RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewFrom this collection, you will learn how to make little codes from telephone rings to avoid the K.G.B., how to speak in the presence of public officials, how to be a Jew in the Soviet Union. For this reviewer, another Jew who grew up in the U.S.S.R., Iossel’s descriptions ring very true. He is a master of atmosphere. But my favorite moments in the book have little to do with the Soviet reality it depicts, and everything to do with individual human experiences like the ironic and tender portrait in the story Blue, where a blind man recalls how he lost his sight years ago, straining to see in his cell at night while writing poems to an imaginary love ... By the end of the collection, Iossel succeeds in giving an insider’s view of the Soviet Union, but shared through the outsider perspective of a slightly bemused man now living far away. What distinguishes Iossel as a writer, aside from his obvious talent for atmospheric dramedy, is his lucid, musical prose style. Despite his dark humor, metaphysical asides and absurdist turns — or maybe because of them — his stories are delightfully easy to read; Iossel’s marvelous sense of rhythm dazzles the reader. We can’t stop turning the pages of this book, no matter what kind of tunnel might await us at the end of the light.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewLudmilla Petrushevskaya’s slender, fragmentary memoir, The Girl From the Metropol Hotel, is strangely much closer in tone and craft to Soviet absurdist poetry than it is to these classic memoirs. That poetry is exemplified by authors such as Daniil Kharms and Aleksander Vvedensky, known for their farcical depictions of early Soviet life in all its casual brutality ... The translator Anna Summers’s inspired introductory essay helps to present this book as a memoir of war, events therein echoing the misfortunes currently inflicted on other young girls from Ukraine to Syria and beyond. In this context, Petrushevskaya’s powerful memoir reminds us that, as Ingeborg Bachmann once wrote, 'war is no longer declared,?/?it is continued.' Like a stained-glass Chagall window, Petrushevskaya’s Soviet-era memoir creates a larger panorama out of tiny, vivid chapters, shattered fragments of different color and shape. She throws the misery of her daily life into relief through the use of fairy-tale metaphors familiar to fans of her fiction ... Ultimately, the girl emerges not only uncrushed but one of Russia’s best, and most beloved, contemporary authors, which brings to mind Auden’s famous words about Yeats: 'Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry.' This memoir shows us how Soviet life hurt Ludmilla Petrushevskaya into crystalline prose.
