Cascades of Ph(r)ases and C(l)auses: Sentence by Mikhail Iossel

Reviewed by Michael Greenstein

At the centre of the cover of Mikhail Iossel’s Sentence, a white, diaphanous curtain billows out of an open window in a breeze and gust of nascent clauses. The curtain shrouds not only a blackened interior, but also mysterious shapes within itself. This rectangular window joins a million others in Henry James’s house of fiction. The curtain’s kinetic flight against a static interior highlights black ink on paper, and the rhythmic relationship between kinetic and static elements in Iossel’s prose. Although James is a master of the prolix sentence, Iossel runs even farther in a joyride that evokes James Joyce’s Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.

Two epigraphs provide a literary background for the long sentences and short stories. The first is from Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp: “All I can come up with are stray sentences, he said, maybe because reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences.” Elias Canetti’s The Book Against Death provides the second: “… with every hour spent alone, with every sentence that you draft, you win back a piece of your life.” Iossel’s swarm of stray sentences win back pieces of his life.

The first story, “DMD,” (Dead Man Drinking) places the narrator on a train between Moscow and Leningrad on January 9, 1986. Vehicle and prose rhythm accompany each other on this journey, replete with parentheses and qualifiers that pace the humour and style. Hop aboard Iossel’s express: “I was returning to Leningrad from Moscow, also for the last time ever (Leningrad – not St. Petersburg), after three strange (and of course, everything felt eerily strange to me at that juncture of my life), shapelessly endless boozed-fueled days and nights of bidding incoherent funereal farewells to a motley crowd of friends and acquaintances there, in the giant stone heart of the eternal Soviet golem.” This fragment within the long run-on sentence layers history in the first parenthesis, and tucks three strange days into a lifetime of strangeness.

Capacious and capricious, the sentence is both drawn out and punctuated into smaller units – a vast Soviet panorama and a tighter confinement in the train’s compartment. The giant stone heart of the eternal Soviet golem stalks the landscape against the narrator’s heartfelt experience in a sentence as endless as the farewells in this carnivalesque departure from Russia or the Soviet Union. Iossel’s style may call to mind a Shostakovich waltz with its hidden political agenda; or, it may revel in Bakhtinian burlesque, parentheses serving as heteroglossia.

Iossel’s prose rhythm develops not only through his long sentence alongside the locomotive, but also through the counter-narrative of parentheses, checking the pace of narration. “On an unexpectedly (but then, again, it was the middle of the first week of the New Year, and the increasingly dispirited giant country was still dawdling in glum post-holiday lethargy, all across its senseless eleven time zones) half-empty Red Arrow.” Iossel’s timetable is measured against a larger-than-life clock that diminishes its citizens. His irony and satire penetrate all of the time zones. The Red Arrow was once the upscale train for Soviet elites: “(not the right word, I know, but it would be boring, both for you and for me, if I were to say instead something along the lines of ‘the transiently lucky and generally pitiful servants and beneficiaries of the irredeemably ugly totalitarian regime’).” With the insertion of “you,” the monologue becomes a dialogue with the reader who goes along for the bilingual ride between Russia and Canada.

Iossel’s centrifugal sentences are paradoxically reined in by his parentheses, which are scattered commentaries on locomotive narration “connecting Russia’s former and present capitals, the respective avatars of its hopeless European aspirations and its shambolic Scythian essence, and invariably departing at five minutes to midnight (from Leningrad’s Moskovsky train station, it did so to the diffusely loud accompaniment of Reinhold Gliere’s ‘Hymn to the Great City’ – the finale of his famous ballet ‘The Bronze Horseman,’ but – not that it matters any, and silence has always suited me just fine – I don’t recall any such acoustic reciprocity on the part of the Leningradsky train station in Moscow.” Iossel’s time zones include the ancient Scythian past and the eleventh-hour departure, and his timing is impeccable. If Scythians were noted for their horsemanship and archery, then Iossel’s brinkmanship gallops and targets Russian history and politics. His round-trip journey extends from Scythian equestrians to Gliere’s horseman in a dance of dissidence, tango of syntax, and wandering choreography. With its thrum and buzz of implication, his wandering sentence is also a wounded sentence – wounded by the clamour of hammer and sickle everywhere.

The narrator meets his fellow-traveller “(yes, I am aware that this term has a different meaning in modern Western parlance … to pre-empt your possible impulse to explain this to me).” He is tall, stoop-shouldered with intense deep-set eyes and eagle’s-beak of a nose “(agreed: a cliché, and a fully insipid one at that, by implication – although, of course, I am Jewish myself, so … nothing, actually).” This insipid Semitic physiognomy is a point of concurrence for the two travellers. His compartment mate “slouched in obliquely” through the door, while outside the “slanted driving snow” reinforces the inebriated state of random travellers and Iossel’s oblique, idiosyncratic style. From his beat-up black cardboard suitcase, the traveller pulls out two bottles of five-star Armenian cognac and a large box of Estonian chocolates. The passengers bond over brandy, their loose lips providing ample opportunity for Iossel’s talent.

They drink from two heavy thick-faceted railroad glasses brought to them by a “hungover trainwoman” in this boozy atmosphere. The narrator has been trained as an electromagnetic engineer (submarine demagnetization), while his partner is a retired senior accountant. His “compartment-mate or fellow-traveller or drinking companion or whatever (it’s high time I started referring to him by a specific name of some kind, or an acronym maybe – DMD, for instance, Dead Man Drinking, why not).” This guest or host has been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer and has a few months to live – hence DMD and life-and-death sentence. DMD has also sought the assistance of a homeopathic cure, but to no avail “(in that nebulous netherworld of homeo-paganistic quasi-medical folk-quackery).” Iossel’s hyphens course through the hyperbole of miracle-worker, cancer-curer, and cancer-whisperer who practices at random nighttime hours “in a rambling wooden cabin” decorated in a rambling sentence.

The story spins along the rails of recognition between characters: “I was a fellow aidishe boy, well, mazeltov, and oh, how funny and strangely and happily coincidental, or serendipitous, whatever the word.” Iossel stretches his sentence with commas, ellipses, coordinated adjectives and adverbs alongside parallel tracks: “as the two of us were careening, if that’s the word.” The narrator checks his word, as if it were a passport and identity. Humour and liquor alleviate DMD’s death sentence – “a damn riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enema, to quote Churchill).” Like matryoshka dolls, enigma and variations ride the rails of highbrow and lowbrow quotations. An echo of Kafka’s letter to his father: “I want to be a free writer in a free world (don’t laugh, dad).”

Fuelled by cognac, the two passengers roll and rollick along with the Red Arrow’s express through the murky Soviet atmosphere from noise to silence: “DMD kept telling me again (but actually, just speaking to himself, sotto voce, mumbling as though in a trance, shaking his head mulishly now and then) that he was not afraid to die.” DMD eventually disappears from the train, and the narrator decides not to pursue him, but instead get on with his own life, which “still had a surprisingly long way to go before running its course.” By the end of the sentence the Red Arrow strikes a bull’s eye, and Scythian archers find their historic mark.

The second story, “Timelessness,” is much shorter than “DMD” and qualifies as an aphoristic statement. In lieu of extended parentheses, it relies on double entendre: “Time wounds all heels but it doesn’t heal all wounds.” This pun echoes in a different form in the foot’s sole and human soul: “the slow-walking gluttons for life’s punishment … but in the end, as its slow act of kindness, it slips away quietly and leaves us alone, face to face with its eternal antagonist – timelessness.” Iossel’s moods swing from the contemplative and melancholic to the humorous and sardonic.

He can tiptoe through the brevity of “Timelessness,” “Emptiness,” and “Line in the Sand,” or expand to the longer “Waltz No. 2.” In this story the narrator stops at a metro station in Montreal on his way to a departmental meeting when he hears a violin playing Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2. Drawn to the music, he is also drawn to the violinist – “possessed of an unmistakable air of being a fellow former Soviet Jew (don’t ask – we just recognize each other, instantly and almost always unmistakably … thus, say, a Great Dane and a Chihuahua, upon spotting each other from a distance, know at once, that they’re both dogs).” The air of music, Montreal, and racial recognition stirs in the breathing space of a Baroque sentence, made humorous by the parenthetic, canine mock-epic simile. The distance between dogs and humans collapses in the comic tell of “don’t ask.” The waltz is a tango between musician and narrator who step between the phrasing: “paused in the middle of the gloomily determined and overwhelmingly young human flow, suddenly overtaken (not the right word, too overused … stirred to the deep maybe … feeling pricked in my heart … something like that).” A pause in the flow of mounting adjectives and adverbs, the heartfelt pinprick, the deep stir and quick compassion – dance in the sentence.

Iossel’s music continues in a “long-dormant recollection that had floated at that instant, out of nowhere, to the rippling surface of my mind – one of listening (and not quite listening either).” This mental ripple triggers a nostalgic memory of Russia in the summer of 1982, but the musical time lapse takes into account Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and the narrator’s rhetorical flourishes and asides. Music’s mnemonic power over the narrator is matched by his own prose prowess “(yes, so to speak …).” His manner of speaking incorporates a potpourri of pop music alongside allusions to Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, Arseny Tarkovsky’s long poem “Life, Life,” and his son Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, Mirror. Iossel’s mimetic mode holds a mirror up to reality as well as to its own sentence structure with its panoramic sweep of music and film. Travelling between Russia and Canada, Moscow and Montreal, his dialogic sentence is diasporic in its drift, all-inclusiveness, and digressions. His centrifugal spin calls to mind Gary Barwin’s frenzied humour and torrents of consciousness with their thrum and buzz of implication.

“Pen Man Ship” breaks down sentence and word to syllables: pen challenges power, man evolves from boy, and ship relates to the narrator’s father who was a submarine electromagnetic engineer. His father had wanted to become a doctor, but in the Stalinist era with its Doctor’s Plot, that was not advisable. Whenever a reference appears in the text, the narrator advises the reader to “google it,” a parenthetic exercise which in itself is comical. A description of the family’s apartment in Leningrad matches sentence to scene: “sadly discordant Red October piano in the corner (in the corner of an oval-shaped room, huh … well, OK, whatever, moving right along), in a large (make it mid-sized) communal apartment (in a nutshell – doors to rooms on both sides of a long, very long dark corridor, sinuous, snake-like.” Iossel’s discursive fragment is itself fragmented, nimble, adjusting dimensions and focus, ranging from a nutshell to a sprawling city named after Tsar Peter the Great (the Dutch shipbuilder), and serpentining through Leningrad or St. Petersburg. It is the city of Dostoyevsky and some absurdity “in the roiling heart (roiling, huh, what an odd adjective … knock it off, if possible – all this … writing) of Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg.”

The waltz is well aware of its own dance that includes the Russian alphabet, and equates writing with penmanship: “is not even a scene but rather an extended and fairly incoherent exposition, so … but on the other hand, who sez exposition is not a scene and a scene not a story and why cannot a story consist of nothing but writing.” Accordingly, the page’s expanse mirrors Russia’s expanse: “where do you stop, I’m unstoppable, my train of thought is, my river of memory.” In the long road of first and last – “letters letters letters and sentences … pen man ship pen man ship clean writing clean writing.” Ellipses between gaps of Soviet past and North American future, an endless transatlantic journey wherein clean writing cleanses history’s filth. “Rain,” the shortest sentence in the book, hints at this cleansing catharsis: “Sometimes just listening to the rain all night is enough.”

From the prolix to the pithy, Iossel instructs us how to write a Russian sentence in English, and his bilingual buzz discourses through a polylingual diaspora spreading the word near and far. He packs his sentences, and his prose migrates with his persona in a grammar of exile. Each sentence is a flaneur, roaming the arcades of clauses in Moscow and Montreal.

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About the Author

Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia), where he worked as an electromagnetic engineer and belonged to an organization of samizdat writers before immigrating to the United States in 1986. He is the author, most recently, of Love Like Water, Love Like Fire (winner of the 2021 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction), Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling. Founding director of the Summer Literary Seminars international literary programs, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and his stories and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner Fellow, Iossel has taught in universities throughout the United States and is associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Linda Leith Publishing (Aug. 1 2025)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 197 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1773901745

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1773901749