Iramifications

Glas 43, 368 pp.
ISBN 978-5-7172-0082-0

With ten novels to her name, Maria Galina is one of the most interesting authors among those who made their names in the turbulent 1990s. She is the leading exponent of "hyper-fiction," a popular new genre that blends fantasy and reality. She is also a prize-winning poet, a thoughtful critic, and a translator of English and American science fiction, in all of which she excels. After graduating from Odessa University in marine biology, Galina took part in several sea expeditions before taking up writing professionally in 1995. She has won numerous prizes for her prose, poetry and critical essays. She has been nominated for the Russian Booker and short-listed for the Russian Critics Academy Award.

Iramifications was awarded the International Portal Prize.

A resourceful shuttle trader from present-day Odessa tricks a tourist from St Petersburg into joining him on a business trip to Istanbul. They are cheated by their Turkish partners and give chase, becoming inadvertently embroiled in the theft of a precious stele from the local ethnographic museum. In pursuit of the robbers, the companions are transported back in time to the mythical city of Iram, where they are drawn into a world of dangerous court intrigues. Iram itself evokes the exoticism of The Arabian Nights, and the adventures that take place there are reminiscent of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Eventually the hapless traders return to Odessa and the whole trip would seem to have been a bad dream, were it not for the presence of a certain white camel...

Says Galina: "In bringing together the legends and traditions of the Hellenic, Jewish and Arabic worlds, I have attempted to create a consistent and interconnected mythological picture of the world, constructed around a monstrous intrigue as old as humanity itself.

This cosmogony is home to a Throne and an Abyss, to fallen angels and their monstrous descendents, to the mystical Book of Raziel and even to a herd of Nubian asses... This singular cosmogony was created for a reason and exists nowhere outside the pages of this novel, of course.

The essence of the novel is the eternal confrontation between two kings - one a creator and the other a destroyer. My heroes are simply their latest incarnations.

The novel explores the intoxicating and corrupting effects of power, but it is also about how the ordinary dreams of an ordinary man can act as a powerful antidote to dangerous temptations."