Overview

Hanuman's Travels, which was shortlisted for the Russian Booker in 2010, translated into German and French, and put on the German stage, is the picaresque tale of two asylum-seekers, one a Russian Estonian man (the narrator) and the other an Indian (the protagonist), and about their daily lives in a Danish refugee camp and on the road in the late 1990s. While they are waiting to go to the Danish island of Lolland, which is said to be a paradise, the two companions in misfortune survive in any way they can. Among scams, big and small disgraces, humiliations and lies, a map is gradually drawn - a detailed map of itineraries where the hopes and the fears of thousands of marginal people flounder and intertwine. Andrei Ivanov was inspired to write this novel by his own vicissitudes as a stateless person living in Denmark. Their struggle at times engenders dismissiveness and even intolerance, but also humanity, courage and the wisdom born of experience and resignation.

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9781908251978

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Andrei Ivanov was born in Estonia in 1971 and grew up in “a typical Russian working-class family”. Although he sees himself as part of the Russian literary tradition, he identifies Estonia as his home country and his creative point of departure. Having graduated from Tallinn University as a Russian philologist and written his thesis on the language of Vladimir Nabokov, Ivanov briefly worked as a teacher, travelled to Scandinavia and explored Denmark for a number of years living in a hippy commune. His Russian-language novels Hanuman’s Travels (2009), Bizarre (2013) and Confession of a Lunatic (2015) drew on his experiences in Scandinavia. The Harbin Moths (2013), won the prestigious literary prize NOS in Russia. Hanuman’s Travels was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize (2010) and won the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s Prize for Russian-Language Literature (2010). First published in Tallinn in 2009, it was released in Moscow in 2010, translated into Estonian (2012), German (2012) and French (2016), and staged at Thalia Theatre (Hamburg, 2014) by Ene-Liis Semper and Tiit Ojasoo of Theatre NO99.

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