World Books Review: Driving the Mean Streets of Paris

Night Roads, by Gaito Gazdanov. Translated from the Russian by Justin Doherty.  244 pages, Northwestern University Press.

He’s far too poetic to pass for Martin Scorsese’s Travis Bickle, but the ruminative nighttime cab-driver who narrates “Night Roads,” the fourth novel by Russian writer Gaito Gazdanov (1903-1971) wheels guiltily and memorably through the same type of hollowed–out urban apocalypse: “a burned-up and dead world, like the dark ruins of collapsed buildings … [an] alien city in a distant and alien land.”

Picking up fares during the pre-dawn hours in Paris between the two world wars, the cabby exudes the same mix of repugnance and fascination about the mangy menagerie of late-night alcoholics, prostitutes, and nihilists as his American counterpart, though his self-loathing is rooted in fears of implosion rather than explosion. This guy’s not going to wreak bloody vengeance on the city’s scum; his fear is that his imagination, dunked nightly in decadence, will be irrevocably polluted.

As Laszlo Dienes explains in his informative introduction to the volume, Gazdanov is a minor classic of twentieth-century Russian literature, a Russian émigré writer whose reputation in English is based on the modest success of his 1930 novel “An Evening with Claire.” I hadn’t read anything by Gazdanov until now; I feel it is safe to say that the episodic, rambling, and at times repetitious  “Night Roads,” penned in the late 1930s, is a minor book by a minor-classic writer. According to Dienes, the novel is “wholly autobiographical,” based on Gazdanov’s decades of driving a cab in Paris before he received a job at the American-sponsored Radio Liberty in the early 1950s. These documentary roots, which appeal to Gazdanov’s weakness for fragmentation, suggest why the novel comes off a series of personal speculations and descriptive notes awaiting fuller imaginative transformation.

Yet at its best this passionate meditation on existence at spiritual rock bottom recalls the dark hells of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Thomas Bernhard. And Gazdanov offers a vivid picture of the Parisian underworld during the 1930s with an emphasis on the virulent paranoia of Russian émigrés, who are nostalgic for their homeland, fearful of communist plots, and disdainful of Paris. For those who like their tales of survival in the gutter spiced with lyric ruminations on decay, political angst, and Slavic melancholy, this is the book for you.

Gazdanov’s cab driver is an expatriate Russian intellectual down-on-his-luck, forced to hobnob with what he calls “endless and depressing human vileness” on a daily basis. The driver’s attitude toward his subjects veers from sympathy to disgust. At times, he offers fastidious protestations that he is free of the moral pollution he encounters every night. These reassurances alternate with confessions that he shares the same criminal desires as his end-of-the-line compatriots: “Deep within me there dwelt an obscure and insistent thirst for murder, complete contempt for the property of others, and a capacity for unfaithfulness and debauchery.” Gazdanov serves up Dostoyevskian confession without the possibilities of grace or self-understanding.

Gaito Gazdanov -- His novel is a cab ride through a Parisian hell.

These conflicting stances serve as the book’s psychological yin and yang: for the sake of his own mental survival the character needs to distance himself from failure, yet he can’t help but empathize with, and even try (reluctantly) to help people who are falling further down faster than he is.

The sick creatures who grab onto the taxi driver as they plummet to oblivion include Raldy, a once- famous prostitute who, because of age and drug addiction, has sunk into abject poverty; Alice, Raldy’s protégé, a sublimely beautiful woman who has none of the intellect, wit or sensual prowess to win over high-class johns; the Russian émigré Vasiliev, whose life degenerates into a lethal, all-consuming fantasia based on fears that the Soviet communists are plotting to kill him; Fedorchenko, a simple soul who catches Vasiliev’s virulent mental illness, and Suzanne, the latter’s wife, a prostitute who found stability in marriage only to see it tragically wiped away by a dementia that vaporizes reality.

The cabby nicknames his favorite lost soul Plato (note the pun on Pluto, God of the Underworld), a determined alcoholic whose impressive intellectual chops include dropping quotations from the works of his namesake and Descartes. Gazdanov indicates that the narrator envies, ironically, Plato’s drink-fueled neutrality: “What I loved in him was the completely disinterested nature of his reasoning, as well as the fact that his own fate and, more generally, anything tangential left him completely indifferent.” Of course, doom descends on Plato with the same ferocity as it does on the taxi driver’s other degenerates – what the narrator “loves” is a sociopathic distance from others that only accelerates Plato’s meltdown.

In his introduction, Dienes talks about the difficulty of translating Gazdanov, whose lyrical Russian prose, which strives to reflect  “the minutiae of the human psyche,” demands to be “recomposed into the chamber music of English.” The passage below suggests that Justin Doherty’s version, though readable enough, hits some off-key, convoluted notes:

And at that point I remember my old fear, based on lengthy and sad experience, which in essence boiled down to the thought that perhaps this malevolent and wretched Paris, traversed by infinite night roads, was merely a continuation of my state of almost permanent semidelirium, into which in some strange and incomprehensible way were strewn fragments of something truly alive and real, surrounded, though, by a dead architecture buried in darkness, by music that was swallowed up in some mad and opaque space, and by those human masks whose deceptive and spectral quality was probably obvious to everybody except me.

From time to time “Night Roads” veers into purple atonality, but it remains a compelling journey into the realm of the damned, a hallucinogenic street paved with early-morning nightmares.