"The Friends": A Review of a Novella from Real Stories
Genre: Documentary prose · Comic sketch · A domestic family anecdote
Tagline: "Even a dead rabbit can patch up a friendship"
"The Friends" is the collection’s one openly comic novella, written in a recognizable skaz manner — the narrator addresses the reader directly ("I’ll tell you," "if you please"), deliberately draws out the drawl of a small-town anecdote, and generally behaves like someone more interested in savoring the telling itself than in rushing to the punchline — a device that owes far more to the tradition of oral family legend than to the strict documentary prose of the cycle’s other novellas.
The story, for readers new to it: in a comfortable gated community live two inseparable friends, Natasha and Olga — neighbors close enough to share holidays and keep no secrets from each other. Natasha keeps purebred ornamental rabbits in a hutch; Olga has a curious dog. One day, out on a walk, the dog drags home a dirty but unmistakably recognizable rabbit — the very same, most expensive one, from Natasha’s hutch. Convinced her dog has strangled her friend’s prize pet and their friendship is over, Olga launches a rescue operation: she washes the rabbit in her husband’s expensive shampoo, blow-dries it, combs it out — and, at dusk, secretly returns the animal to its shelf in the hutch, among the others, like a porcelain figurine back on display. She spends the next day in worse suspense than an exam, waiting for her friend’s usual nine-a.m. call — and when Natasha finally comes by, she announces, right from the doorstep: the day before yesterday one of the rabbits died, she and her husband buried it in the little woods nearby, and this morning it turned up back in the hutch, "alive as ever." Listening with the most sympathetic expression she can manage, Olga understands: her dog had nothing to do with it — the rabbit had already died of natural causes before that, and she and her husband had simply, unwittingly, dug up an already-dead animal. There’s nothing left to do but confess the whole truth, shampoo and blow-dryer included; the laughter in Olga’s house that day, by the narrator’s own account, "defies description," and from then on the two friends make each other a pact — to tell the truth, whatever happens, no matter how strange.
The device the whole novella turns on is the tone of a collective, almost theatrical retelling: the narrator keeps comparing what’s happening to a movie and to an Agatha Christie plot, drops in rhetorical asides on behalf of "any normal person," and clearly enjoys the comedy of the situation even more than the two women living it — which is exactly what turns a domestic misunderstanding about a rabbit into something that reads not like a random anecdote, but like a polished family legend, told and retold many times over.
Kadyrov deliberately places this novella inside a collection where the other texts work with far heavier material — memory, loss, childhood trauma — and it’s exactly that juxtaposition that underlines the genre range built into the very idea of a "real story": real life supplies material not only for tragedy but for pure, undiluted comedy, and both registers are equally legitimate as unexaggerated truth.
Quote from the novella: "From then on, the two friends made each other a pact: to tell the truth, whatever happened."
#IskandarKadyrov #RealStories #TheFriends #Review #DocumentaryProse #ComicSketch #LiteraryNavigator #18plus
Tagline: "Even a dead rabbit can patch up a friendship"
"The Friends" is the collection’s one openly comic novella, written in a recognizable skaz manner — the narrator addresses the reader directly ("I’ll tell you," "if you please"), deliberately draws out the drawl of a small-town anecdote, and generally behaves like someone more interested in savoring the telling itself than in rushing to the punchline — a device that owes far more to the tradition of oral family legend than to the strict documentary prose of the cycle’s other novellas.
The story, for readers new to it: in a comfortable gated community live two inseparable friends, Natasha and Olga — neighbors close enough to share holidays and keep no secrets from each other. Natasha keeps purebred ornamental rabbits in a hutch; Olga has a curious dog. One day, out on a walk, the dog drags home a dirty but unmistakably recognizable rabbit — the very same, most expensive one, from Natasha’s hutch. Convinced her dog has strangled her friend’s prize pet and their friendship is over, Olga launches a rescue operation: she washes the rabbit in her husband’s expensive shampoo, blow-dries it, combs it out — and, at dusk, secretly returns the animal to its shelf in the hutch, among the others, like a porcelain figurine back on display. She spends the next day in worse suspense than an exam, waiting for her friend’s usual nine-a.m. call — and when Natasha finally comes by, she announces, right from the doorstep: the day before yesterday one of the rabbits died, she and her husband buried it in the little woods nearby, and this morning it turned up back in the hutch, "alive as ever." Listening with the most sympathetic expression she can manage, Olga understands: her dog had nothing to do with it — the rabbit had already died of natural causes before that, and she and her husband had simply, unwittingly, dug up an already-dead animal. There’s nothing left to do but confess the whole truth, shampoo and blow-dryer included; the laughter in Olga’s house that day, by the narrator’s own account, "defies description," and from then on the two friends make each other a pact — to tell the truth, whatever happens, no matter how strange.
The device the whole novella turns on is the tone of a collective, almost theatrical retelling: the narrator keeps comparing what’s happening to a movie and to an Agatha Christie plot, drops in rhetorical asides on behalf of "any normal person," and clearly enjoys the comedy of the situation even more than the two women living it — which is exactly what turns a domestic misunderstanding about a rabbit into something that reads not like a random anecdote, but like a polished family legend, told and retold many times over.
Kadyrov deliberately places this novella inside a collection where the other texts work with far heavier material — memory, loss, childhood trauma — and it’s exactly that juxtaposition that underlines the genre range built into the very idea of a "real story": real life supplies material not only for tragedy but for pure, undiluted comedy, and both registers are equally legitimate as unexaggerated truth.
Quote from the novella: "From then on, the two friends made each other a pact: to tell the truth, whatever happened."
#IskandarKadyrov #RealStories #TheFriends #Review #DocumentaryProse #ComicSketch #LiteraryNavigator #18plus
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