David Bergen's Away from the Dead​

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Goose Lane, 2023)

It begins with a chapter titled “The Lady with the Dog,” for Chekov’s 1899 short story, ends with notes about two-hundred-year-old diaries, and, in between, a pair of lovers is compared to characters in a Tolstoy novel: David Bergen’s Away from the Dead is an homage to storytelling, a reminder that literature endures.
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At the heart of Bergen’s novel is Lehn. Readers meet him straight away, but it takes time to understand that he views his life story as unfolding in concert with the literature that has shaped his understanding of life:

​Of the things that Lehn did not know about himself—and there were many aspects of his life that were hidden from him—was the fact that he measured the timeline of his own life by the lives of the writers he admired, and by their influence upon him, and by the confluence of their words and his actions.

At this point—quarter-way—readers can identify alignments and divergences between the stories Lehn has read and his perspective on his own life. Also by this point, many readers will have recognized the other chapter titles as nods to other stories.

Bergen’s characters are often readers, and Tolstoy’s work also plays a role in The Matter with Morris (2010), wherein Morris discusses Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina —how he'd “always felt that there was a very natural bond between the two books,” how they’re “both about women who are trapped.” Not only are bonds between characters and books important, but bonds between books. (This question of women being trapped is another theme that resurfaces, but saying more would be spoilery.)

In Away from the Dead, the Tolstoy work in question is War and Peace—appropriate because Bergen’s novel is set in Ukraine during the Russian Revolution. It focuses on how ordinary people’s lives are impacted by war and reflects Tolstoy’s belief (expressed at the end of his masterpiece) that history should be told via everyday lives, rather than those of generals and politicians who figure in history books.

And, just as readers are surprised to find Levin’s long-winded observations about agriculture and serfdom in War and Peace—alongside battlefield scenes and love stories like Pierre’s and Natasha’s—other characters emerge alongside Lehn in Away from the Dead, whose experiences raise questions about class and privilege.

The battlefield in Bergen’s novel is everyday strife and violence. The characters’ violations and sorrows—including grief and loneliness—are closely observed; political unrest feels distant, but readers familiar with the historical events (and the ongoing, present-day conflict in Ukraine) extrapolate, which creates a sense of archetypal truth. Bergen’s stories transmit varying emotional intensity according to readers’ beliefs about how reading resonates with reality.

In Bergen’s 2012 novel The Age of Hope, someone gives Hope a James Michener novel to read (1971’s The Drifters, which also explores status and privilege, against the backdrop of another war on another continent); she tears the book into three parts. Later another character tapes—reconnects—the binding: a tangible representation of the differing relationships between readers and books. In Away from the Dead, readers choose the scale of their attention, determine when to focus on a single section, one element in isolation, and when to step back and widen the scope.

It's possible to read Away from the Dead as a simple character study— “The Age of Lehn” —though he’s as unsettled with himself as Hope, who says “I’d be way more content if I didn’t always have to take myself with me wherever I go.” She longs to escape herself, even though she simultaneously feels that she’s not fully inhabiting her own story: “I stand outside of the action, watching, all alone. I am alone.” Lehn is on the margins too, his bookstore far from the frontlines, and he is in conflict daily with the political perspective he’s expected to inhabit.

But it’s also possible to read this story as being more about other stories (which is, partly, why so few plot details are outlined here). Bergen’s novel is slim, his prose spare and direct: room to read between and around the lines. This opens the possibility of reading Away from the Dead through the lens of not only Tolstoy and Chekov, but Gorky and Pushkin, Sterne and Dostoevsky, Mandelstam and Gogol. It also opens the possibility of reading in the context of Bergen’s other books and, spiraling outward, the work of other writers (like Bellow and Kosinski, Coetzee and Lessing, Nabokov and Updike…just a few of Morris’ favourites). Morris’ agent warns him, “Nobody wants to read about unhappiness.” But Out of Mind (2021) suggests the opposite is true: “They [readers] wanted ugliness.”

From beginning to end, Lehn’s story is prismatic, refracting and reflecting all the stories he’s ever known. He recalls Fly in Rawi Hage’s novel Carnival, who searches for meaning in literature: “I sit on books, sleep on them, breathe them.” Every day Fly drives his cab, the body of the car a material connection to his navigation through sorrows small and large; he understands that the “fall of nations and empires begins with the fall of the libraries.”

In Away from the Dead, characters move through matters of nationhood and empire figuratively, too, but also materially, with the soles of their feet connecting with the ground beneath them. There are more boots than feet in this story. Initially this seems like a quirk, but the author’s note illuminates another layer to that story element: right at the end, Bergen stokes the curiosity of receptive readers, insisting that Lehn’s story reverberates beyond the page.
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Away from the Dark ends with another character, Inna, having read aloud from one of Lehn’s books: “The girls did not know these [Greek] myths and fell for them hard.” Readers recall what she said years ago to Lehn: “I think everyone needs some passion, some god to follow. You have yours. It is books.” Theirs is a story of how to walk, how to travel, how to move through time—whether it appears to be at a standstill or unspools in a rush—with a good pair of boots and more books than hands. 

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Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.