Googling for Soul is a novel in eleven interconnected stories by acclaimed Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov. Moving between villages and cities, generations and languages, the book follows people trying to understand who they are in a world repeatedly reshaped by history.
A sculptor who has spent forty years in a northern capital receives a phone call from a nephew he has never met and must 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 translator Robert Chandler, and the letter becomes a search for identity, memory and belonging.
Ismailov writes with wit and restraint about lives caught between the village and the metropolis, tradition and modernity, the language people inherit and the one in which they imagine another life. Though composed of individual stories, Googling for Soul gradually reveals itself as something much closer to a novel: a portrait of Uzbekistan and its people, scattered yet connected by history.
For readers of contemporary literary fiction, literature in translation and writing from Uzbekistan and Central Asia.
Author
Hamid Ismailov
Hamid Ismailov (born 1954) is an Uzbek writer, poet, journalist and translator. Born into a deeply religious Uzbek family of mullahs and khodjas, many of whom suffered during the Stalin-era persecutions, he was also shaped by an extensive Soviet education, graduating with distinction from both secondary school and military college and later earning university degrees in several disciplines.
Rather than pursuing a conventional Soviet or post-Soviet career, Ismailov became a dissident writer and poet. He left Uzbekistan in 1992 and settled in the United Kingdom, where he worked for many years with the BBC World Service and later became its first Writer in Residence.
Although his work has been banned in Uzbekistan, Ismailov has published numerous novels, poetry collections and other works in Uzbek, Russian and several other languages. His fiction has been widely translated, including The Railway, translated into English by Robert Chandler, as well as A Poet and Bin-Laden and Googling for Soul.
Ismailov has also translated Russian and Western classics into Uzbek and Uzbek and Persian classics into Russian and other languages. Critics have compared his award-winning writing to Russian classical literature, Sufi parables and Western postmodernism, while his distinctive voice draws on an unusually rich intercultural experience spanning Central Asia, Russia and the West.
