Collection of Short Tales Offers a Surreal Glimpse of a Soul in Exile

What could be more natural for an emigre writer than to find things in his adopted country strange to the point of surrealism? And what could be more natural, if the writer is Russian, to call on his native literature’s rich traditions of the surrealistic, the comic and the piercingly sad?

Zinovy Zinik, like most of the narrators of these five stories, is a Russian Jew who lives in London. He is a triple exile--as a Jew, because of the Diaspora; as a former Soviet citizen, because the USSR is no more; and as a Russian, because the country of his youth has changed irreparably, if perhaps for the better. He can’t go back to anything he remembers.

Zinik’s narrators, most of whom work as translators, hang out in the Soho district, “the very embodiment of all that is seedy and sensual, clandestine, illegal and brutally exhibitionist. . . . This square-mile magic island has for generations attracted to its shores all kinds of shipwrecked refugees and undesirables,” who mingle with English self-exiles: “peddlers of sleaze,” artists, writers and alcoholics.

The opening story, “A Pickled Nose,” is meant to recall Gogol’s “The Nose” even as it describes a peculiarly English institution: a private bar, the Colony Room, that lives off a fading myth: The painter Francis Bacon used to drink there.

“A Pickled Nose,” unfortunately, is a hard story to get into. The tone is uncertain. Are the English characters supposed to be funny or only foulmouthed and cruel? The Russian narrator is of little help. He sits and observes but has no stake in the action as it pinballs from a discussion of Bacon’s art to the recent death of the bartender, Ian Board, to the lewd jokes medical students play.

Only at the end do things clear up. The narrator confirms that the Colony Room has become his “family,” however dysfunctional, a kinship of those who “refuse to emigrate into the real world.” And Board, in death, has achieved a triumph he never approached in life--lying to his young female assistant that his “rotten beetroot” of a nose got that way because the owner of the bar obliged him to use it as a sexual organ. Board swore the girl to secrecy, and of course she blabs, ensuring his immortality as a jokester in a world that has mostly ignored him.

“No Cause for Alarm” is flawed in the opposite way. The poignancy comes first: A translator who has anglicized his name to Alec moves from one London neighborhood to another in a futile effort to fit in. His stomach rumbles at a pitch that sets off car alarms; in one suspicious and heavily wired district, he triggers a riot. So far, so good--the surrealism nicely conveys his alienation. But the rest is silly, including Alec’s rescue (or abduction) by a sexy woman who composes a symphony based on the sounds of his gut and the answering sirens.

“Double Act in Soho” is a romp through the area’s porn shops and a commentary on what perestroika has wrought. The title story is a fable about an emigre who returns to Moscow wearing a fancy raincoat. A subway door clamps on it--like his soul, it’s neither inside nor outside. The Russians who gather around him may be trying to help--or they may be thieves.

The longest tale, “The Notification,” is the best. A Jew who has left his wife in Moscow and emigrated to Israel meets a drunk in a cafe, who immediately spills his soul. The second man has also abandoned his wife in Moscow. She may have died of a heart attack at the moment he left. He isn’t sure. He writes to her but also waits to be notified of her death. In this story, set in Jerusalem, Zinik meditates on all three kinds of exile; his realism and surrealism achieve a fine fusion. The silliness--another sexual kidnap--comes too late to spoil it.