Conversation · Sixteen Days of Coldest April
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You stare at the now-familiar black-and-white rainbow. The book feels heavy in your hands.
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In cold, detached prose, the author describes a scene from one of the Yugo-Graad Riots in the Twenties. Youths overturn motor carriages and set trash cans ablaze while heavily armoured guardsmen dash in and disperse them in a flurry of baton blows...
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The Yugo-Graad Riots took place from '27 to '29, fuelled by ethnic unrest and the state's repressive tactics. These events are often seen as marking the end of a brief period of liberalization known as the Yugo-Graad Spring. Like all such periods, it is frequently memorialised in art and literature.
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As ethnic tensions run wild, a pair of young lovers meet each other on the street. Somehow, in the middle of all the chaos, they manage to lock arms and look into each other's eyes.
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They go through a brief and somewhat awkward love affair, and in the end they betray each other and succumb to the absurdity of Graadian life. The man becomes a lens-grinder, completely abandoning his former existence...
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He toils through the daily drudgery at the Lenka Polyfabricate. Happiness and fulfilment have eluded him his whole life, and in the end... he has nothing to do but dedicate himself to the craft.
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She spends the next several decades standing at a conveyor in a Sosnovor fish processing plant. The smell of fish guts slowly seeps into her hair and skin... as every single one of her dreams dies, one by one.
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The memory of their short time spent together tortures the former lovers ceaselessly, until the end of their days... Years pass in solitude, their bodies growing ever more decrepit.
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As life leaves their remains between the soiled sheets, their final thoughts are filled with regret.
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The back cover is dominated by a black-and-white photograph of the author...
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She can't be much older than her mid-30s in this photograph, and yet from this cover the eyes of a sad, old woman stare back at you.
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In your hands you hold 'Sixteen Days of Coldest April', by Yekartina Dahl. The cover image shows a row of concrete apartments, above which span a black-and-white rainbow.
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Indeed. The book is unusually heavy in your hands, as though the cover were lined with lead...
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You flip through the book. The pages are thinner than you realized, and the type quite small and tightly set. It's nearly 600 pages long.
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Real art is dense and difficult. If it didn't feel like you had to wrestle a suicidal bear to get through it, you weren't really reading.
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Their happiness is fleeting. A cruel jest. The absurdity of the state totally crushes them and they end up betraying each other. She becomes an official for "the regime" and he, a lens-grinder in Ferdydyrke. The end.
At the beginning of the book, ethnic unrest has taken Yugo-Graad by storm. Windows and mailboxes are smashed, motor carriages turned over and set on fire...
Black smoke hangs above cobblestones speckled with droplets of reddish-grey blood. Militant guardsmen, decked in heavy armour, have been called in to control the riots...
As ethnic tensions run wild, a pair of young lovers meet each other on the street. Somehow, in the middle of all the chaos, they manage to lock arms and look into each other's eyes.
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In excruciating detail, the author describes the socio-economic conditions that have brought the people of Yugo-Graad into the streets -- centuries of humiliations and despair. And then, during these riots, two young people meet...