I have read Roadside picnic many years after having seen Tarkovsky's Stalker. Being a book that inspired one of my favourite movies
I had a notion that I would not be able to give it justice. Stalker (the movie) for me lives in some untouchable realm of poetry and speaks to my magic centre in a language that my conscious self doesn't even speak. I wanted to approach the book as an entity in itself and was curious what book could have sparked the ideas behind Stalker.
After reading the book, I think that it served as a springboard, a rough frame that is vague enough for the master to sketch his own murky painting. The problem with Solaris was exactly this - that it wasn't vague enough, or that Tarkovsky didn't approach it freely enough. But Stalker offers perfect vagueness - very few practical details on the life of stalkers, but all of which seem to follow the logic of poetry more than any other logic.
The children of stalkers are different. They are “infected” by the zone.
The zone has no rules you can spell out. You have to be “in the zone” when you're in the zone. Its rules align only to the most instinctual operation.
Only certain people, who are comfortable with the oppressing silence within and without, are able to withstand the Zone and operate in it.
Completely poetic. And perfect for Tarkovsky's needs.
I feel somewhat bad talking about Tarkovsky and his needs, but we can just take it that I'm not really talking about Tarkovsky here - I'm talking about my impression of the man as informed by 3-4 of his movies. The movie mirage of Tarkovsky.
The problem and the success of Tarkovsky and William Turner are, for me, almost identical. Both are incredible masters of their technique. Both reached their full sublime level of mastery once they stopped giving any tribute to the real. The real needs no operator except itself, but the magic needs the operator because the magic hides and lurked and shows itself only to the most sensitive of us. They let go of the narrative, of drawing boats and waves, and start painting the inner landscape of the soul.
Back to the book, though.
I read the book in English, and I think that doesn't work. Translated in contemporary US English, the whole thing looses meaning, I feel. The oppressive misery of the Russian worker's class is not a part of the US heritage, they don't have a language for it. British English could have done it better justice if translated by someone familiar with Zola. It's too shiny for the sentiment underneath. The dog-eat-dog world doesn't come through. I have tried imagining the dirty Russian underneath, but sometimes my imagination would fail me, and English would take over in conveying the story. And then the story would disintegrate for me, becoming just a plain cloth to weave the “important points” together. And this type of reading I don't enjoy.
I am generally not a great fan of the terse style in which many SF books have been written, the minimalist down-to-the-bone type of text which seems to be a poor wrapping for a good idea. But in this case, considering the language problem, I cannot be the judge of the text. It might have been great in Russian.
I deeply appreciate the ending of the book, as all the moments when the cosmic joke of our existence is understood deeply by a protagonist.
Comments