[freeringsf]

Lotta Lotass: Tredje flykthastigheten (The Third Escape Velocity), 2004

That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. Ever notice how Armstrong, the first man on the moon, the representative of the democratic and capitalist United States of America, almost quoted Mao there...? The Great Leap Forward, a nice name for a spectacular failure. And yet, reflected somewhere in the common name for it, a common wish.
To enter orbit, an artificial terrestrial satellite must achieve the first escape velocity, about eight kilometres per second, or twenty-nine thousand kilometres per hour. To completely escape Earth's gravity, the craft must achieve the second escape velocity, which is just above eleven kilometres per second or nearly fourty thousand kilometres per hour. When the spacecraft reaches that speed, it can reach any planet in the solar system. The third escape velocity, about seventeen kilometres per second or over sixty thousand kilometres per hour, can take the craft out of the solar system and on to other worlds. Can a cosmonaut survive such speeds? Lotta Lotass' Tredje flykthastigheten (The Third Escape Velocity) centres around Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, his life, and the lives of his colleagues. It's not non-fiction. It's not a biography.

True, there's biographical elements to it; we get to follow young Yuri Alekseyevich growing up in a small farming community during the war, seeing the fighter planes soar and crash as the war comes closer, hearing rumours of Heroes of the Soviet Union performing superhuman tasks, dreaming of one day flying himself. There's technical aspects, like the one quoted above, but never technobabble for technobabble's sake.

Because what Lotass has written, in a prose that's at the same time clinically precise and an allegorical dream, is of course not just about our first steps to exploring the actual cosmos but also about inner space. It's not just about the man at the front receiving the praise but about the entire space programme, including the ones who perish without ever reaching... call it heaven, call it transcendance, call it wisdom or peace or nirvana; the need, and at the same time the folly, of reaching for the stars, of doing the impossible, of becoming more than merely men: become cosmonauts, those who can navigate the universe at will. And to do this, obviously she takes liberties with the real story - such as wildly exaggerating Gagarin's first flight, extending it from one orbit to 14 to allow Gagarin more time in space, as if she couldn't stand the thought that he has to land sometime, and also giving him manual control of the capsule; the illusion of being in control of one's fate while stuck in orbit... only to land and become a prisoner of his fame, never to reach space again. Watching as the Soviet space programme continues, piling up casualties, falling behind its lofty goals, never reaching the moon.
Vanya! Look! What we thought were walls were just wooden fences. Unguarded and so thin that the magpies fly right through. They were raised by your father and your mother. See how the lines on your face reflect theirs. Vanya! What we thought was a prison was just a barn in the middle of the forest. Its bars, the shadows of the mighty tree under which it rests. Easily, without having to toil, we can walk across the wide and open field. Look, Vanya. Who is that, walking towards us with his hands across his stomach? Comrade! Do you remember me? I'm Anatoly Tokoff. The year after you were picked up, I reached 12 Gs in the centrifuge and my guts were torn to shreds. Lotass, not completely unlike, say, Jenaette Winterson, moves deftly between fact and fiction, myth and technology, and even for the most part manages to pull off the (perhaps needlessly tricky) technique of shifting perspective frequently - sometimes even in the same sentence - to emphasise that the novel, whatever its formal narrative, is really in the first person plural. And it may soar, but in the end its accomplishment is in the way it's tied to the ground.

Of course, like the nameless engineers that built the rockets, this novel will remain unavailable to most of you unless some kind publisher translates this...

[Dyslermergerb]

thanks man.

ah, yuri gagarin. as a boy he and sigmund j?hn, the (East) German cosmonaut were my heroes.

[bypeTeenehalT]

Why did Lotass choose Gagarin, I wonder? I remember that the rather zany Finnish author Rosa Liksom also wrote about him in her own way. Her 1987 book V?lisasema Gagarin was translated into Swedish as Station Gagarin and published by Whalestorm and Weedstrand back in 1990. I wonder whether Lotass has read it. Or whether there are any points of similarity beyond the title.

[Dyslermergerb]

Thanks Bjorn for the helpful input
this is the only book of hers, curiously to've been translated into German, wiki sez, so I'll pick it up thanks