Nine

Before I begin my analysis of a novel that wore me out with its dialogues and got under my skin, let me say that, as in everything I have written so far, in this review too I will be sharing entirely subjective views that are open to debate. My attitude – or rather, my impression – has not the slightest bearing on the novel’s true weight. The copy I read was published by Xan Publishing House in 2026; its publisher is Sabuhi Shahmursoy and its editor Javid Gadir. Page numbers in this review refer to that edition. And now to what the novel stirred in me.

The novel opens with its epilogue, and from the very first paragraph you sense that Elay has no intention of plastering over his sentences or reality, nor of covering up the story he is about to tell. In creative writing this is called the “author’s promise”. The epilogue’s closing sentence sounds like the seal on that promise: “Like everyone else, he was a small innocent who had committed enormous sins.” Elay does not forget the promise he has made to the reader. A word is dropped early on, a small promise is made, and somewhere further on it comes back to meet us. If I remember rightly, I admired the same thing in Naiq Babayev’s novel Blind Spot. It is what we find in sharp-eyed writers who know what they are writing.

The story begins like this: a stranger arrives in a village whose name we are not told, meets the Headman and announces that he has been sent by the Republic to take a census of the population. The author calls the Headman sometimes the Old Man, sometimes the Headman, and the newcomer the Dark Man. The Dark Man wears a permanent smile that spans his face from ear to ear like a bridge. The guest spends the night in the Headman’s house, but at night he undresses and beats a drum – without making a sound. We ask not only “Who is this man?” but also “Where is this place?”, “What kind of country is this?”, “What is going on here?” In the first chapter I was reminded of Kafka’s The Castle. Its strange emptiness, its enigma, the way the absurd comes across as natural and convincing – all of this can be sensed here too. The novel carries you along.

No one in the novel has a proper name; everyone is called by their age, their trade or their place in the village: the Headman, the Butcher, the Carpenter, the Blind Old Woman, Dove… There are no names, but there are identities, and the characters behave according to who they are, not what they are called. Elay has built his work precisely on these identities, social positions and personal traits. Almost every character is distinct, no one resembles anyone else, and this colour is sustained from the first page to the last. The author knows his characters well: he knows how each of them will react in any situation.

One of the things I liked from the very start is that the author does not rush. Elay does not try to race ahead. He stays in the scene, invites you into its absurd reality and makes you feel the situation too. Sadly, we don’t see this in most of our authors: a hurried text leaves the reader breathless, delivering events at a gallop and never letting them taste the setting, the world of the novel. In Nine, by contrast, there is time to linger over small details. On page 22, for instance, after a minor squabble with his wife, the Old Man sits down to eat with the guest: “The Old Man could barely swallow his mouthful of fish. The bitch always did this. The moment there was any trouble between them, she turned the food to poison. When he was young, his poor mother…” The author neither wanders off at length into the past, nor recounts their relationship in dry words, nor deprives you of its colour. He depicts a great deal in few words. The triangle of guest, Old Man and wife is superbly built: the scene is short, but it says a great deal.

The pleasure the novel gave me grew fivefold on page 57. It had been good up to that point; there it became excellent. A mother who has come to buy meat complains to the Butcher about her daughter’s mischief and, in her own sweet way, makes threats along the lines of “Uncle Butcher, if this naughty girl doesn’t do as she’s told, you’ll cut her tongue out.” The child, too, has been brought up all her life on words like “The Butcher will chop you up” and “If you don’t behave, I’ll take you away and the butcher will slaughter you.” Elay builds a psychological background that fits the child, the mother and the Butcher alike. Then the scene turns in such an unexpected direction that I was left with my hand over my mouth. I won’t say what happens – you must read it. It was in that scene that I knew this novel was not like the others.

The novel also captures a parent’s instinct to protect. On page 37 the Dark Man asks to see Dove. Dove’s mother, who does not yet know what is going to happen, reacts simply and profoundly: “What has my child ever done to anyone?” There is a similar moment on page 107: surprised by what the Dark Man says about his father, the Headman falters and asks the first question that comes into his head: “And your mother?” That was superb.

Sadly, the dialogues are not always like this. I would even say they are the novel’s weakest, most fragile link. Elay sometimes hands the narration over to dialogue, at which he is not especially skilled, and we have to learn how the story is unfolding, what is happening, from the characters’ talk. Where the author’s own voice would do far better, shifting the load onto dialogue damages the atmosphere and creates a lazy-screenwriter effect. These exchanges also drag on far longer than they need to. “I love you so much.” – “No, I love you so much.” – “I love you more…” – and so on, until they drive you up the wall. At times the dialogue simply makes noise. One senses that, for Elay, dialogue is what a rough sea is to someone who cannot swim. At times it feels like a downright swamp: once you fall in, you can’t get out. Some of it I would cut without batting an eyelid; some I would rework from the roots up.

I have another objection about the way people speak. The inhabitants of this village, an illiterate community, converse in fairly polished sentences, in the manner of educated people. In some conversations I hear the author’s voice more than that of their world. The Headman himself cannot read or write; he cannot read the Dark Man’s papers. Yet on page 15 he says that during the war “they made a written request for a list of the men able to bear arms”. And towards the end of the book we become quite certain that the man saying this cannot write.

Then there is the size of the village. On page 18 we read: “There are only twenty-seven families in the village. Only a hundred and eight people…” Yet on page 50 the Headman, walking through the village at night, passes through its quarters and alleyways. Quarters and alleyways in a village of a hundred and eight people? And as events grow more tangled, the crowds grow larger too. Had he not given those exact figures, I think the author would not have needlessly confined the world he had built.

Another device I did not like at all is concealing who begins a scene. There are many paragraphs and chapters that open with lines like “…was moving forward in the dark” or “…did not know what to do” – sentences with no subject, which Azerbaijani allows. Someone goes somewhere, someone does something, but you don’t know who. Supposedly this creates mystery. Not in the least! In fiction, an action takes on meaning through the character who performs it. Say someone is driving very fast. That may mean one thing for character A and something else for character B: one person’s hurry makes us laugh, another’s makes us worry. When we don’t know who it is, we don’t know how to read the scene either. We will learn the name a little later anyway, so write it from the start: “The Headman was moving forward in the dark.” I felt this cheap device was unworthy of Nine’s far more important and more beautifully crafted mystery.

Repeated explanations of things the reader already knows also dulled my pleasure in reading. In one section about the Blind Old Woman, when everything is already clear, we have to hear the analysis once more through the Butcher’s thoughts. I don’t want to say much about it; it puts me in a black mood. Why should an author capable of building such scenes need to explain them afterwards? The editor’s essay at the end of the book spoiled my mood for the same reason. Who stands for whom, what is a sign of what – let readers find that out for themselves. What is the point of explaining again, and so closing, what the novel has opened?

The language of Nine, on the other hand, gave me great pleasure: a wide vocabulary, mellow sentences, warm and engaging expressions. Look at this sentence on page 213: “It was so dark that for the first time I saw darkness radiating darkness.” In places like this I am lost in admiration for Elay’s descriptions. On page 78 the Blind Old Woman explains why she cannot remember her age: “In the dark, days, months and years get mixed up. The skein of time slips out of your hands.” There is no shortage of observations like this that reach beyond the life of a single character.

On the language front I also applaud Javid Gadir’s work. A few incomplete sentences and patches of clumsy word order remain, but on the whole one senses serious editorial work. There are also too many instances of sanki (‘as if’) in the text. It wasn’t needed this often. As if, as if, as if… as if we were supposed to count them. The slang, on the other hand, is mostly in its place. Anyone who reads my writing knows my view of slang: it is an inseparable part of the language and, like every word without exception, it is excellent when used in its proper place. Here it adds no “bad manners” to the text; on the contrary, it reads naturally.

The novel is full of mythological references. From The Book of Dede Korkut to Greek mythology, you can find traces of many ancient texts, as well as of modern literature. I should also say that I very much liked the breadth of the author’s outlook. All too often we read authors who never properly received even the secondary education that is compulsory for all. You find grand claims and preaching in their texts, yet the author has not properly grasped the very position they are defending. These lines may sound egotistical to you – they sound a little that way to me too – but I write about this sad reality with a heavy heart. Anyone who wants to surprise readers from every walk of life with a book must, if they are to become a writer, work on themselves constantly – or at the very least acquire elementary scientific knowledge. In this respect I saw no shortcomings in Elay; on the contrary, one can clearly feel a solid foundation beneath his pen. The psychological substrata of the characters and of the relationships between them are built so soundly that nothing seems to come out of nowhere or to be dictated by the author.

Another thing I liked about the characters is that their stories go on even after death. What they “live through” at the moment of death and what befalls them after they die are worked through as well; the author does not leave a person’s story unfinished at the last breath. I won’t say how he does it. But these passages, too, played their part in making me believe in the novel’s strange world. You think, surely now it will go like this – but it goes otherwise, and that otherwise seems more natural.

Amid all these tragedies there is also pitch-black humour. In the midst of carnage and mayhem, among those who cut off heads and spill blood like water, he drops a sentence that makes you roar with laughter. The lines I laughed at with the most admiration were these, on page 329: “He was eating with such appetite that… He ate exactly two.” The novel’s salt and savour lie in its irony and in this humour running beneath the surface. Not every author is granted the gift of writing a novel that is absurd and unexpected, yet persuades you of its own logic. Bravo! Towards the end the novel stumbles slightly on this point of logic, but it never falls.

So there it is. There is a great deal to say about this novel, and I can’t fit it all in here. There were many passages I underlined, writing “EXCELLENT” or “MAGNIFICENT” in the margin – most of all in “The Sixth Day”. This is a book I recommend without reservation. I saw Elay in person for the first time on 23 October, at the Baku International Book Fair. I had heard of him but had not read his earlier books. From now on, I will read whatever he writes.

The unique atmosphere the author has created is something I probably won’t forget for a long time. That is where the power of the pen lies: the novel ends, but the sweetish smell of meat will not clear from the air.