Sentence by Mikhail Iossel Review by John Mwazemba

Sentence by Mikhail Iossel

Review by John Mwazemba

Publisher: Linda Leith Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-77390-174-9

Publication Date: August 1, 2025

Pages: 197 pages  

Sentence by Mikhail Iossel: Existence, Nostalgia and Loss

Some stories are written not in ink but tears. That’s true for Mikhail Iossel’s collection, Sentence. It is about a man on a losing streak against time. The stories are told in a gripping, breathless and sometimes disorienting rush—in flowing, stream-of-consciousness narration. In an elegy that is an aggregate of bad things—withering losses at the brutal lottery of life—he stretches a taut wire piercing the accumulated years past and the fragments that remain—the detritus of a life now in its sunset years. 

As time passes, it only becomes darker as the years wreak havoc on all aspects of the narrator’s life. The loneliness compounds and the hole he feels inside grows bigger, but he can only use sentences to throw tantrums, complain and brood. He zeroes in on a singular kind of loss that has haunted him of late: a bemoaned, irrecoverable time. 

The narrator describes himself as a “man of losses… wondering… where they have gone, the golden days of his spring”? This is best condensed in the chapter entitled “Life Happened”. In it, he sums up the entire collection when he recounts a melancholic moment as he was being interviewed by a journalist. The narrator shows the journalist a few photographs of himself in his twenties. Upon seeing the photographs, he says that the journalist, “… said, in a carefully hesitant voice, ‘but… but… what happened’”. Life happened. 

Yes, life is what happened between his twenties and the time of the interview as an older man. An unceremonious vanishing of youthful vigour. A dimming of the years. A fading of the brightness. A brutal erasure. Breath by laboured breath. The entire collection is about this kernel of truth: what happens in a man’s life over the years because time does to a man what flowing water does to a rock over time. A quiet decay happens that soon becomes apparent. The rock begins cracking and, eventually, disintegrates into pieces. The man starts having wrinkles. Illness. Time is up. Ah, life!

Iossel probes the depths of the human condition, highlighting uncomfortable truths, unanswered questions and unexplored emotions. In this aspect, reading Sentence is like the experience Susan Sontag described as participating “in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability”. It is all too human as the narrator recalls distant days when his country and home city had other names.

However, Sentence can befuddle the reader used to simple, linear narratives.  There are complex sub-stories in parenthesis; a thought is started, dropped midsentence, picked up and dropped again in an interesting touch-and-go style. The sentences have the poetic force of a hammer blow—wandering and playful but arresting—sometimes pithy and nuanced and sometimes simple and direct but desperate.

In the story entitled DMD, the narrator is on a train returning to Leningrad from Moscow before departing for America in less than two weeks. In the train, the narrator meets another older Jewish man who is dying because, “only about two and a half weeks earlier… my compartment-mate… was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer and given three-to-four months to live… two Soviet Jews imminently about to escape the… Soviet Union for good, if admittedly in two… alternate modes of dying—one real and the other… metaphorical”. 

In the book, the Soviet Union is a plaything, a muse and a night terror—red in claw and tooth. After the narrator leaves the country, it becomes a misremembered Jerusalem; he is always longing for it. Being Jewish, the narrator almost echoes the voice of another Jewish narrator, one accustomed to being constantly uprooted from place to place, as Jews have endured throughout history in Rebecca Sacks’ novel The Lover, declaring, “This year we are slaves, next year may we be free in Jerusalem.” 

Sacks continues that, “In the narrative books of the Bible, ‘Zion’ refers to a particular geographic region of Jerusalem—the section where King David built his residence. However, in later books of the Bible… ‘Zion’ shifts from a concrete referent to something more metonymic as it comes to refer to the entire city of Jerusalem… ‘Zion’ becomes a shorthand for Jerusalem only in the later books of the Bible that emerge during exile. Only when the city is lost… and its people in bondage—only then is Jerusalem called ‘Zion’… The city is ruined, the Temple is smashed, the people are scattered. In that absence, your longing may flourish into a new song, one that lives inside your heart. Call that place Zion—the place we love from afar. My lover is mine, and I am my lover’s, but only at a great distance”. 

Like the ancient Scythians described by Herodotus as carrying their dwellings with them on their wagons wherever they went, in Iossel’s narrator, the old Soviet Union rises like an apparition, somehow always shrouded in a mist like a ghost. Iossel dispels that mist in wisps—sentence by sentence. Only when the country is lost does it become ‘Zion’, the place he loves but only from afar. It is in this aspect that Iossel is like Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past, where the memory of the past is haunting and pervasive. 

The narrator talks of “another lifetime…  seeing shadows of shadows, sharp-edged sunny spaces, on a benign mid-September Leningrad afternoon…”. Oh, the memories. Oh, Leningrad. He left the Soviet Union because he was fed up with it but in retrospect, he says “I miss my life as it used to be, before everything”. As life used to be. Before the uprooting. Before America. Before Canada. Before Trump.

If the narrator’s nostalgia is Proustian, his sense of alienation is Kafkaesque. He is burdened by nonexistence (thoughts of death), existence (life) and dangerous existence (hanging on life by a thread). Life is complex—and sad. About time, he says, “it makes us older, it makes us weaker, it makes us sadder and weepier, it makes us lonelier”. He poignantly says, “I’m just a writer of unwritten stories, and sometimes late at night I sit up in bed, panting… knowing I’ll never again see St. Petersburg, the city of my life”. Ah, St. Petersburg. The dull innocence of your sun and the half-heartedness of your rain.

Life is a puzzle. Things that do not make sense happen. The narrator cries out: “life generally is like that—just as you barely begin to understand why you came here, it already is time to leave”. This reminds one of the character Joseph K in the novel The Trial by Franz Kafka. Joseph K is arrested, sentenced and executed for a crime he doesn’t know. The executioners slaughter his throat and he dies in a nondescript quarry in a deserted scrubland. As he feels the life ebbing, Joseph K voices his protest against his inhuman end. “Like a dog,” he says sadly.  Joseph K’s crime could be that he is simply human. And that had to be punished. Maybe the narrator in Sentence is suffering because he is human. Maybe living is just painful. “That’s life,” as Iossel’s narrator would put it.

Mikhail Iossel came to the US, from the former Soviet Union, in 1986, and started writing in English in 1988. Back in Leningrad, USSR, he worked as a research engineer and was an underground (samizdat) writer and literary-journal editor. In the US, he graduated with an MA in English/Creative Writing from the University of New Hampshire and subsequently was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.Prior to moving to Canada in 2004, Mr. Iossel had taught creative writing at the University of Minnesota, New York University, St. Lawrence University, and Union College. In 1998, he founded Summer Literary Seminars: one of the world’s largest and most innovative independent international literary programs, holding conferences in Russia, Kenya, Lithuania, Italy, and elsewhere.  He writes both in Russian and in English, and his work has been translated into a number of foreign languages. He is the author of “Every Hunter Wants to Know,” a collection of stories (W.W.Norton), and co-editor of Amerika (Dalkey Archive) and “It All Depends on Who You Believe” (Tin House/Bloomsbury), anthologies of contemporary Russian writing. Currently he is finishing work on several book projects: “Samizdat,” a collection of stories; “Winterbreak,” a novel; and a book of novellas set both in the US and Russia and united by the commonality of narrative perspective. He was the recipient of thee SHHRC research grant, National Endowment for the Arts award, and the Guggenheim Fellowship.

John Mwazemba is a writer, editor and publisher based in Nairobi, Kenya. He now assists people in writing their memoirs. He is the immediate former Regional Director of Oxford University Press (East Africa). Before that he worked for Macmillan Publishers where he started his editing career. He has worked as an editorial consultant for the United Nations, the World Bank, Transparency International, and many other organisations. You can contact him at: johnmwazemba@gmail.com

7 January 2026