In the 1990s, Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen, an Austrian photographer with Galician roots, travels repeatedly through Ukraine. The chaos of the transitional post-Soviet era seems infinitely more appealing than the boring life of the West—especially since falling in love with his interpreter Roma Voronych. He accompanies her on a hair-raising trip to the Carpathian mountains where we hear of happenings in the solitude of the mountains, as well as in the “Tavern On The Moon,” which served briefly as an observatory and subsequent athletic training station where, in between commercial film productions starring strippers and bodyguards and various intellectuals, Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, the outlaw modernist Ukrainian poet of the 1930’s is to be found in person. Andrukhovych relates all this madness absorbingly, with much wit and ironic joust. Lurkers here will come to understand that the postmodern folk novel from Ukraine they are reading is in fact about the West. Yuri Andrukhovych's nuanced Ukrainian prose requires an exceptionally talented translator in order to be appreciated in English. Happily, Andrukhovych has found just such a wordsmith in Vitaly Chernetsky, who has managed to accomplish the well-nigh impossible: staying true to the original text while producing powerful and persuasive English-language prose. Read this novel, both to experience one of the most important recent Ukrainian literary texts and to bear witness to Chernetsky's emergence as a great translator. Kudos to both! Alexander MotylTwelve Circles is a flamboyant meditation on the history of everything. Don’t expect the trains to run on time but (in their own time) they arrive and depart and in due time the story of Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen unfolds before our eyes. Andrukhovych is the ultimate omniscient narrator and his mile-long sentences chart their own unbroken course, fearlessly, with no end in sight. It’s all in the details, the unspoken truths, the sidelong glances, and the marvelous translation by Vitaly Chernetsky brings it to life on the wide screen. Lewis Warsh
