Hamid Ismailov: Where to Start with the Uzbek Novelist

Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek novelist, poet and translator whose books are banned in his own country and widely translated beyond it. If you are new to him, start with Googling for Soul, his new novel in eleven stories, published this autumn, and then go back to A Poet and Bin-Laden, a darker book about a poet drawn from the Ferghana Valley into the orbit of al-Qaeda. The first is the easier door. The second shows how far he is prepared to follow a character.

Both are on our list, and between them they cover most of what makes him worth reading: the village and the city, faith and politics, and the way a language shapes the life a person can imagine.

Who is Hamid Ismailov?

Ismailov was born in 1954 into a deeply religious Uzbek family of mullahs and khodjas, many of whom suffered in the Stalin-era persecutions. He was also shaped by a thorough Soviet education: he graduated with distinction from secondary school and from military college, and later took university degrees in several disciplines.

He did not follow the career that education prepared him for. He became a dissident writer and poet, left Uzbekistan in 1992 and settled in the United Kingdom, where he worked for many years at the BBC World Service and later became its first Writer in Residence. His work is banned in Uzbekistan. He writes in Uzbek and Russian, and has translated in several directions at once: Russian and Western classics into Uzbek, and Uzbek and Persian classics into Russian and other languages.

That last detail explains a good deal about how his fiction reads. Critics have set his writing beside Russian classical literature, Sufi parables and Western postmodernism, and all three are audible. He moves between registers the way a translator moves between languages, without announcing it.

Googling for Soul: a novel in eleven stories

Googling for Soul is subtitled A Novel in Short Stories. Each of the eleven pieces stands on its own, but read in sequence they build a single portrait of Uzbekistan and its people, scattered across villages, cities and generations and still connected by a shared history.

The situations are small and exact. A sculptor who has spent forty years in a northern capital takes a phone call from a nephew he has never met, and has to decide whether to save him or send him home. A village schoolteacher retires just as the country changes its name around him. A boy who would rather be Ramón than Rahmon picks up a guitar. In the title story a stranger writes to the translator Robert Chandler, and the letter turns into a search for identity, memory and belonging.

Ismailov writes about these lives with wit and restraint. The tension that runs through the book is between the language people inherit and the one in which they imagine a different life, and between the village and the metropolis that pulls them away from it. It suits a writer who has spent most of his working life between languages himself.

The English text is the work of four translators, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Dani Ismailov, Irina Buss-Zolotareva and Andrew Bromfield, edited by John Farndon. The book runs to 266 pages and is available in hardback, paperback and as an ebook.

A Poet and Bin-Laden: the Ferghana Valley before 9/11

A Poet and Bin-Laden is a different kind of book. It opens on the eve of 11 September 2001, with the narrator on holiday in Central Asia watching the attack on the Twin Towers on television, and then moves backwards and forwards in time.

Two lines run through it. One is the rise of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan under Tahir Yuldash and Juma Namangani. The other is the journey of its central character, the poet Belgi, from the mountains of Osh on the edge of that movement into the inner circle of al-Qaeda, and finally to a meeting with bin Laden himself. Belgi sets out in search of a Sufi spiritual master and ends in guerrilla warfare. The novel lives in the tension between those two responses to oppression, the transcendental and the violent: between the book and the bomb.

Along the way Ismailov gives vivid accounts of events Belgi witnesses, among them the siege of Kunduz, the breakout from Shebergan prison and the insurgency in the Ferghana Valley. Andrew Bromfield translated it, and the English edition was supported by English PEN and Arts Council England. It runs to 296 pages.

Which book should you read first?

• For a first meeting: Googling for Soul. The stories can be read one at a time, and its wit makes the case for him quickly.
• For politics and history: A Poet and Bin-Laden, which takes on a period most Western readers know only from the news and tells it from inside the region.
• For the writer himself: read both, in either order. The same concerns, faith, exile, language and the cost of belonging, run through a quiet book and a hard one.

More from Central Asia

Ismailov is not the only writer from the region on our list. Glagoslav publishes literature from the Slavic world and beyond, and Central Asia has been part of that list for more than a decade.

The Turkmen writer Ak Welsapar left Turkmenistan in 1993 and has lived in Sweden since 1994; most of his novels are banned at home. The Tale of Aypi, translated by W.M. Coulson, is the first novel translated directly from Turkmen into English, and it won an English PEN Award. It follows a fishing village on the Caspian ordered to abandon its shore, and the one man who refuses. His stories are collected in Death of the Snake Catcher.

From Kazakhstan comes the poet Galymkair Mutanov, whose The Shining Light, translated by John Farndon with Olga Nakston, draws on the oral tradition of the steppe and on the example of the nineteenth-century poet Abai. And Dina Yafasova, born in Uzbekistan and a correspondent in Central Asia before she settled in Denmark, wrote Don’t Call me a Victim!, a novel about survival after torture and what it costs to hold on to one’s humanity.