Ismailov creates a world alive with witches and mermaid, although it is a challenge to sort the literal from the figurative. Others echo the mundanity of everyday life, with the pouring of tea, trips to the cinema. Some scenes occur on an epic scale of gods, myths, wise men. As with the tales themselves, much of the novel is elusive, just beyond our immediate understanding. It is almost impossible to know which are authentic, and which are the authorвЂ™s own creation. Sometimes captured in the speech of its protagonists, sometimes as stories within stories, fables within fables. Such proverbs can be found throughout Gaia, Queen of Ants. Gaia, Queen of Ants, Hamid Ismailov, Shelley Fairweather-Vega (trans) (Syracuse University Press, November 2019) One who has not built a home in the eyes of patience Will have difficulty building one on the Jayhun river As goes one of the novelвЂ™s many-likely fictitious-aphorisms:

Any patience the novel may demand from the reader is an effort well-rewarded. However, so impressive is the novel that one need not be familiar with other Uzbek works or culture, or even other Central Asian writing, to recognize its high quality. Given this scarcity of accessible modern Uzbek literature, the casual English language reader could be forgiven for not knowing upon what basis to judge the relative worth of a novel like Gaia, Queen of Ants by Hamid Ismailov. Those that have found their way into the English language are usually classical texts or themselves translations of Russian translations of the Uzbek originals. Few contemporary works of fiction from Uzbekistan are translated into English directly.

The myth of the ant queen