MixedThe New York Review of BooksOf the many other odd things Stepanova does not explain, the oddest is why, having established that \'telling these histories\' is both impossible and objectionable, she tells us her family history anyway. It is fragmentary and ambivalent, the lives of her assorted relatives are (as she keeps insisting) perfectly ordinary, the chapters devoted to them are called \'not-chapters,\' and there are no detailed portraits or developed stories, but history it is, nevertheless—in narrative form and in chronological order, with a clear cast of characters and multiple layers of background ... She is perfectly capable of reconstructing the past—with a vivid imagination and in seamless prose—but she believes she is not supposed to, so she keeps interrupting herself, apologizing for an occasional plot line and assuring her reader, against clear evidence to the contrary, that \'nothing can be made out now\' ... Sentence by beautiful sentence, Stepanova seems to have written herself into a corner. She wants to memorialize the dead but cannot reach them because memory is faulty and no longer exists, having been replaced by postmemory ... Stepanova is an accomplished stylist and subtle essayist. She could have gone against fashion to make sure a little part of the past “didn’t simply dissipate into the air, unremembered and unremarked upon.” Instead, she produced an assortment of glass boxes with some of her \'indistinct relatives\' inside and added a series of elaborate reflections about why that was not a good idea. Rather than painting portraits, she snapped some photographs, many of them beautiful, most of them selfies.
Alex Halberstadt
MixedThe New York Review of Books\"... he writes Vassily’s story as best he can, adding some background and filling the landscape with monsters of his own invention. We almost never hear from Vassily directly. What we get is an omniscient narrator’s third-person account of what Vassily did or thought (or may have done or thought). The sole direct confession—about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944—gets the same treatment, with no follow-up questions ... There is plenty of archival information ... But Alex does not go to the archives, has no clue about the time and place he dreams about, and does not ask Vassily any specific questions (from what we can tell) ... The unease the reader feels over...novelistic passages is made more acute by the obvious implausibility of some elements of the background ... When locating hell in countries with names, pasts, and flesh-and-blood inhabitants, writers—especially memoirists—are expected to set limits to their imagination.
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