Review by New York Times Review
FOR years, acceptable portrayals of Soviet women in art were limited to the ideal proletariat, a strong-jawed woman with flashing eyes and scythe in hand, or the fairy tale Snow Queen in furs. It's no surprise that the realistic short stories and pessimistic plays of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, who began writing in the 1960s, were banned until glasnost. Her bleak fictions depicted Soviet women as the human workhorses they were. They did not live in castles or picturesque garrets but in mini-gulags, subdivided apartments, which deprived the generations of families and strangers forced to cohabitate of any sense of privacy. (As a child, Petrushevskaya and her mother lived under a desk in her mentally ill grandfather's room.) Her work was suppressed because she matter-of-factly described the horrors of domestic life in a society that abolished the self. Many of Petrushevskaya's stories can be considered fantastic. Her breakout book in America, "There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby," was cheekily marketed as "Scary Fairy Tales." These stories teemed with grotesque and supernatural elements that masked the real terror: how unrelenting misery transforms human beings into monsters. The new collection, "There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself," is slyly subtitled "Love Stories." These 17 tales, selected and translated by Anna Summers, who herself grew up in those "cramped, ghoulish blocks of apartments," follow Petrushevskaya's writing career from her first published story in 1972 to one published on her 70th birthday in 2008. They are deeply unromantic love stories told frankly, with an elasticity and economy of language. The characters are often pathetic, incomprehensible. "Doctor Zhivago" this ain't. The first lines of the first story, "A Murky Fate," establish the tone and themes of the book: "This is what happened. An unmarried woman in her 30s implored her mother to leave their studio apartment for one night so she could bring home a lover." The lover turns out to be her co-worker - a slovenly, narcissistic married man. The next day she discovers that despite their dispassionate and perfunctory encounter, she is madly in love. Is it possible that she truly desires this toad? Or does she just want to enter the kingdom of tragic women who have loved and lost? Does it matter? Is it so wrong to want to have a love story? A few stories capture a character in a Chekhovian moment of clarity; some read like family lore, recounted without fanfare or urgency; others echo the gossip women exchange like currency. What is consistent is the dark, fatalistic humor and bone-deep irony Petrushevskaya's characters employ as protection against the biting cold of loneliness and misfortune that seems their birthright. Even when a story ends with the narrator suggesting that a couple lived happily ever after, it rings false. We suspect the teller has tired of the story and is deliberately concluding on a mawkish note. What one can cling to is reward enough - a home, even if shared with a host of other miserables; children, even if they are scheming to steal your money and your home; a man, even if he is unfaithful, abusive and unpredictable. THE strongest piece, "Young Berries," which seems to draw on Petrushevskaya's own life, recalls a young girl's stay at a sanitarium where she faces down bullies, finds her voice and begins to write. The narrator becomes infatuated with a beautiful and cruel boy who is drawn to her "whiff of shame." He mocks and torments her, but her victory is in her survival. "The circle of animal faces had never crushed the girl; the terror remained among the tall trees of the park, in the enchanted kingdom of young berries." Characters and settings seem to reappear hazily. Is the woman in "A Happy Ending" scheming to take over her mother-in-law's apartment a grown-up iteration of the 15-year-old girl in "Hallelujah, Family" who gives birth to a child she despises? Do we see the same communal apartment through different characters' eyes in different stories? The sense of sameness, the repetition of landscape, circumstance and emotion is disconcerting. Petrushevskaya's female characters resemble nothing so much as Russian matryoshka nesting dolls, hollow women with a succession of smaller hollow women inside them, with the only solid figure a baby at the core. Maternal love trumps all. Children are the center that holds parents together. Children, even unborn children, console women when the men inevitably leave. We see, again and again, how, in the absence of a child to care for, a man will do, especially if he is abusive, deranged or suitably helpless. So haunted by loss is the elderly woman in "Tamara's Baby" that she takes in a lunatic man she meets at a health resort, scandalizing her family and friends. While their coupling might be perverse, their mutual need is undeniable. It seems fitting that a book that opens with "A Murky Fate" should end with the tongue-in-cheek "Happy Ending," in which a woman, wounded by the emotional abandonment of her son, betrayed by her philandering husband who has also infected her with gonorrhea, secretly inherits an apartment, which enables her to escape. In her absence, her husband is unable to wash or feed himself, or even use a telephone. The discovery that he has become as vulnerable as an infant gives her permission and reason to return. For these women, telling their stories is as necessary as having someone to care for. They tell stories, while waiting in endless lines for bread and trains and promotions that will never come, to feel less lonely. As Joan Didion said, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Petrushevskaya loves her female characters too much to idealize their lives. Their husbands cheat and beat them, but these women take lovers. They have their work and their children. They may not have the heart to throw the bastards out or lock the door against them, but these women hold the keys. In the absence of a child to care for, a man will do, especially if he is abusive, deranged or suitably helpless. Elissa Schappell is the author of "Blueprints for Building Better Girls," a collection of linked stories.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 17, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 clich. 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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
