Ekaterina
and the Night By Maxim Jakubowski
Xcite Books Ltd. 2011
Xcite Books Ltd. 2011
“Will
you tell other women stories about me when we are over?” she asked
Alexander.
He
wanted to be truthful and say no, but already she knew him too well.
He was who he was, and aware that the temptation would be too strong
not to talk about her, to improvise tales of beauty and fury, of lust
and longing, songs of adoration and missing.
This
self-referential quotation encapsulates Maxim Jakubowski's latest
novel – a book of tales about women, lust, love, and loss. Although
ostensibly focused on the relationship between Alexander, an
introspective British author, and Ekaterina, a wild-hearted Italian
journalist decades his junior, Ekaterina and the Night spends
at least half its time tracing these two characters' travels through
the lives of other lovers and sex partners, before and after their
brief, intense connection.
The
novel begins with sixteen year old Ekaterina's decision to seduce her
handsome, urbane tennis instructor. She considers that it's high time
she discarded her virginity, but she changes her mind when confronted
with the grossness of male lust.
The
scene shifts to Alexander's early explorations in the world of women.
Both sensual and sentimental, Alexander finds astonishing variety in
the female body and soul. His heart breaks more than once as he
treads the torturous paths of pleasure. Although he recognizes his
own susceptibility, he still cannot resist falling for the women he
fucks.
Twenty
year old Ekaterina meets Alexander when she interviews him for an
article. No sparks fly, at least at first. A creature of words as she
is, he woos her long distance with missives both tender and obscene.
When they next arrange an encounter, in the terminally romantic city
of Venice, passion has snared them both.
Even
from the beginning, though, both protagonists seem to believe their
love is doomed – by geographic and social distance and even more,
by the gap of age and experience that separates them. They call
themselves Lolita and Humbert, although in fact they have little in
common with Nabokov's creations. The fantasy scenario of the innocent
and the beast inflames them, inappropriate as is.
Over
the course of several years, they meet, infrequently, in fabled
cities – Paris, Rome, New York – share a few days of ecstasy,
then part. Because they expect their love to fail, it finally does.
Ekaterina cuts Alexander out of her life completely. Alexander, who
craves women like an addict craves drugs, moves on to other
conquests. Time marches forward – but decades cannot completely
erase the marks the two have left on each other's souls.
Ekaterina
and the Night offers a third
major character in Emma, the personification of the night referenced
in the title. Emma is a harvester of souls, a sort of emissary or
assistant to the angel of Death. Several chapters follow her as she
arranges the demise of individuals she has been assigned to harvest,
some of whom are minor players in the lives of Alexander or
Ekaterina. Emma is extraordinarily beautiful and strangely
compassionate despite her role in the universe. As the novel
progresses (if one can use that term for a book that jumps back and
forth in time the way this one does), Emma's trajectory has near
misses with those of the other two protagonists, until finally she
arrives for her appointment with the aging Alexander.
I
found myself surprised at the book's rather sudden conclusion. I read
it in ebook form; one characteristic of ebooks is that it's not
always obvious when you're nearing the end. Based on the blurb, I
expected a three-way encounter among Emma, Ekaterina and Alexander.
That never happened. Instead, Ekaterina fades out of the book
completely, despite her prominence in the title.
In
fact, I should warn readers to ignore the blurb and the cover (a
shapely, boot-clad foot with a steel cuff around the ankle), as both
are totally misleading. There's no BDSM to speak of in this novel,
and there's nothing particularly shocking about Alexander's and
Ekaterina's relationship, as claimed by the blurb. I blame the
publisher for this; I suspect people who purchase the novel based on
the marketing information will be annoyed when they discover how
different the reality is from the hype.
Maxim
Jakubowski's style offers a refreshing change from more commercial
erotic fiction. His prose is simultaneously dispassionate and full of
sensory richness. One has the impression of looking through glass,
imagining the smells, sounds and tastes rather than directly
experiencing them. Indeed, I think the author is gazing through the
lens of recollection, evoking cherished scenes from the past and
filling in the details from oft-rehearsed memory – telling his
favorite stories, as Ekaterina intuited that Alexander would.
As
in previous books, Mr. Jakubowski lovingly describes the geographies
in which his characters come together. Indeed, cities, cafés,
and hotels are practically minor characters, each one distinct with
its own individual personality. Occasionally I found his metaphors
jarring (such as a comparison of a woman's nipple to a pizza crust),
but overall his literate, observant prose is a pleasure to read.
And
is Ekaterina and the Night
erotic? Arousing? Yes, and no. The novel includes a great deal of sex
– some tender, some raw, some brutal, some boring. The encounters
range from transcendent to banal. After Alexander and Ekaterina break
up, for example, she falls on hard times economically. To support
herself and her lover, she works providing remote sex shows by web
cam. There's a long scene in which, on camera and in return for a
large amount of money, she allows herself to be taken anally for the
first time. There's no pleasure or joy in this scene at all. Other
chapters offer accounts of similarly disastrous, uncomfortable, or
unpleasant sexual activity. These sections of the book detract from
the delicious eroticism one finds elsewhere in the book.
Do
not misunderstand me – this is not incompetence. I don't believe
that the author intended these scenes to be arousing. Since they do
not contribute much (in my opinion) to either the plot or the
character development, I'm really not sure why he included them.
And
did I enjoy the book? Again, I feel ambivalent. At its best,
Ekaterina and the Night
is a melancholy, nostalgic evocation of lost love and vanished youth,
a meditation on the transforming power of sex and the connection
between romance and death. At its worst, it is a set of barely
connected vignettes that sometimes arouse and sometimes disgust the
reader, but all too often seem rather pointless.
A
reader who's looking for a traditional plot, with a core conflict,
rise in tension, climax and a resolution, should probably avoid this
novel. Someone seeking a more subtle emotional and intellectual
experience may well enjoy it. Ekaterina and the Night isn't
really a story. It's stories, plural, braided together and united by
a wistful sense of remembered joy and a consciousness of mortality.
