Synopses & Reviews
Named one of “the best Russian novels of the 21st Century,” The Underground is the unforgettable story of an abandoned mixed-race boy navigating the wondrous and terrifying city of Moscow before the Soviet Unions collapse.“I am Moscows underground son, the result of one too many nights on the town.” So begins the story of Mbobo, the precocious 12-year-old narrator of this captivating novel by exiled Uzbek author and BBC journalist Hamid Ismailov. Born to a Siberian woman and an African athlete who came to compete in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mbobo must navigate the complexities of being a fatherless, mixed-raced boy in the shaky terrain of the Soviet Union before its collapse.
With echoes of Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man and Fyodor Dostoevskys Notes from Underground, Ismailovs novel tackles head-on the problems of race and the relationship between the individual and society in a thoroughly modern context. While paying homage to great Russian authors of the past—Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gorky, Nabokov, and Pushkin—Ismailov emerges as a master of a new kind of Russian writing that revels in the sordid reality and diversity of the country today. Named one of “the best Russian novels of the 21st Century" (Continent Magazine), The Underground is a dizzying and moving tour of the Soviet capital, on the surface and beneath, before its colossal fall.
Review
"Ismailov tells a haunting tale of an Afro-Russian boy's search for love. Generous in spirit yet unsparing in its honesty,
The Underground illuminates a loneliness that is as devastating as it is universal. In breathtaking prose, Ismailov reminds us again and again that even the slimmest thread of light can pierce through the darkest of days."
—Maaza Mengiste, author of Beneath the Lion's Gaze
Review
“In reading Hamid Ismailov's
The Underground, I found the hard-won wisdom of Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man in conversation with the boyhood lyricism of Anne Carson's
Autobiography Of Red. But most crucially, simmering just under the skin of every word, I heard Ismailov's own heartbeat: haunted, beautiful even when strained, and insistent. The world has conspired to keep this necessary and timely novel a secret for too long.”
—Saeed Jones, author of Prelude to a Bruise
Review
“One of the best Russian novels of the twenty-first century”
—Continent Magazine
Review
"Hamid Ismailov has the capacity of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque realization of history on the ground."
—Literary Review
Review
"A writer of immense poetic power."
—The Guardian
Review
“
The Underground, Ismailovs latest novel published in English, depicts the brutal separation between the hopes and realities of social integration on the threshold of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The dark and picaresque tale follows the life and death of the young Mbobo (also the books title in Russian) in a series of vignettes marked by the grand stations of the citys metropolitan transportation system.”
—f news magazine
Review
“Wonderful…. Intimate details from a specific era and location enrich Ismailovs novel. Kirills memories of seasons and stations become a nostalgic elegy for the bittersweet cityscape of late-Soviet Moscow.… The imagery is visceral.… Ismailovs work, like Pushkins and like Platonovs, is a profound and haunting exploration of place and time. Just as
The Railway conjures up a multifaceted Uzbek town and
The Dead Lake is rooted in the tortured vastness of the Steppe, so
The Underground creates a spiritual and cultural map of Moscow.”
—The Kompass
Review
"Ismailovs works blend a keen awareness of the cosmopolitanism of the Soviet project, with its feverish drive for modernization.… It also pays homage to the rich tapestry of Russian—and Soviet—literature, and the interplay between the two.
The Undergrounds structure is reminiscent of Yerofeyevs
Moscow to the End of the Line; and Ismailov delights in pan-Soviet literary references, from Abkhazias Fazil Iskander and Chuvashias Gennady Aygi to Odessas ‘Ilf and Petrov and Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin. Ismailov sees himself as part of the Russian literary tradition (his prose has been compared to Bulgakov, Gogol, and Platonov).… Ismailov's novel is a deep examination of the confusions of Soviet and post-Soviet ‘Russianness.'… An intricate portrait of an all too foreign loss: the disappearance of ones country."
—openDemocracy
About the Author
Born in an ancient city in what is now Kyrgyzstan, Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek novelist and poet who was forced to leave his home in Tashkent when his writing brought him to the attention of government officials. Under threat of arrest, he moved to London and joined the BBC World Service, where he is now Head of the Central Asian Service. In addition to journalism, Ismailov is a prolific writer of poetry and prose, and his books have been published in Uzbek, Russian, French, German, Turkish, English and other languages. His work is still banned in Uzbekistan. He is the author of many novels, including Sobranie Utonchyonnyh, Le Vagabond Flamboyant, Two Lost to Life, The Railway, Hostage to Celestial Turks, Googling for Soul, The Underground, A Poet and Bin-Laden, and The Dead Lake; poetry collections including Sad (Garden) and Pustynya (Desert); and books of visual poetry including Post Faustum and Kniga Otsutstvi. He has translated Russian and Western classics into Uzbek, and Uzbek and Persian classics into Russian and several Western languages.