? What does Mazur want us to take away from all this? Every reader will have to guess. For what it’s worth, I thought the alienation of migration was one theme; but much of the book seems to be about the passage – transit – of souls between one plane of existence and another, and whether that can ever be a two-way process.
It seemed, in fact, to be about who is and is not truly alive, and what defines life over death. I found myself thinking about a very different book (it’s J.B. Priestley’s excellent Bright Day), in which the hero’s friend has a very strange sister, who communicates with the dead and perceives other worlds – not unusual at the time the book is set (1913), when spiritualism was in vogue. One night she remarks vaguely that “It’s all... quite different ... from what you imagine ... Like the dead and the living ... some people you think are alive are really dead ... and others you think are dead are really alive. ...”. Later Priestley’s narrator considers a cynical businessman of his acquaintance and concludes that he never truly enjoyed anything; was, in fact, never really alive. Bright Day and Almaty-Transit could not be more different, and are set a century apart, but there is an oddly similar theme – do you have soul, and do you belong with the living or the dead? The journey that Merry makes in the book suggests that Mazur is thinking of something similar. But this is not the sort of book that serves up its message on a plate.
In any case, Almaty-Transit has plenty to hold the reader whether there’s a message or not. Mazur isn’t writing fantasy because it’s easy (it isn’t if done well, anyway). She is a good writer. The characterization is excellent; I found Merry and Aidar and Alma very real indeed. The people from the jazz club are well done too. The imagery from the half-life is sometimes gripping (though very creepy; this is not a book for people prone to nightmares). The reader might or might not figure out what Mazur really wants to say, but they’ll have a good time trying.
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