'Back to Moscow' Effective But Backwards

For just under 400 pages, Guillermo Erades’s debut novel, “Back to Moscow,” situates the reader within the mind of a blithely misogynistic narrator. Martin, a foreign Ph.D. student at Moscow State University, studies women in Russian literature. In a twist of “academic creativity,” he attempts to construct a sociological, field work-based understanding of “real Russian women.” In other words, Martin turns academia into an excuse to meet, sleep with, and occasionally have protracted relationships with these so-called “real Russian women.” The trials and tribulations of these relationships form the entirety of Erades’s plot. However, our narrator’s abandonment of traditional academia becomes something both more interesting and more disturbing than a simple skirting of responsibility.

The most fascinating facet of Erades’s text is not Martin’s explicit philosophical musing themselves but rather what is implicitly revealed through them. Erades rather brilliantly uses Martin’s search for the soul of the “real Russian woman” to highlight the hubristic sexism of such an attempt. By focusing on Martin’s female-oriented perspective, Erades is able to note the twinges of misogyny embedded in his straight male perspective. However, while the novel cleverly plays with perspective to highlight the assumptions inherent to Martin’s actions, Erades’ writing barely portrays women as individuals any more than Martin does in his own limited view. This is where the novel becomes most problematic: Martin interprets the women of his world in a hyper-misogynistic manner, but the underlying truth is only slightly more rich than Martin assumes it to be.

The foundation of the novel is strong. Martin is a compelling narrator because he is able to perceive the physical factual realities of emotion in women while remaining unable to effectively interpret them as evidence of inner psychological states. To Martin, women are not people but rather a series of incomprehensible actions. In the following scene, this theme is carried out to its entirety: Here, his girlfriend finds her contact information in his phone as “Lena [her first name] Propaganda [the club they met in].” Martin says, “‘Is it my fault that so many girls in Moscow share the same few names? It’s all Katyas, Mashas, Lenas, Tanyas, Olyas, Natashas.’ She looked at me, now on the verge of tears. Then, in a shaky, soft voice she said, ‘I just want to be Lena.’” Lena is hurt by his refusal to consider her as an individual—or indeed as anything other than a woman he met in a club (like all the rest of the “Lenas”) that he sleeps with. Martin completely misses this, responding to her desire for acknowledgement by quite literally equating her with every other girl living in Moscow. Martin observes her being “on the verge of tears” and speaking with “a shaky, soft voice”; however, Martin’s keen eye for physicality renders no understanding of the psychological narrative within Lena. She is correct: Martin does not consider her an individual.

Passages like these, in which Erades’ omission of information reveals a subtle depth to Martin’s character, form the foundation for the novel’s effective use of first person narrative. Here, the nature of a first person perspective allows Erades to highlight the way in which misogyny constitutes not only external interactions but also a flawed internal narrative. Martin would not be caught doing something externally sexist—he is not portrayed as overlooking a female character for a promotion or being an agent of the wage gap. Instead, by situating Martin’s misogyny within his internal narrative, Erades astutely implies that sexism consists not simply of a series of physical actions but also of a flawed internal perspective.

However, a myriad of minor issues in the narrative undermine the subtle feminism implied by an analysis of Martin’s character. Erades’ plotting feels thin. The novel’s ending feels unsupported, rushed, and indelicately treated. But these are all minor problems compared to the deeply problematic manner in which the text conceives of its female characters. In Erades’ world, all women want to be taken out to expensive, champagne-accompanied dinners bookended by bouquets of roses and the magic words “I love you.” In a particularly amusing recurring sequence of scenes, all women, after a night of sex, seem to want to brush their teeth with the same red toothbrush—abstaining from the four less brightly colored (and clean) toothbrushes Martin leaves by his sink. If they do not want dinners and red toothbrushes, they are emotionally unfeeling and philosophically empty. If the text treated its female characters with the same eye for subtle commentary as Martin’s character shows Erades has the creative potential to do, “Back to Moscow” would have been a masterful text. Instead, Erades ironically creates a work that Martin’s character successfully parodies.

—Staff writer Aziz B. Yakub can be reached at aziz.yakub@thecrimson.com.