The Body of the Soul

September 15, 2023
Centrifugal, pensive, often elusive stories by the one of the greatest living Russian writers (and leading anti-Putinist). "After breaking up with her latest lover, Martha committed suicide in an indecently literary manner: having gone to the hairdresser and manicurist, she threw herself under a train." So Ulitskaya, hitherto known in English for her novels, dispenses with the high-living mother of a pensioner who's determined to take a quieter route out of the mortal world than her mother took decades earlier; instead, Alisa determines that she's going to stock up on pills and depart on her own terms. The trouble is, she needs a doctor to write a prescription, something easier said than done, and a proposition packed with tragedy all on its own. In another story, lesbian lovers marry in Amsterdam, "the most tolerant city in the world," though when their family comes from Azerbaijan and Armenia to find two women at the altar, they intolerantly turn around and fly home, "having thereby refused to participate in the forthcoming blasphemy." The couple is happy all the same--until, that is, death intervenes, as it so often does in Ulitskaya's stories. Punctuated with a handful of portentous intervening poems ("I'm entering the final episode, / and whether it's sweet or sour matters not, / so long as it formulates the ultimate meaning"), the stories have a sometimes surreal edge, as with an evocative ghost story in which a pathologist is visited by the spirit of a young man on whom he has just performed an autopsy. The stories are, beg pardon, haunting, though marked by occasional odd turns of phrase that would seem to be direct renderings of idiomatic expressions that don't quite travel well in English: "Normal men with appropriate sexual attributes never struck root in this family." " 'He's a student of mathematics, not a dog's prick!' " Even so, the stories are marvels of economy and the unexpected twist, each a memorable tour de force. A welcome introduction to the short fiction of an essential writer.

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October 27, 2023

Ulitskaya (Just the Plague) is an award winning contemporary Russian writer, television host, and political activist. Recipient of the prestigious Russian Booker Prize, she is also a celebrated short story writer and this new collection (translated by Peaver and Volokhonsky) is a moody and slightly mystical glance at life, loneliness, and cadavers. There is a dry Raymond Carver-esque element, a sedate and slightly distanced tone, that steps back from the drama; it is a style that focuses not on the tension or the psychological fireworks, but on the mundane repetitions of a life filling up with moments and mysteries. There is also a strangely surreal undercurrent here, and elements of Garcia M�rquez and Chekhov lurking in these quiet and curious tales about gender issues, mortality, and the unfulfilled promise of an Armenian sorceress. These are stories filled with the quiet untenable tension of dreams, desires and decisions, the tensions that hold us together, without letting us get too close...broken families, broken people, silent lives. VERDICT For libraries trying to build a world literature collection, or looking for something new in the short story genre, this collection could be a perfect addition. --Herman Sutter

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