Yana Wagner "Tunnel" Moscow: AST, 2024

Yana Wagner's new text is a disaster novel that transcends the genre. A car tunnel, the people trapped within, the growing terror of the unknown, the need to coexist and fight for survival—all of this, of course, is present in full accordance with the rules, but, as with other good books, it turns not into a pleasant chill in the pit of your stomach, but into a real social drama. This is because Wagner's characters are not extras in the scenery, but literary types, and her narrative is not one account of the main event, but several: about what happens to people in the moment, about what happened to them in the past, about how the human and the not-so-human coexist within a person, and about how (how can one not recall Sartre here) hell is other people.

“Already on the second lap, right in the middle of the empty passage between the sleeping rows, where in the cars on both sides people sat and lay motionless, like dead people, in uncomfortable positions, the senior lieutenant, stupefied by the heat and lack of sleep, suddenly thought that everyone had really died, but for some reason he had just missed the moment when it happened.”