Love Stories
November 12, 2012
Full of meaningful, finely crafted detail, this story collection set in Russia manages to tackle the grimmest of situations head-on with compassion and a great deal of warmth. In “Two Deities” a one-night stand between a woman in her mid-30s and a man of 20 results in pregnancy and the decision to raise the child together. The troubled “Alibaba” sells her mother’s rare books to get money for drinks and longs to find a man who doesn’t live with his mother or wife, so that she might stay the night. In “Tamara’s Baby” a man named “A.A.” who makes life miserable for his friends by always dropping by unannounced finds contentment with an older woman he meets at a health resort for the indigent. Dasha, in “The Impulse,” shaves her head and ignores her son, who subsists on a diet of ice cream and frozen pizza, because of the stress of her relationship with a married man. The author does a wonderful job evoking the world of shared apartments and heavy drinking, where to get from a village to the capital “one had to ride the train for seven days, then a bus for thirty-six hours, then another bus, which sometimes didn’t run, for seven more.” However cruel the characters are to each other and to themselves, the author is always fair, broadminded, and even loving toward them, making this book both supremely gritty and realistically life-affirming.
November 1, 2012
Petrushevskaya's (There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby, 2009) short stories transform the mundane into the near surreal, pausing only to wink at the absurdity of it all. The literary collection opens with an informed and knowledgeable introduction by translator Summers, a literary editor born in Moscow. Petrushevskaya, first celebrated as a journalist and a playwright with her prose only published after glasnost, here writes of characters, women most eloquently, mired in environs so dull as to focus their attention toward drink, sex and, most critical of all, a decent apartment in which to live. In "A Murky Fate," a lonely spinster pleads with her mother for privacy to entertain a lover; "insensitive and crude," yet an assignation that brings fulfillment. In "The Goddess Parka," a penniless provincial schoolteacher is seduced by his vacation landlord's distant cousin. "Like Penelope" chronicles an alliance between Oksana, "a girl beloved by her mother but no one else," and Mischa, whose hand-me-downs Oksana wore. In "Two Deities," an older woman and young man contemplate their son, the product of a "few minutes of half-naked passion on the cramped kitchen sofa." The most unconventional is "Hallelujah, Family!" four lives laid out in a list of the 45 notes. Then comes "Give Her to Me," about a struggling composer and lyricist but beyond the starving artist cliche. In "Milgrom," a Lithuanian beauty is robbed of her son. The four concluding stories are "The Adventures of Vera," "Ero's Way," "Young Berries" and "A Happy Ending," where an STD infects a marriage with hate. In these tales of pessimism and gloom, stoicism and resolution, life real and life absurd, Petrushevskaya delivers 17 stories in four groups, many of them cold, dark and vodka-drenched; some rampant with alcoholism and cruelty; and nearly all struggling in contemplation of soul-damaged men and maternal women. Think Chekhov writing from a female perspective, burnished by the ennui of a soulless collectivist state, contemplating the influence of culture and politics on love and relationships.
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January 1, 2013
The length of this collection's title is in inverse proportion to the brevity of the stories, a contrast neatly reflecting Petrushevskaya's covert but stinging irony. She won awards and accolades for the fantastic tales in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (2009). The scouring realism showcased here in 17 works spanning her long writing life is the narrative mode that made her famous and led to her being banned in her native Russia. These strange, violent, and devastating stories of love warped by poverty, anger, and pain embody the Soviet era's soul-starving shortages of dignity, shelter, and freedom. Petrushevskaya's afflicted characters are trapped in wretchedly crowded communal apartments and suffocating family configurations, bereft of privacy, comfort, and hope. Out of misery coalesce the weirdest and most warped of romances, some disastrous, some grotesque, some liberating, while mothers' love for their children brightens an absurdly cruel world. Petrushevskaya's phenomenal skill in coaxing radiance from resignation, courage from despair, makes for universal and timeless stories of piercing condemnation, sly humor, profound yearning, and transforming compassion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)