The Chukchi Bible

A raven flies over a dead, blank earth, scattering his droppings, and his droppings become the world. The first woman gives birth to a litter of whales, and wades into the sea to let them suckle at her breasts. This is just the beginning of the late Yuri Ryktheu's epic The Chukchi Bible, and it's a strange and affecting read: an astounding confabulation of myth, memory and heartache.

If Rytkheu seems like a writer from another world, that's because he is: a Chukchi from the far North-East of Siberia, he grew up in a traditional village with a shaman for a grandfather, enthusiastically toed the Party line as a faithful member of the Union of Soviet Writers in the sixties and seventies, and died in St Petersburg in 2008, largely scorned by Russian readers. He translated Tolstoy and Pushkin into his native language, toured the world as a member of Soviet cultural delegations, and seems to have succeeded in squaring the mythic abstractions of his own peoples' oral tradition with the brutally secular requirements of state-sanctioned socialist realism.  In his later years, however, he began to return with greater fidelity to his first influences, and The Chukchi Bible is perhaps the finest book to emerge from this late flowering. Intertwining the belief systems and sacred history of the Chukchi with the stories of his own ancestors and home village, Ryktheu pieces together a family saga that's both a piercing evocation of a unique community adapting to modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a timeless meditation on environment, landscape and origin. Whatever strange places and stories it speaks out of, it's utterly familiar in its humanity and emotional impact; and the combination makes for an enthralling read.