Buduneli

by Alejandro Grenier

A clerk designs a flag under artillery fire for a nation that does not yet exist.

He has no training, no time, and no idea what he’s doing. The flag comes out muddy, stitched together from curtain scraps by men who can’t write cursive. A bullet punches through the corner. Yet it flies anyway.

Buduneli is a literary novel about a group of men who decide to will a nation into existence on the steppes of Central Asia, and the dozens of people who, one desperate act at a time, make it real.

Khormuzta is a clerk turned revolutionary who has never led anything larger than a book club. Andrade is a foreign con man who talks his way into becoming a minister of government. Together with a band of idealists who call themselves the Emperor’s Men, they overthrow a crumbling tribal council, survive a civil war, and face two empires who view their country as a line on a whiteboard to be erased.

Buduneli is told through dozens of voices: the clerk who approves apple pie as the national food without ever having seen one, the farmer who internalizes an identity he never asked for, the boy who fires a rocket launcher and earns a word he still doesn’t quite understand, the monk who trades his robes for a rifle and the soldier who trades his rifle for robes. Told through battle reports, fax transmissions, and a polished government website for an annexed republic that never asked to be one, the novel explores what it costs to build a nation from nothing: not just guns and borders, but anthems, cooking committees, and the fragile agreement among strangers that they are, somehow, one people.

5 out of 5 fairies

This was a fun read, cover to cover. If I had to describe the vibe and style, I’d say it’s quite reminiscent of Joseph Heller (minus the insane circular bureaucracy of Catch-22). Grenier does an impressive job weaving a story that is both at times absurd and fascinating in this debut novel. It’s odd to think about – you’re watching a nation be born and strive to stay alive, yet all these little mundane things keep weaving in. Some scenes, if you omitted the bombing and other telltale signs of war, could easily be set in an office or other place that wouldn’t be out of place in the US today. I loved following along with the birth of Buduneli and getting to see things from so many different perspectives as things moved along. If you enjoy satirical fiction, then I highly recommend this. At the end, you have to wonder, how differently will the events of today be remembered in the history books compared to how we experience them as they unfold? And how many nations have a more noble record in the history books than what actually happened?

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Alejandro Grenier is a student at Virginia Tech and a cadet in Army ROTC. His interests run toward the gap between how history gets made and how it gets remembered, and how the difference often obscures what makes history worth remembering. He is bilingual and is learning Russian, with results that are improving. BUDUNELI is his first novel.