Robert's Alibi by Declan Burke-Kennedy

Despite some pretty fundamental flaws in his story-telling technique Burke-Kennedy's 1988 novel has drawn me back to it a number of times.
Geoffry, the central character and sometimes first-person narrator, is an Irish novelist living in a mountain cabin in the Basque Country.
Although on the French Pyrenees his cabin is close to the Spanish border and the separatist conflict, which was much more virulent when the novel was published, occasionally impinges.
Indeed the historical identity of the Basque people – described by Burke-Kennedy as the equivalent of Europe’s native Americans who were subsequently displaced and marginalised by later waves of invaders – is one of the many layered themes of this novel.
Linguistic similarities between obscure Tibetan dialects and Euskara (the Basque’s indigenous language) are posited, although evidence is never presented.
Slightly more convincing is the similarity between the four pronged Basque Lauburu found on ancient tombs and the Tibetan swastika (an ancient Hindu and Buddhist symbol that existed long before it was hijacked by the Nazis – see below).
Geoffry’s solitude in his mountain retreat is interrupted by the arrival of an Irish woman, whose name we never learn, and her son Julian.
Although he has no idea who she is, Geoffry soon becomes aware that she is very familiar with him and believes that he was her late husband Robert's best friend who used to come and spend his holidays with Geoffry.
Geoffry plays along, initially hoping to learn more information and recall if he had ever actually met Robert, but he is also attracted by her physically and by her obvious vulnerability, and is reluctant to disillusion her in case she leaves.
He learns that Robert is missing and presumed dead following an avalanche while climbing in the Himalayas and that his widow wants Geoffry to edit the manuscript of a book he was writing about the region, its religions, links to the Basque Country and even European Druidism.
As Geoffry becomes further implicated in Robert's deception he and the widow work on the manuscript which initially fascinates him then repulses him. Parts of Geoffry's own past start to click into place – an affair with a Basque photographer called Noelle who took part in photographic expeditions to the Himalayas and who often disappeared out of Geoffry's life with no explanation.
While Geoffry has become complicit in providing an alibi to Robert’s deceptions against his wife, he gradually comes to the conclusion that he has also been deceived.
He in turn embarks on a deception, luring Noelle back to his bed by making her believe that Robert is still alive and that Geoffry is the only person who knows where he is hidding out.
The fairly soap-operish storyline and the author’s frequent insistence on ‘telling’ us that Geoffry is an enigmatic solipsists to whom women are constantly shooting “interested glances” and preening themselves to make him notice them, do grate slightly.
We also get an extended rehearsal of Geoffry's Nietzschean ideas, which just smacks too much of the author trying to tell us what he believes.
This is more a novel of ideas – perhaps Burke-Kennedy wanted to write the book that his fictional character Robert did. A quick google did reveal some speculation on ethnic links between ancient Tibetans and Basques.
There is a good novel in here trying desperately trying to get out but that is burdened down with simply trying too hard to make its central character Geoffry appear more interesting.

A Basque Lauburu

A Tibetan swastika

Jung and Moriarty

John Moriarty strikes me as a Jungian figure although he never really mentions the Swiss psychologist in his writings. Yet he is constantly drawing upon archetypes to illustrate his philosophy. His autobiography Nostos could also be read as a diary of individuation during which the floodgates to his unconsciousness are opened and almost sweep him away in a deluge of libido.
Jung defines an archetype as an image that exists within the collective consciousness in-potentia. Incarnations of these archetypes keep recurring throughout history that can be seen as a representation of human experience and which are personified in the stories and characters we find in religions, myths, legends and art. Woman as temptress whose actions result in the down fall of a male hero, for example, can be seen in the archetypes of Eve, Delilah, Salome, Cleopatra and Morgan le Fey.
In Invoking Ireland, Moriarty, who died in 2007, focuses almost entirely on Irish myths to try to illustrate his belief that there has been a schism between what we as humans instinctively are and what we have become and how we choose to live. In it he becomes a character living in a parallel Ireland called Fódhla lamenting the wrong turn that his fellow countrymen, and the rest of the Western world has taken.
For Moriarty the mythological peoples of the Tuatha Dé Dannan and The Fomorians personify the schism. The Tuatha Dé Dannan where a magical people who “spent their time acquiring visionary insights and foresights and hindsights, acquiring the occult knowledge and the occult art of the wizard, the druid, the witch, these, together with all the magical arts, until, masters in everything concerning them, they had no equals in the world”. (Invoking Ireland P25). It was their “particular delight to be of one mind with the wind and rain”… “you could walk through the land and not know they were in it”.
By contrast the brutal Fomorians are out to exploit nature, rather than be a part of it. They had features “hanging like seaweed when the tide is out, their tongues the colour and shape of cormorant tongues, the clamour of the ocean their talk”. Their arrival in Ireland saw "forests cut down, rivers rerouted, towers everywhere, it was soon clear it must come to a fight.” (P28).
But in the battles that followed it was ultimately the Fomorians who were victorious and who dominate the psychic and physical makeup of the modern Irish while the Tuatha Dé Dannan became spectral figures “harmonised to all things [they] were of one mind with the wind and rain. Now again, you could walk through the land and not know they are in it." (P28)
Despite the Fomorian domination of modern Ireland, Moriarty contends that there is still enough of the Dé Dannan in us that we can sometimes hear and see beyond the coarse world of Ireland to the more subtle one of Fódhla and to the parts of us that still inhabit it.
“Yet we a rougher people who came later to Ireland, out alone in lonely places we will sometimes hear their [Tuatha Dé Dannan] music”.
It is not just the music of the Dé Dannan that Moriarty believes we can still catch snatches of, but also their wisdom.
He quotes WB Yeats: “I know now that the revelation is from the self, but from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches birds to make their nest; and that the genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments of our trivial daily mind.” (Invoking Ireland P92)
Moriarty plunders the writings of philosophers, poets and mystics to reiterate this. On page 215 of Invoking Ireland he quotes Jacob Boehme: “In man is all whatsoever the sun shines upon and heavens contains, also hell and all the deeps.”
Moriarty elaborates: “In other words, we aren’t only a microcosm, the universe in little. In us also are the transcosmic immensities as heaven and hell, and the deeps as well, all of them.”
On the same page he quotes Hopkins: “O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed…”
Joseph Conrad: “The mind of man is capable of anything, because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.”
And, as he has often done in his other books, repeatedly, from Friedrich Nietzsche: “I have discovered for myself that the old human and animal life, indeed the entire prehistory and past of all sentient beings, works on, loves on, hates on, thinks on in me.”
Moriarty’s life, as depicted in his books seems to me to be a Jungian exercise in integrating the unconscious (Dé Dannan) aspects of himself with the coarser conscious (Fomorian). And it is a venture fraught with risks and which, as described in Nostos, left Moriarty floundering on the verge of one of Hopkins’s precipices and occasionally tipping over into psychosomatic chaos that left him both mentally and physically debilitated.
But while the process is a risky one it is something that Jung argued is a necessary one if we are to reach our full potential. For him consciousness is comprised of the ‘ego’ that aspect of us that is defined by the world we live in and and a result of experiencing everyday reality, while the unconsciousness is the domain of the ‘self’ – in Moriarty’s world the ego could perhaps be personified by the Fomorian archetype and the self by the Tuatha Dé Dannan.
In his commentary on Jung’s work Anthony Storr, quoting the psychologist writes: “The goal toward which the individuation process is tending is ‘Wholeness’ or ‘Integration’: a condition in which all the different elements of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious, are welded together. The person who achieves this goal possesses 'an attitude that is beyond the reach of the emotional entanglements and violent shocks – a consciousness detached from the world’. Individuation, in Jung’s view, is a spiritual journey; and the person embarking upon it, although he might not subscribe to any recognised creed, was nonetheless pursuing a religious quest. By paying careful attention to the unconscious, as manifested in dream and fantasy, the individual comes to change his attitude from one in which ego and will are paramount to one in which he acknowledges that he is guided by an integrating factor which is not of his own making.” (The Essential Jung, P229).
While the archetypes (personifications of aspects of the unconsciousness) that dominate Invoking Ireland are predominantly Irish, Moriarty also draws copiously on myths, legends and religions from all over the world. Again and again he reiterates his central message that humanity has taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way and is not paying attention to what those myths and the characters who are inhabiting them are telling us about ourselves. We are more than the base Fomorian (self) that inhabits this world and exploits it for our own benefit, we are also Tuath Dé Dannan and can access vast untapped reserves within ourselves if we so choose.
Moriarty quotes Rilke: “However vast outer space may be, yet with all its sidereal distances, it hardly bears comparison with the dimension, with the depth dimension of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be within itself almost unfathomable.” (Invoking Ireland P201/202).
Invoking Ireland for me it is a symbolic journey of Jungian individuation in which Moriarty opens his consciousness to unconsciousness content and casts himself as a man who lives in Fomorian Ireland who is given a glimpse of Fódhla and occasionally even ripped out of everyday reality and relocated into the Ireland of the Dé Dannan.
Invoking Ireland by John Moriarty is published by The Lilliput Press

Indian Himalayas

A GROUP of people are bent over a bundle on the ground –a middle-aged woman and some younger men, including one with a ponytail sprouting from a shaved head.
Gradually they start to shuffle the bundle towards the river, the man with the shaved head descending a couple of steps into the fast-flowing water and with the help of the others eases a large black plastic bag towards himself.
He tilts the opening and pours a cloud of dust that briefly swirls on the undulating surface of the river before dispersing. The shaven-head man submerges the black bag and fills it with water, washing out the remaining contents before releasing it as well to be swept downstream.
The man in the River Ganges lifts handfuls of water to douse his upper body before mounting the steps to the ‘ghat’ – a paved area with steps dipping into the river where Hindu rituals take place.
He briefly rejoins the woman and young men to stand and gaze downstream as the ashes of their dead relative disperse before making way for others who wish to perform rites, rituals or simply douse themselves in the river’s waters.
The River Ganges, worshipped as a manifestation of the goddess Ganga by Hindus, emerges from the Himalayas just a few kilometres from Haridwar.
The city has added spiritual significance because Hindus believe it is one of the sites where a celestial bird called Garuda accidentally spilt drops of the elixir of immortality.
As evening darkens to night those gathered on the ghat release wreathes of flowers with candles burning in the centre into the river to swirl in aimless eddies before catching a current and being swept
way.
Others gather in groups to chant mantras accompanied by drums, tinkling bells and crashing cymbals.
As well as milling pilgrims, and aimlessly meandering cows of course, there are wandering sadhus – holy men dressed in orange robes. Some of the younger ones have simply dropped out for a while but for the ones with longer beards it has become a way of life.
However, away from the ghat the spirititual frenzy takes on a more commercial tone and the streets bulge with souvenir kiosks, food stalls, shops selling mobiles phones, hotels and ashrams.
It’s all a bit tacky – Lourdes or Knock for Hindus.
Green hills rise in the countryside surrounding Haridwar towards the Shivalik mountain range that in turn ascends into the Himalayas.
Ragaji National Park is home to herds of wild elephants, two species of deer, monkeys, tigers and leopards.
In the distance a herd of elephants lingers close to the shelter of a tangle of bushes, a mother and baby lagging behind.
Sitting in a tree a white eagle screeches in the air while a stork, visiting to escape the savage winter of Siberia, soars overhead.
As the day fades the bushes rustle, the deer stand still, tense and sniffing the air but the tigers and leopards stay hidden and I leave disappointed.
From Haridwar I shift base 17 kilometres up the road to Rishikesh where the Ganges pours out of the Himalayas and down through India and into Bangladesh.
Here too Hindu pilgrims gather on the ghats to worship at its multi-tiered temples, but the shops are more new agey and the restaurants, while still for the most-part vegetarian, offer pizza and Tibetan cuisine catering for western spiritual seekers and trekkers who also gather here.
Rishikesh gained its international reputation in 1968 when the Beatles and their entourage came to find enlightenment in the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Back then the ashram included a hospital, post office, supermarket, hotel, luxury apartments and meditation pods overlooking the Ganges but it has lain abandoned since the early ‘70s.
It lies past the last settlements of Rishikesh and there are no signposts to it – a sign on the padlocked gate says ‘No Entry’, however an accommodating security guard (who is happy to accommodate
the 50 rupee note I slip him) unlocks the gate and ushers me in.
Pod number nine was where John Lennon meditated but it is cracked and crumbling now, tendrils of jungle slithering through its brickwork. The pathways are overgrown and strewn with huge elephant turds.
The luxury hotel, the hospital and even the Maharishi’s private accommodation are all being slowly sucked back into the foliage which was once cleared to make way for them.
At 1,500 metres the temple on top of Kunjapuri isn’t the highest in the area but it is from here that I catch sight of the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas proper.
Stooping into the temple to be engulfed by a billow of incense an old woman marks a tilik – a pressed thumb of red dye and some grains of rice – onto my forehead.
Brightly painted, almost cartoonish paintings adorned the walls as pilgrims mutter prayers before coming back outside to ring a bell.
The rituals and the significance of the temple are mysteries to me but the shimmering snow-covered crags on the horizon – Bandarpoonch and Chaukhamba, which is nearly 8,000 metres high – are hauntingly beautiful and I want to be on them, even more so as my superbly knowledgeable guide Chandar tells me about expeditions he has led or taken part in.
We start to descend along the winding road which leads up to the temple but soon cut off into barely defined track of shifting shale, past scrub and forest.
Occasionally the foliage is broken by a strip of cultivated land and a few houses, but Chandar tells me that most of them have been abandoned as people flee the unpredictability of life in the country for the crowded but more stable incomes provided by the cities.
Chandar stops to talk to a group of women gathering sticks and while I can’t understand the conversation their narrow, sinewy faces say more about the lives they live than language could ever do.
This article first appeared in The Irish News on March 10.

The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño

Are dark, sinister forces at work, the embodiment of evil, or is the narrator, Udo Berger, just losing touch with reality and experiencing the world through a cloud of paranoia?
He is a German on holiday with his girlfriend Ingeborg in a Mediterranean coastal resort in the Catalonian region of northern Spain.
While Ingeborg suns herself on the beach, Udo works in his hotel room on strategies for a board game called The Third Reich.
He is an arrogant man, contemptuous of the frivolity of the tourists around him and full of self-importance over his reputation as a champion gamer.
Udo and Ingeborg fall in with another German couple, Charly and Hanna, and through them with two Spaniards, the Wolf and the Lamb, who Udo tolerates rather than likes.
He is also drawn to a badly scarred man El Quemado (the burnt one), who hires out pedal boats to tourists during the day and sleeps beneath them on the beach at night.
Charly seems to be going off the rails, drinking heavily and getting in to fights, disappearing until one day he sails out to sea on his windsurf board and doesn’t return.
As events unfold Udo becomes haunted by the notion that there is a guiding hand, or force, behind what is unfolding and is convinced that El Quemado is the personification of that force.
As he watches people coming and going in a hotel “convinced they were at the center of the universe” Udo muses: “What did it matter whether Charly was alive or not, whether I was alive or not? Everything would roll on, downhill, toward each individual death. Everyone was the center of the universe! The bunch or morons! Nothing was beyond their sway! Even in their sleep they controlled everything! With their indifference! Then I thought about El Quemado. He was outside. I saw him as if underwater: the enemy.”
Ingeborg and Charly’s girlfriend, Hanna, return to Germany, leaving Udo alone with the Spaniards and to begin a game of The Third Reich with El Quemado in which the stakes are never defined but which Udo becomes convinced will result in a terrifying forfeit.
He tells the German-born hotelier, whose husband is dying, and with whom Udo has an unconsummated affair: “And if I tell you that I feel something intangible, strange, circling around me in a threatening way, do you believe me? A higher force keeping watch over me.”
This “forgotten” novel by the late Roberto Bolaño was apparently discovered among his papers after the Chilean novelist’s death.
It has a raw and unfinished feel to it, as if he were working out ideas, playing with tropes and styles, all of which more fully realized in his later, more mature fiction.
There are better Roberto Bolaño novels already out there, but The Third Reich stands up well and gives us an intriguing insight into how their author’s world view was informed paving the way for those better novels and the underlying sense of dread and tangible evil that weaves through them.

From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón

Icelandic magic realism, sinister comedy, and dark deeds unfold in a series of vignettes and set pieces in From the Mouth of the Whale. Natural historian, runic scholar, poet, and healer Jónas Pálmason has been exiled to a remote island in 1635 as the Protestant Reformation sweeps Catholicism and pagan superstitions underground. Literally.
In an early tale Jónas, aged five, is swept along with his family and the people of his village to a mound where spirits are said to live. The earth is cleared from the side of the hill to reveal a buried statue of the Virgin Mary, still venerated by the older people who have been forced to abandon their former faith and its icons.
As he grows older Jónas gains a reputation as a healer and a shamanic figure, an animist who seems to share a psychic link with the naked Iceland landscape in which he travels. But from early on he arouses suspicion.
Sjón—deftly translated into English by Victoria Cribb—writes a rich layered prose that, like his protagonist, seems to spring from the extremes of Icelandic dark and light.
Describing Jónas composing a poem on Iceland’s birds with a youthful accomplice Sjón writes: “Láfi had begun the poem, the first three stanzas were his, but had run out of birds and inspiration by the time I turned up. As we walked from farm to farm we took to chanting the poem together. He recited the first verses, which he had knocked together with some skill, and I slid into the metre—slipped into like a tongue into the socket of a well-boiled sheep.”
From early on we know that Jónas has been exiled with just his wife for company. She constantly berates him for “that sort of nonsense that got us here in the first place.”
“That sort of nonsense” is Jónas’s apparent mastery of dark arts, his reputation as an exorcist and healing skills that are rooted in the folklore of his country and pagan rites.
He admits himself that he brought unwelcome attention to himself by “meddling in affairs too deep for a poor poet, by which I had provoked enmity of powerful men with who I could not contend, failing to realize they were jackals, not lions, that they would not be satisfied until they had severed my head from my body.”
Jónas seems at times to live in a hinterland between the harsh reality of his life in 17th century Iceland—the deaths of three of his children and the communal frenzy that resulted in the slaughter of a group of Basque fishermen—and an esoteric hinterland, grounded in nature but which shimmers into other worldliness.
These experiences define him and draw down the antagonism of the puritanical Christians who now control his country, who burn books and execute heretics, and who want to impose their worldview on those who do not share it.
Switching from first to third-person narrative, From the Mouth of the Whale is a story of a man out of sync with the time in which he lives but whose very sense of being is wired into the physical environment into which he was born.
Beautiful prose, sharp observation of nature, folklore, poetry, grotesque violence, human loss, and outright comic chaos weave in and out of this confidently written novel in which the narrative tone is in perfect pitch with the story being told.

Acid Mothers Temple - Auntie Annie's, Belfast

Driving guitar noodles built around a single chord, aural landscapes layered in real time, bird calls, manic chuckles and all-out over-the-top explosive guitar.
An evening in the company of Acid Mother's Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO takes you through gently nodding, hypnotic trance to moments when, if you’re that way inclined, you can headbang your way into head-rush ecstasy.
Yet somehow in the middle of the sonic chaos that they are producing the band members seem to be just outside of it all, gently swaying during even the most feedback driven frenzies.
This laidback attitude was evident from the point of entry into the upstairs venue at Auntie Annie’s in Belfast's Dublin road where drummer Shimura Koji and guitarist/synthesizer (and according to the album notes on their latest album) dancing king Higashi Hiroshi, sprawled at the door beside a table laid out with a dozen or so albums, including their just released The Ripper At the Heavens Gate of Dark.
Lead guitarist and band founder Kawabata Makoto was also wandering round with a glass of red wine in his hand being ignored, or perhaps simply unfazed, by those who had paid to see him play.
The audience of a 100 or so mixed serious musos, people about town, students, hippies, metallers, grunge kids - nearly all male.
The band ambled on stage and spent about 10 minutes messing around with equipment before Hiroshi began twiddling his keyboard to produce those '50s B-movie sci-fi screeches which somehow define AMT's 'space rock' credentials.
The Led Zepplinesque Chinese Flying Saucer from their new album was given a good 10-minute workout, allowing Makoto to flay at his guitar while not seeming to move very much.
Hiroshi seemed to sway, as if slightly out of time - not in rhythmical sense but as if he was in fact chronologically out of time, in a different dimension - to the frantic rhythms in whose production he was taking part.
Bassist Tsuyama Atsushi took on most of the lead vocals and, from where I was, seemed to be in control of the loop programme that allowed the band to record different noises, both vocal and instrumental, that were then banked and replayed and added to, to create an aural collage over which hypnotic guitar and bass riffs were laid.
Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix all suggested themselves as big time influences (tracks on the new album include Back Door Man of Ghost Rails, Shine On You Crazy Dynamite and Electric Death Manta, the clues are writ large for those who don't twig on musically).
Yet there is also something indefinable about AMT, I hate to say it, but a Zen-like quality, a musical Koan in which the absurdity of the sonic chaos and apparent stillness of the band shocks the audience in to a state of enlightenment.
Or maybe, as for the two headbangers who spent much of the evening in front of the stage, it was just pure kick-ass metal to swing your head to and occasionally raise a single-fingered insult towards the band.
If I was writing this review as a Haiku it would read:
Loud guitars screeching
reeds in rivers sway.
Acid Mothers Temple.

Vilnius, Lithuania

Getting lost in a strange city can be unnerving, especially when you find yourself in the less salubrious areas, but having survived the experience it can be quite invigorating and leave you feeling that you have peered behind the tourist façade.
The centre of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius oozes quaintness: narrow cobbled streets, crumbling buildings, baroque churches – both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox – tavern-style bars and restaurants and even clanking armoured guards outside the presidential palace.
Surrounding the old city is a more functional belt of late 19th/early 20th century buildings rising three to four storeys and it was in this area that we ended up staying – a good 20 minute walk to the more picturesque part.
However, Lithuania is a former region of the USSR and that legacy is evident in the outlying suburbs where functional blocks of flats and industrial estates sprawl.
Most Lithuanian street names seem to have five or six syllables which when squeezed into a map can make them difficult to read – well that’s my excuse for getting lost anyway.
The advantage was a long peregrination into areas which were well of the beaten tourist trail but left me with a smug feeling of having experienced Vilnius in a more intimate way than if I had simply traipsed the cobbled roads and the not unpleasant streets leading back to the apartment where I was staying.
Although there is a distinct Lithuanian national identity the country has had historical ties with Poland and been claimed as part of Russia at various periods in its history. The onion-towered Orthodox churches stand testament to that legacy.
Lithuania’s 50-year membership of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is grimly marked by The Museum of Genocide Victims located in the former headquarters of the KGB. Its main purpose is to remember the country’s partisans who resisted Soviet occupation until the mid-1950s. Tens of thousands were arrested and sent to gulags thousands of miles away, often with their entire families and their stories are told in words and pictures.
In the cellars below are dozens of prison cells where the dissidents were kept before being deported and where others, even deeper underground in a sinister bunker, were executed.
During the Second World War Lithuania was occupied by Nazi Germany and the country’s Jews were gathered into ghettos in Vilnius and murdered there or sent to concentration camps. Their fate is commemorated in a small but poignant museum and the former ghettos are close to the city centre.
There are more than 30 museums and art galleries listed on the tattered tourist map which led me astray but quite often these seemed to have disappeared or to be inexplicably closed.
A museum of Russian Art was closed on the two days that I tried to get in to it and a long trek – four kilometers each way – outside the city to visit a museum dedicated to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin also proved fruitless. There were signposts, but no museum, or at least I didn't see it.
Pushkin never actually visited Vilnius, although his grandfather lived there and one of his sons did as well. Neither did Californian psychedelic jazz-fusion guru Frank Zappa, but there is a statue to him in Vilnius anyway which, after a fair bit of searching I did manage to track down.
A 30-minute bus trip took us to the small town of Trakai on Galvė Lake, where a 16th century castle overlooks the surrounding lush green countryside and five linked lakes.
The architecture here is unique and refelcts the history of many of Trakai’s residents whose ancestors were brought from Crimea 700 years ago.
I was expecting the food to be stodgy – blood sausages and cabbage with a side of gherkins and stubborn black bread – and to be fair it was there if you wanted it. However, the menus in the restaurants that I visited were varied and surpsingly fresh and healthy.
A Ukrainian restaurant close to our apartment was a highlight with superb borscht and some excellent fish dishes. The surprise treat was a bowl of cold beetroot soup, served with a hard-boiled egg and a dollop of sour cream. It shouldn’t work but somehow it did.