The second event of the 2007 Mayor's Book Club took place on Tuesday night, featuring "Around the Bloc" by Stephanie Elizondo Griest, a UT alumna.
The first section of the three-part travel memoir and the subsequent book discussion were in regard to Griest's stay in Moscow. Thomas Garza, the night's discussion leader, and an audience of approximately 20 Austinites gathered in the Podolnik Auditorium of the Yarborough Branch of the Austin Public Library.
Garza is the director of the UT Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. He has been involved with the UT and Moscow Linguistics Institute exchange program since its inception in 1993, a mere two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Griest took Garza's Post-Soviet Youth Culture class the semester after her return from Russia.
Griest's vivid writing style takes hold in the first chapter, where she first sees the Russian students. She describes their appearance as a whole in detail and juxtaposes it with hers and those of her fellow UT exchange students, all without judging. The Russian girls "wore makeup; the boys wore aftershave."
"She describes 'the other' without evaluating them," Garza said.
The author writes about everyday happenings in such a manner that the reader is invested in each character and every event that happens to them. Perhaps it is Griest's journalistic eye for detail or the relative objectivity with which she views unfamiliar things that make her descriptions appealing. Trips to the market for "something green and leafy" and ongoing battles with armies of insects that invade nightly become as engaging and captivating as parties with copious amounts of vodka and new Russian friends. Part of this appeal is due to the well-researched cultural context into which these happenings are placed: The Soviet Union collapsed five years earlier, the mafiya was gaining large amounts of power within the cities, the "New Russian" had just emerged and the youth were thoroughly disillusioned. The Revolution was freshly dead.
An important chapter to the memoir's depiction of Russian culture is "The Vodka Chronicles."
"The drinking [is used] in order to make the connection amongst individuals," Garza said. "I found it seductive that the Russians saw the drink as a cultural experience."
Griest cites Dr. Alexander Nemtsov, who blamed vodka for a steep decline in the life expectancy for Russian males - down to 57 years and three months in 1994, "the lowest in the developed world." But, according to Garza, it is down to about 55 years of age now in urban areas. Garza stated that he believes this phenomenon has occurred because the older generation's certainty of tomorrow has disappeared, and they were abruptly given too much "freedom of choice."
Within the text, Griest not only witnesses the influence that biznes (the mafia) had over businesses and the economy, but over her own friends as well. Her friends' friends and families were involved in biznes, and some of them either vanished or were found riddled with bullets. According to Garza, the heyday of the Russian mafia was from the fall of the USSR to the crash of the ruble on Aug. 19, 1998. The crash coordinated with Russian President Vladimir Putin's rise to power and helped to dismantle the mafia further, said Garza.
Russia has changed for the better in just the 10 short years since Griest lived in Moscow. When questioned about how he felt Russia would progress in the next 10 or 15 years, Garza replied, "I'm very optimistic."
The second discussion of the Mayor's Book Club takes place at 7 p.m. tonight in the Hampton Branch at Oak Hill (5125 Convict Hill Road) and will be led by Chiu-Mi Lai, UT senior lecturer of Chinese literature, language and culture.
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