God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories [Hardcover]

Tom Bissell (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 25, 2005

Here are six fictional stories about Americans colliding with a remote and often perilous part of the world:

Two journalists, stranded in wartime Afghanistan, are taken in by a warlord who becomes the arbiter of their fates.

A female scientist investigating the Aral Sea disaster is drawn into a trap by a former KGB officer.

On a hike through Kazakhstan, Jayne and Douglas’s marriage unravels when their guide, a veteran of the Soviet-Afghanistan war, takes an unseemly interest in Jayne.

The son of an American ambassador addicted to the seamy underside of a Central Asian city finally gets in over his head.
In the Pushcart Prize–winning title story, a tortured missionary struggles to reconcile his sexual urges with his faith.

A young man just back from a long stint in Kyrgyz-stan finds his relationship with his fiancée all but destroyed.

Sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, but always eerily affecting, these stories show us deeply foreign lands and peoples through our own eyes. Impressive in both range and emotional acuity, God Lives in St. Petersburg is a stunning fictional debut by a “wildly talented” (Outside) young writer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this sharp, hip collection of stories, Bissell fictionalizes his experiences in Central Asia, which were first aired in his nonfiction debut Chasing the Sea. Bissell has a predilection for school-of-Eggers deadpan irony and pop culture references, but if his knowingness sometimes grates, his witticisms are rarely gratuitous; the conflation of American consumerism with the barrenness of the Central Asian landscape gives these stories a striking immediacy: "Afghan men tended to wear their scarves atop their heads in vaguely muffin-shaped bundles or around their necks with aviator flair.... This was called terrorist style..." "Death Defier" follows a pair of Western journalists as they flee a war-torn Afghan city only to end up in the care of a warlord who dispatches one of them in search of an unlikely folk remedy for the other's malaria. In "Aral," an American scientist investigating the destruction of the Aral Sea is kidnapped by a KGB operative bent on showing the world how pollution has crippled his children and his country. The stunning title story depicts a missionary stationed in Russia who loses his faith as he is overcome by sexual desire. The story's deeply disturbing conclusion is a reminder of the short distance between the help offered by outsiders and the harm they do. Bissell never flinches as he looks straight into the starved hearts of his characters. In these chilling stories of a region ravaged by war, exile and neglect, desperation drives men and women to do the otherwise unthinkable, and no one is quite forgiven for their transgressions.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Bissell's collection of short stories set in Central Asia feature Americans emotionally and literally stranded in alien circumstances they struggle to comprehend. These six tales bring culture clashes and complexities to new levels as characters strive to survive in and make sense of seemingly senseless situations. Two journalists in Afghanistan fend off the inevitability of death while in the company of a notorious warlord. A missionary in St. Petersburg attempts to reconcile his homosexuality and infidelity with his faith. A young married couple is ill-equipped to deal with a marital crisis during a dangerous hike in Kazakhstan. The irresponsible son of an American ambassador on a collision course with fate risks his own life and costs his father his job. An environmental biologist is forced to rethink her theory on the diminishment of the Aral Sea. A returning Peace Corps volunteer finds he cannot pick up the pieces with his former girlfriend. Bound by common thematic elements of pathos and confusion, these stories shimmer with rare insight into an ever-mysterious foreign landscape. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (January 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375422641
• ISBN-13: 978-0375422645
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #315,671 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Way We Live Now February 8, 2005

By Marshall Boswell

Format:Hardcover

Everyone who reads this exhilarating dervish of a book will first be struck by its courage and its timeliness, by how presciently and precisely it tells us what we need, but might not want, to know about the far reaching impact of American adventurism abroad. His characters blunder into Central America for a number of reasons, both selfish and altruistic, and yet in no instance does Bissell shy from tracing out the full and unexpected consequences of such meddling. Other reviewers have already praised the book on this account, and I suspect the string of Amazon reviews that will begin to accumulate here will continue to explore this aspect of the book. But this is also, first and foremost, a book of high literary achievement. Literature is not political commentary but rather a way of experiencing political existence within the charged and always unstable context of art. As such, each piece here is a wonder of accumulated detail, of complex characterization, of carefully designed form. Donk, the Michigan born photographer in "Death Defier," is both a way for Bissell to explore the complexity of our sojourn in Afghanistan as well as a fully fleshed character in his own right who, with gut wrenching memories of his dying father, confronts his own death with a level of terror and dignity that becomes universal paradoxically because of its particularity. Douglas and Jayne, the sophisticated and clueless New Yorkers who take an "Expensive Trip Nowhere" to Kazakhstan, transform in the course of their story from poster children for American naivete to a couple confronting their horrifying limitations, a recognition that is both psychic and political without ever being tendentious. (The story also cleverly and devilishly updates Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," as the author forcefully points out in his afterword. No mean feat, that.) The only story that does not work totally for me as a piece of fiction, "Aral," falters only in its overeagerness to make a statement-specifically about the tragedy of the Soviet destruction of the Aral Sea, an issue Bissell treats at more length in his superb travelogue, "Chasing the Sea." So yes, this is an immensely important work, one that uncategorically deserves all the hosannahs it has already begun to receive and will continue to receive. But let's not overlook the fact that this story collection also heralds the arrival of a literary artist of the higher caliber. You probably have to go back to Philip Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus" for a proper analogue.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Home is Where the Hurt Is January 12, 2006

By G. Bestick VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Tom Bissell is fond of sprinkling aphorisms throughout the stories in this fine collection, so let's lay one on him: Only a young man with his entire life stretched out before him could afford to be so pessimistic about life's possibilities.

Granted, he's writing about places it's easy to be pessimistic about, god-forsaken Central Asian Republics spawned by the collapse of the Soviet Empire, places that are a "combo of Soviet paranoia and Muslim xenophobia" as one character puts it. Five of the collection's six stories follow this pattern: take a (young) American; drop him or her into a central Asian country; stir; chronicle the resulting disaster.

The first story, Death Defier, is probably the best. A free-lance American photographer gets caught in a difficult situation in Afghanistan while trying to help a British reporter felled by a virulent strain of malaria. The story poses an interesting question: can you dive so deeply into the mechanics and aesthetics of war that you become immune to death-terror? Bissell grapples honorably with the complex sensibility of war correspondents, people who are voyeuristic and deeply engaged, often at the same time. Aral is about Amanda, an American biologist sent by the United Nations to study the shrinking Aral Sea (a hall of fame ecological screw-up). Amanda consistently misreads the intent of the people around her. She displays that combustible American mix of idealism, aggressiveness and ignorance of the local culture that's served us so well in Vietnam and Iraq.

Expensive Trips Nowhere and The Ambassador's Son are ugly American stories. In an Author's Note, Bissell acknowledges his debt to Hemingway's The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber for Expensive Trips Nowhere, which is about courage or the lack thereof on the steppes of Kazakhstan. The Ambassador's Son is about what you'd get if you dropped the Jay McInerney of Bright Lights, Big City into the capital of Tashkent. It should be noted that Bissell writes well about sex, giving it neither more nor less significance than the situation he's describing merits. The final story, Animals in Our Lives, is the only one set in America. Franklin, a recently returned expat English teacher, and Elizabeth, a med student, spend an afternoon at the zoo and experience the moment when it comes clear they don't have a future with each other. It's a sensitive rendering of the kinds of pain your intellect can't protect you from.

The title story, which won a Pushcart Prize, is about Timothy, a missionary in Samarkand whose faith gets subverted by physical urges. Bissell gets the succumbing to temptation part just right, along with the heartbreaking juxtaposition of sex with hope that pervades the world's downtrodden places. What's missing is a visceral sense of the struggle to hold on to God. God may not live in St Petersburg, but Dostoievksi did, and the master understood that sin gains heft through the hubris of the sinner. Something enormous was at stake for Dostoievski's spiritual criminals; they pitched themselves willingly on to the pyre, inviting and accepting oblivion for their defiance. Timothy settles for the tiny oblivion of orgasm, then sits in a fug of post-coital remorse waiting for God to ring him up. He's simply not a big enough person to carry his part of the argument, so the story falls short of the tragic dimension it tries to achieve.

There's a lot to like about Bissell as a writer. He's willing to engage with far-off, difficult cultures, and willing to wrestle with big ideas like death and sin. He writes a prose that's both erudite and plainspoken, which is hard to do. He can be both trenchant and expansive in his observations, often in the same well-turned phrase. His efforts to describe the ways in which the personal and political infuse and alter one another takes him into territory mined so productively by Graham Greene. While each of the individual stories may not be perfectly realized, it feels like there's something at stake here, maybe something important.

He's an author work rooting for, and I'd definitely buy his next book.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rare Feat of Short Story and Expose February 28, 2005

By M. JEFFREY MCMAHON TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Bissell, who is very young (born in 1974)to be writing short stories with this kind of wisdom, worked as a Peace Corps volunteer near the Aral Sea and has used his experiences in South Central Asia and Eastern Europe, delving into the lives of journalists haunted by demons, searchers, spoiled rich brats, do-gooders, criminals, sociopaths, and a litany of misfits to produce a rare feat of fiction--literary short stories that have the feel of expose. He takes you into the heart of modern day Afghanistan, for example, in his story "Death Defier," where an American journalist, haunted by family demons, appears to be a courageous photographer of truth on one hand and a man with a death wish on the other. In "Aral," his story that more than the others ventures into exposition and polemic, a nihilistic KGB officer lectures an American biologist UN worker about the "fat souls" of Americans who, for all their platitudes, know nothing of real suffering before subjecting the woman to a little trial of her own. In "The Ambassador's Son" a rogue narrates his licentious exploits and the manner in which he corrupts a Christian missionary.

Amazingly, these stories can be peeled layer upon layer for their psychological depth while at the same time they percolate with the buzz of the chaos that we read about in the daily newspapers and blogs. A great achievement.