Getting Shoved Here, There, and /Elsewhere/ by Vladimir Lorchenkov

Chapters, POVs, and Linearity in The Good Life Elsewhere

When you first pick up an English edition of The Good Life Elsewhere, its cover greets you grumpily. Three line-drawn figures look out from the monochrome background, each holding a hoe and frowning, one gazing wistfully at the reader while the other two glower at him.  The back of this novel, written by Moldovan author Vladimir Lorchenkov, promises that it will be a funny book, but also a sad one: the residents of a tiny Moldovan town in their attempts to migrate (illegally) to Italy for work.  This simple premise calls to mind a linear narrative, likely punctuated by bumps in the road where the villagers’ efforts are delayed, ending in a triumphant yet uneasy scene in which the successful immigrants enter their new country, full of hope for the future.

 

Not so in this novel.  We open to a bold statement:

“Here you are!  Italy, our Italy.”

Serafim Botezatu narrowed his eyes and blinked, but the city spreading out beneath him in the valleys between the hills didn’t disappear.  Buildings of white stone were just as blinding as the joy Serafim and his forty-five fellow travelers—Moldovans all—were feeling.  They were standing in a little grove on a hill beside the capital of capitals, Rome herself, and none of them could believe what was happening.  Finally, they’d made it to Italy.

Here, we meet who we might assume to be the main character, Serafim, a young man who has dreamed of Italy his whole life.  He learned perfect Italian from a textbook, studied it in every way he could, and paid human traffickers four thousand euro—up front—to be bussed into the country.

 

At the end of this chapter, Serafim and his fellow villagers walk into the city and learn that they’ve been duped.  They spent days in a cramped bus, paying extra money to traffickers with each “customs stop,” to be dropped outside their own capital of Chisinau.

 

After this disappointing episode, the novel jumps around, generally without warning, sharing the villagers’ continued efforts to leave Moldova.  Each chapter tends to share a new event, a new person, and many present events out of chronological order.  As readers, we are shoved and shunted in unexpected ways by Lorchenkov’s chapter, POV, and chronological structure.  This deviation from “default” narrative norms—extremely short chapters, consistent point-of-view, main characters, mostly-chronological presentation—serves to share a story in general, a story that can resonate with more (and more deeply) than the simple, linear narrative can convey.

 

The Chapters and Timeline

Two-page chapters are, of course, not unheard-of in conventional literature.  James Patterson, for example, is known for the practice—and his books are about as mainstream as you can get.  However, Lorchenkov uses these chapters in different ways.  Most times, the end of a chapter marks the end of a vignette (or, at least, a temporary transition to another one).  Chapters 10 and 11 tell the story of a man who sold a kidney and attempted to replace it with a pigs’; the second chapter shares his widow’s grief.  Chapter 12, meanwhile, takes place in the Italian Consulate of Romania as two customs agents discuss (and obfuscate) Moldovan efforts to enter Italy.  Neither of these vignettes directly progress beyond these three chapters.

 

Many other chapters do share stories that we revisit across the novel, but they frequently take place out-of-order, from a different POV, or in the form of news stories.  The lack of a Table of Contents further throws us into a world with no anchor—we’re never sure where, when, or with whom the next chapter will be—but they allow Lorchenkov to tell the story of an entire village/nation in a single book.  Such a wide-reaching story, by its nature, cannot be both honest and singular.  Such a story must be disjointed and cacophonous and inconsistent to convey the (shared) experiences of so many.

 

The POV

Rather than sticking to one or a few point-of-view characters, Lorchenkov provides us with a dozen or so whose stories progress through the novel.  The point of view is almost always some form of third-person, though one story is presented in italics by the first-person chronicler of a religious crusade.  Lorchenkov toes the line between third-person limited and omniscient, sometimes sharing characters’ inner lives not, but the way in which he shares them is interesting.

 

Like the events in the novel, people’s thoughts and internal motivations are presented as both accidental and predetermined at the same time.  An example from Chapter 28, when Serafim suggests to his friend another scheme for smuggling themselves into Italy (after several failed attempts):

After which, he [Serafim] prudently grabbed a pitchfork and took shelter in the house.  Serafim was saved from arson only because it was Vasily’s house, and Vasily couldn’t bring himself to burn down his own place of residence, even to smoke out a newly acquired enemy.

Rather than placing the reader within Vasily’s head during this exchange, we view the altercation from a distance.  The narrator casually inserts observational terms like “prudently” while reporting the event as objectively as possible—with the added information of why Vasily doesn’t burn down the house.

 

The first sentence of the chapter is “Of course, at first the friends fought.”  There was no other possibility besides violence in this instance, but that violence is also individualized; they fight using moves from a Bruce Lee film they saw together as children.  Even when writing this idiosyncratic fight, Lorchenkov structures the telling in a way that portrays the event as fully natural and without mystery.

 

The End

This empirical posture is consistent throughout the novel as Serafim and Vasily’s flying tractor is hit by stray bullets shot to disperse clouds from a government meeting; as Vasily’s wife hangs herself in the yard after being duped by the human traffickers and berated by her husband; as Moldovan military shelling causes Serafim’s village to break free of the land and finally float down the river toward Italy.  By exaggerating the limits of reality and keeping readers off-balance, Lorchenkov creates a story that can contain and express the multitudinous experiences of the Moldovan people, their desire for a better life, and the forces (and people) that keep them trapped.  As readers, we participate in the characters’ disorientation and desire for stability while being made to understand, with some distance, how the villagers’ own actions contribute to their confinement, both real and felt.