This slender, uncanny volume\u2014the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.\u2014has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are grouped into four sections: \u201cA Murky Fate\u201d; \u201cHallelujah, Family!\u201d; \u201cMy Little One\u201d; and \u201cA Happy Ending.\u201d But there is little in them that readers might associate with true love or happy endings. Instead, Petrushevskaya delivers a smoking, cast-iron skillet upside the head: promiscuity, serial mendacity, domestic violence, dangerous liaisons, ineptitude, ignorance, geriatric romance, and cringing fear. Love stories? Seamy debacles. Hookup sagas set in a grim Moscow and environs. Coupling stories fraught with meanness, misery, and egregious misunderstanding. Workaday women sharing sour, collective apartments and tawdry, loveless lives. Young women who flower, suffer abuse, and wither. Collision stories: hapless women, old before their time, thwarted by brutal men. Though the men hardly fare better.<\/p>\n
In \u201cA Murky Fate,\u201d an unmarried thirty-something living with her mother engineers a drab tryst with a man who services her with perfunctory courtesy and patronizing affection. But in her sterile office-life world, this confers a blissful memory: \u201cThere was nothing but pain in store for her, yet she cried with happiness and couldn\u2019t stop.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Fall\u201d offers a dry comedy of manners at a state-run seaside resort where vacationers escaping the rainy north come together only to multiply one another\u2019s misery. A gaudy temptress attracts a mooning pack of suitors before efficiently selecting her tall, confident \u201cNumber One.\u201d They find the sex lovelorn travelers yearn for, only to fall prisoner to their coveted exclusion and inevitable teary separation: \u201cOur golden couple has departed. The delicate Carmen and her faithful husband, Number One, are jetting through the frozen air away from each other, back to their children and spouses, back to the cold, and to hard, grim work.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Goddess Parka\u201d a schoolteacher called A.A. goes to summer in the country, rents a porch on a cabin, and falls sway to old Aunt Alevtina who plays Yentl to his bachelor, setting him up with young Nina, but it\u2019s a hard sell: \u201cNina didn\u2019t impress A.A. She was heavy, very shy, with large pale eyes. But he did notice her casual, almost indifferent manner when she was examining some old prescriptions of Alevtina\u2019s\u2014the manner of a true expert.\u201d Only Alevtina\u2019s funeral provides the maudlin catalyst the shy couple requires to find one another and fall into what promises to be a mechanically indifferent relationship.<\/p>\n
Alcoholism, an exposed nerve throughout the collection, drives the story of Ali-Baba, a scheming addict who hocks her mother\u2019s first edition volumes of Russian symbolist poet Alexander Blok for drink and drug money. One of Blok\u2019s own poems speaks perfectly to Ali-Baba\u2019s dead-end existence:<\/p>\n
\nNight, street and streetlight, drugstore,
\nThe purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
\nFor all the use live on a quarter century\u2014
\nNothing will change. There’s no way out. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n