The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko by Scott Stambach Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“How do you even start a book you know is going to be your last?”- The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko, Scott Stambach

Seventeen-year-old Ivan Isaenko is a life-long resident of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus. For the most part, every day is exactly the same for Ivan, which is why he turns everything into a game, manipulating people and events around him for his own amusement.

Until Polina arrives. 

She steals his books. She challenges his routine. The nurses like her. 

She is exquisite. Soon, he cannot help being drawn to her and the two forge a romance that is tenuous and beautiful and everything they never dared dream of. Before, he survived by being utterly detached from things and people. Now, Ivan wants something more: Ivan wants Polina to live.

Sorry for the radio silence this week. I underestimated the amount of time it would take me to read a book, and then decided last minute that I wouldn't write a review in favor of discussing it in my February Wrap-Up. So stay tuned for that. I picked this book up primarily because of the setting and also because it reminded me, in a very superficial way, of All That Is Solid Melts into Air, which as you know, I loved. This book was not like that. This book was more like The Fault in Our Stars with added radiation. But let's start from the beginning, shall we?

I actually kind of liked the introduction. It reminded me a lot of the way Lolita (that is the aforementioned book that took up most of my week) opened up, with a made-up literary agent telling his thoughts on the story. In fact, the structure of the book is very Lolita-esque, except instead of Humbert Humbert pleading his case we get Ivan Isaenko describing his intense love for the dead Polina. Give me Humbert Humbert any day. He was a far better main character, interesting in a despicable way and real in a horrific way. But, of course, Lolita is one of the greatest English language books of all time (by the way, one of my nitpicks is that Lolita isn't considered Russian literature because, yes, the author was Russian but the book was written in English and has nothing to do with Russia at all). Needless to say, this book is not. And a lot of that had to do with the titular character himself. 

Ivan's problem was that he, like all the other characters in this book, were obviously just that. Characters. The last time I felt this way, as you might remember, was earlier in the month when I read History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund. The worst offenders of this were Ivan and Polina. They read like any main character and love interest in any pretentious teen novel. Ivan was supposed to be brilliant and well-read, with some "adorable" Sheldon Cooper aspects to make him seem quirky and different and like he doesn't connect with humans the way others do. I hate these types of protagonists so much, because I find them annoying, hence why I don't like John Green MCs. They constantly talk about the Universe and the inevitability of death and act like it's the first time anyone has ever had such thoughts before, because no one can rival them in their depth. Of course, this is probably a matter of personal preference, and I for one prefer Zusakian daydreamers or tall dark and gloomy (think the literary equivalent of Harold from Harold and Maude) as my leading men, since I find them more sympathetic (and, let's be honest here, more attractive too). Polina was even more hollow than Ivan. Despite Stambach's efforts to give her interests in hopes that would give her a personality, she was still nothing. I wonder, now, if the author was trying to do to her what Nabokov had Humbert do to Lolita, make her into a dream for Ivan to love rather than an actual person, but I think I'm giving the author too much credit in that interpretation. Their romance made me feel nothing, and her death felt too emotionally manipulative to actually affect me.

My next problem lies with two of the supposed "antagonists", chiefly Nurse Lyudmila. Now, one of the author blurbs compared this book to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. With respects to Mr Butler, this book has about as much in common with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as The Fault in Our Stars does. The only thing that I found even remotely similar was the character of Nurse Lyudmila. Stambach obviously wanted to make her into a Nurse Ratched-type character, but it was unsuccessful mainly because Stambach never developed her. Nurse Ratched is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time because of how absolutely evil she is. Kesey never wasted time having Chief tell us explicitly what a sociopath Ratched was, he showed us. Nurse Ratched is the only fictional character who has ever actually made scared me. Her tactics are purely psychological; I don't think she's ever actually hit a patient. She doesn't need to. Now let's compare her to Nurse Lyudmila. Ivan spends all this time telling us what a psycho she is, but we see no actual evidence of that except for when she hit Polina and injured Ivan's hand. That is so out of the blue that it just makes her feel even more flat than she was before. All it made me do was wish for the actual Nurse Ratched to show up. I'm sure that would have improved this book immensely.

But by far my biggest disappointment was the lack of actual Russian or Belarusian culture. With the exception of a few Russian words interspersed and casual mentions of Slavic culture, as well as the whole Chernobyl thing, with a few name changes this book could have taken place in an American hospital no problem. It's even inaccurate in the little things that really make a story real. I remember one particular erroneous scene when Polina is speculating what Nurse Lyudmila calls the director, whose name is Mikhail, in bed. She mentions both Mick and Mickey when really the only nickname that Mikhail really has is Misha. A simple Google search could clear that right up. There's also the inclusion of a black nurse named Katya. What could have really worked is if she was an African American or English nurse who came to Belarus to work at the hospital, kind of like as if she was in a sort of "nurses without borders" program. Of course, she would also have an English or American-sounding name, like Kate. The Slavic countries are some of the most Caucasian countries in the world because the only way to get diversity is to get immigrants, and no one in their right mind would want to immigrant to Belarus in 2005 when the economy sucked thanks to the downfall of the Soviet Union. She also spoke in a very stereotypically American black dialect, calling Ivan "child" a lot. That's not even touching upon the blatantly racist reputation that many Slavic countries have.

On that note, nitpicks! Most of these have to do with medical terms and such that I consulted Nurse Mother as well as Google about. Number 1: I think Stambach needs to look up the difference between a coma and a catatonic state, as well as the definition of a coma. One can't fake a coma, and come out of that faked coma in time for dinner because a coma is a prolonged unconscious state. It is also a medical condition. I think whenever Stambach refers to a coma he's talking about a catatonic state, which is something completely different (though he uses those two terms interchangeably). A catatonic state is characterized by the lack of motion or reaction to outside stimuli. The key here is that the person experiencing catatonia is still conscious. It's also mostly a psychological condition as opposed to a medical one. There's also another scene where Ivan has to give blood to Polina. Polina is AB-, Ivan is O-. Now, in my understanding of blood types, ABs are the universal receivers. So really, Polina could have just gotten blood from anyone; she didn't need it from Ivan. But that makes for a nice chapter heading, so I guess we're going with it.

A few other nitpicks include Polina wanting to read Lolita for her final book, and mentions that it's not very depressing. Now, Lolita, if you've been living under a rock your whole life, is about a girl who was sexually abused for years by her stepfather who was obsessed with her and when she finally escapes him she falls in with a guy equally as horrible only to meet another man, one who seemed to actually love her only to die a week before her 18th birthday in childbirth. On Christmas, nonetheless. I found that book infinitely more depressing than this one. Also, Ivan and Polina both find it suspicious when they discover he has a file that has the names of both his parents blacked out with marker, which leads to the revelation of his father. Ivan was born in 1987. The Soviet Union was still reeling from Chernobyl, and the censors were going crazy trying to cover up the impact. This book would have been more realistic if his parents turned out to be high Soviet officials who abandoned their infant son because it looked bad for them to have a radiation deformed child. That scenario would have worked well, and even given the opportunity for Stambach to get in some Soviet history, which would have made me very happy indeed.

And one last thing. Female last names in Russia end with an -a. The only exception being Ukrainian last names that end in -enko. Those stay the same. 

But what did I like about this book? The Russian lit references, of course. I liked the occasional reference to Russian culture (but Jesus stop with the cabbage okay could you get more stereotypical). The prose, while very much inspired by John Green's, went down easier than Green's usually does, with far less eyerolls than usual. I liked Nurse Nataliya. This book was a quick read for me, and I found it strangely compelling, like I couldn't put it down. I also appreciated that the horrors of cancer and radiation diseases weren't shied away from but exposed, something I found The Fault in Our Stars lacking in, though I question the realisticness of someone giving a blow job and then dying three days later.

Other than that, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko, I'm afraid, didn't really impact me as much as everyone said it impacted them. I felt so emotionally removed from this book that I didn't even get a little choked up when Polina died. And don't tell me it's because I already knew she was going to die; I knew Rudy was going to die halfway through The Book Thief and I still cried like a baby when it actually happened. One scene in particular stands out to me as to how I felt about The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko. Ivan is wondering if his life is real or not after reading Lolita (a book where you can never be sure of anything that actually happens). That scene made me laugh, because Ivan's life never seemed real to me. He was always nothing more than a character in a story to me.

5 out of 10