Steppe

In this compassionate and clear-eyed character study, Vasyakina (Wound) traces the bond between a rough-hewn Siberian truck driver and his queer daughter. The unnamed narrator reunites with her father in 2010 on a long haul across Russia. During the drive, her father expresses approval for her decision to study at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow (“Gorky had been a bosyak, a vagabond, like everyone else in my father’s orbit and like my father himself”). She’s happy to have his blessing but chafes at the terms (“Seeing myself as a bosyachka was embarrassing; I was ashamed of my poverty, my rootlessness”). On the drive, she reflects on her father’s previous career in organized crime, when his stint running moonshine during the Gorbachev administration landed him in prison. Over the course of the nonlinear narrative, the reader gathers that the father has since died from AIDS, and that he was hiding his illness from the narrator during their trip. Vasyakina assembles a thoughtful and necessarily incomplete portrait of the father from the narrator’s musings on the harshness and violence of the post-Soviet era that shaped him. It’s a satisfying examination of how well a father and daughter can know one another. (Jan.)