Times Literary Supplement Review of Censored Tales

Areas of Compatibility

Carol Rumens

"It is often the case that men of scientific temperament are equally endowed with artistic sensibilities," remarks the narrator of a story in this collection, "At the Movies," perhaps with a self-conscious authorial wink. Up til now, Tony Rothman has concentrated on producing volumes with such titles as Science a la Mode and Frontiers of Modern Physics. But any apology for the defection is unnecessary. It is good news for literature when science gets on such friendly and intelligible terms with it. Rothman wears his training lightly, though it is certainly visible, both in his method, distinguished by a fascination with interlocking structures and a readiness to experiment with the devices of post-modernist fiction (mutliple narrative, for example), and in his depiction of a Russia that isn't all soul, shortages and folk-tales, but dreams more ardently than the West of technological achievement. For Valya, the artistically-minded engineer referred to above, political metaphor springs naturally from technological fact: "To make compatible a European video recorder and a Soviet TV is merely a matter of phase. To do the same with an American recorder and a Soviet TV is a matter of frequency and therefore wavelength. It is, when all is said and done, East vs West. That is, impossible."

One area, at least, of compatibility is suggested by Rothman's relish for dark, self-mocking Russian wit: "This reminds me of a joke: 'Ah, I so much want to see Paris again.' 'What, you've already seen Paris?' 'No, I've already wanted to.'" If the pathos of material deprivations sighs rather obviously here, the tables are neatly turned later in the same story to remind us of the pathos of Western abundance.

Weaving happily between the early days of perestroika and the age of Pushkin, Rothman's imagination often invokes the spirit of the skazka. Yet, for all their zany humor, such stories as "The Albanian" and "Five Metamorphoses on a Russian Folk Tale" have a slightly stale flavor of pastiche. The very best stories seem to be those in which the author/narrator risks an exploration of his more painful responses to the society in which he feels such affinity. "Veshalka," for instance, a plain but moving tale of how a foreign visitor, Robert, incensed by a bad-tempered old cloak-room attendant, follows her home in secret an finds his rage gradually transformed into a mood of penitance.

In his receptivity to the complexities of the Russian experience, Rothman, an American disproves the metaphor of "totally different wavelengths." A more interesting question raised by his work is how literature and science can become each other's beneficiaries. If scientists really cared about humanity, suggests one of his ebullient narrators, they would surely invent a bomb with all the primary effects of Zubrovka (a vodka) and none of the secondary ones. There is surely an important message behind the quip. If men of science would learn to "play" as kindly and as wittily as this author does, the world an all its wavelengths might be yet be spared.