Reshaping Europe for fun and satire, a review of The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago and The Island of Crimea by Vassily Aksyonov

In both Aksyonov's Island of Crimea and Saramago's Stone Raft, a change in European geopgrahy leads to bizarre stariic consequences. In one case making, the Crimean peninsula becomes an island; and in the other the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) drifts away from Europe. Both authors use this bizarre, unexplained geographic event as the starting point for satire.

I read The Island of Crimea twice.The first time was in 1987 when the Cold War when the Berlin wall was still standing and the Cold War was still very real. The author was esteemed as an emigre dissident, an opponent of the Soviet regime whose works could not be published in the USSR. I was a fan of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Of course I would read Aksyonov, and I did.  But it left no lasting impression.

When I picked the book up a few days ago, I couldn't remember if I had ever read it. So I read it again, but now in a totally different prollitical context, it reads like a different book -- an antique, an artifact of history. The irony has aged; the satire is arimed at a target that no longer exists. And without the interested generated by the Cold War, this stilted mechanical tale would probably never have been published.

In the case of The Stone Raft, the satire (both light and bitter) is just a staring point, an excuse for creating fascinating and memorable characters. The utterly impossible problems they face reveal who they are and change them in unexpected ways. Saramago succeedds in translating global issues and conflicts to family ones; and the resulting story should delight long after the global issues are no longer of interest.

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