Pale

Even the premise of this book brings a smile to your face: the misadventures of a three-hundred-year-old vampire living in Ganja. The events take place during the pandemic, and the story is told in the first person by a protagonist whose name we never learn. He is forced to donate blood to a vampire who periodically changes donors – as for why and how, you will find out in the book. In return, the vampire recounts to this young man what has befallen him over the course of three hundred years. The novel ties these episodes in neatly with historical figures and events from the periods in question. In short, I liked the book; if I find the time, I would even read it a second time. I recommend it to you as well.

The work won first prize in the “Young People's Novel Competition” organized by the publishing house “Teas Press” in 2023.

The book's greatest strength is that it fulfils its relatively modest ambitions rather well; its main weakness is that the text has not been properly worked through. When the vampire recounts events that took place two hundred years ago, the dialogues and narrative are poorly matched to their period; the words chosen do not sound in the least archaic. For instance, when the vampire (Malik Fagan) tells of an episode that occurred some two hundred and eighty years earlier, he uses phrases such as “I stepped up onto the wooden platform” or “I unscrewed one of the bolts” (there are many such examples; I have given only two). True, he is telling all this in the present day, but had the author added a touch of historical colour to the language of those times, the text would be far more pleasurable to read. This problem also shows up in the dialogue.

Beyond that, the entire novel is filled with flat, technical sentences, almost entirely devoid of literary texture. At times the author tries to provide a logical explanation of things (for example, where the blood goes when a vampire drinks it and how it is digested), yet in certain places he makes serious errors. In a duel scene, a bullet fired from a pistol grazes the arm of a target standing twenty paces away a few seconds later. A bullet does not take several seconds to cover twenty paces, dear writer!

I believe the novel could profit from a thorough edit, be shortened a little, and be made somewhat more beautiful.

If we set aside these minor points, the author's intellectual background enriches the novel: the alignment with historical events is handled well; the vampire explains why he does not wish to bite everyone and turn them into vampires by invoking the rules of evolution, and so on. The author's reflections on society, truth, and conscience are also pleasing.

The humour and irony in the text are of a high order: I applaud him for that.

All in all, I liked it. Pale is a novel worth reading. On this occasion I congratulate Ashraf Ashrafov and look forward to his future work.