Occasionally when browsing across Amazon.com I find myself entranced by a book-cover. Usually it’s of some re-issued classic that needs a little modern art-work (the colorful abstract forms and swirling gyre-like eye of The Portable Conrad say) to maintain the work’s alluring hipness, its auspicious claim to relevance. Suddenly, for some reason, I always feel commanded to halt and stare. A subtle yet mood-altering tingle has invaded my brain’s southern third-world regions. It’s a promise being made by the book-cover: if you buy this book (which you’ve been meaning to get around to for years) it will be as good as you can conceive of it as being; it will enter the real world clothed in the same unearthly color of the ideal world; each page, each sentence, will ring so true that it will be as if they had already existed somewhere within your mind, frozen and asleep but always waiting to be awakened. I love this feeling, and the resemblance it bears to the feeling of a new romance is far from coincidental. These books that I hold in my head, I have a love for them whose month is ever May.
One such book has always been Red Cavalry and Other Stories by Isaac Babel, the Jewish-Ukrainian writer whose other work Odessa Tales (which I have actually read) still evokes in me a love both addictive and problematic. My impressions and memories of that book are still inscribed with a fierce, often glowing though sometimes chiding marginalia. And though I sometimes think that the admiration that Babel heaps on the book’s hero (The King, Benya Krik ruler of Odessa’s underworld and a figure so vital and morally polluted he makes Tony Soprano look muddled and ill) is a bit less complicated, less tempered, than it should be, Odessa Tales is still a drug of a book. It gives the reader an injection of chemical pleasure.
And herein lies the rub. From what I’ve been told, Red Cavalry is even more sudden, more striking than the ultra-short, ultra-violent, ultra-lyrical stories of Odessa Tales. Its fun is even more immediate, more narcotic, more soaring and hemispherical. It more radically resets the horizons of the short-story. It’s also (supposedly) a somewhat less sophisticated book, a markedly junior effort whose problems and deficits are even more fascinatingly peculiar. Moreover, it’s a war book filled with war stories that re-imagines the period that Babel spent with a Cossack regiment during WW1! Every new detail that I learn doubles down on the sincere burning coolness of what I already knew.
At this very moment, I know it is sitting on the shelf of my local library, it’s pages waiting for intrusion. All that I have now is the cover: a neat-looking cartoon of a red-army soldier—-replete with a frowning, virile mustache and bulging bayonet—-pasted over a map of Eastern Europe, the title spelled out in blocky Soviet-era script. As I wait, I cringe with the foreknowledge that Red Cavalry is very likely not as good as I imagine it to be. I’m sure it’s very good, great probably. But unfortunately its existence within the real world forecloses its potential for perfection. I know there will come a moment upon which my relationship with the book will hinge, when its shimmer will subside having passed through the atmospheric impurities of the actual world. There is something else that I know however: the real pleasure it will give me may not be perfect, but it will at least be real.
