Three Novellas About Family
November 10, 2014
This third collection of Petrushevskaya's short fiction to be translated into English brings together three stories about family by a Russian writer whose work was long suppressed, primarily for its daring to express such controversial topics as domestic dissatisfaction and discord. In "The Time Is Night," originally written in 1992 and published in Germany before it was available in Russia, a sharp-tongued woman juggles committing her elderly mother to a mental hospital, caring for her beloved young grandson, coping with her alternately manipulative and ungrateful adult children, and keeping them all afloat with her poetry. "Love themâthey'll torture you; don't love themâthey'll leave you anyway," remarks the narrator in the midst of her long, often caustic and increasingly desperate monologue. In the intentionally melodramatic "Chocolates with Liqueur," a woman endures domestic violence silently until a crisis brings the situation to a head. And in "Among Friends," the strongest story of the group, a woman convinced she's dying takes shocking measures to ensure the well-being of her son. Written in 1988 but censored for 17 years, "Among Friends" offers a glimpse into Soviet politics and cultureâat both what they valued and at what they feared.
September 15, 2014
Three deceptively simple tales explore the dark terrain of the greedy human soul. Winner of Russia's Triumph Prize and deft chronicler of beset Muscovites, 76-year-old Petrushevskaya (There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself, 2013, etc.) returns with three bewitching novellas. Although her writing is not overtly political, her gimlet-eyed appraisal of humanity resulted in her work being banned in the Soviet Union for decades. The emotional palette here is gray-toned: love reduced to sex, motherhood to jealousy, empathy to guilt. The ethical dimensions contract; instead of questioning how one ought to behave, Petrushevskaya's characters simply react, trying to safeguard their meager possessions from suffering relatives. In the longest novella, The Time is Night (previously published as The Time: Night and shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize), an older woman struggles to make financial ends meet and emotional debts balance. Both an insightful poet and a vindictive woman, Anna can at once tenderly care for her grandson and viciously insult her own daughter. The moral quandaries intensify, however, when her son returns home from prison, her daughter hints at moving back home, and her own mother's bed at the local hospital is lost. The second tale, "Chocolates With Liqueur," grafts an Edgar Allan Poe motif onto a tale of marital horror. Lelia, a young nurse who has lost her parents and grandfather, manages to carve out a life for herself-that is, until Nikita comes along. Too frightened to reject his advances, Lelia soon finds herself in a loveless, abusive marriage to a man sinking into mental illness. The final novella, Among Friends, traces the Friday night parties of a group of friends. They are bound primarily by their fear of informants and their infatuation with the seductive yet mercurial Marisha. Together, they endure political pressures, broken marriages and deteriorating parents-all of which the shrewd, often calculating narrator observes mercilessly. But there is one betrayal that cannot be endured. Infernal, haunting monologues.
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October 1, 2014
In her latest collection, Russian author Petrushevskaya is interested in the emotional and psychological toll living in Soviet Russia took on families, with an emphasis on how women, specifically mothers, coped. The novella "The Time Is Night," an extended interior monolog of the poet whose troubled home life is the subject of the piece, will be a difficult read even for readers familiar with Petrushevkaya. Anna is unreliable and overwhelmed and her narration chaotic. This is intentional, a stylistic representation of a woman on the edge in a culture of silence and secrecy. The remaining two stories, "Chocolates with Liqueur" and "Among Friends," are more typical of Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby--the narration is easy to follow, and there's a twist at the end of each--but they are darker, more in line with "The Time Is Night." VERDICT Though first-time readers of Petrushevskaya may want to start with the two short stories before tackling "The Time Is Night," this is an important if disturbing work, one of the few translations available focusing on the domestic life of Soviet Russia and one of the most challenging examples of "women's fiction" available in English.--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD
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