There Once Lived a Woman…

In Moscow author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s short stories, the boundaries between reality, dreams and the afterlife are porous. Often without realizing it, characters die or wake up from the dead; they converse with ghosts, or experience, in the flicker of a glance, the mystery of love at first sight. In “The God Poseidon,” a woman sees an old friend, who takes her to a splendid mansion where she is living with her new husband, an old sailor who turns out to be the sea god Poseidon. A paragraph later, the narrator learns that her friend, in fact, drowned months before. In “Two Kingdoms,” a woman named Lina wakes up on an airplane, and by the descriptions of the other passengers—“their yellowish faces and black crew cuts,” and the way they sleep “reclining in the same exact way, their parched mouths half open”—we glean that she has entered an afterlife of shifting impressions.

Petrushevskaya’s modern fairy tales are often dark and occasionally revolting. In “Hygiene,” a vile disease wipes out an entire family, and the last one alive, a young girl, is devoured by her cat. “The Arm” follows a colonel as he rides on a ramshackle plane, the pilot of which keeps fretting over a charred stump of burned flesh that rolls around on the floor. Imagination alone accounts for little in Petrushevskaya’s work. What distinguishes the author is her compression of language, her use of detail and her powerful visual sense: One tale finds two murderers in a tavern, surrounded by the shadows of all the people they have ever killed. Not every story here reaches the bizarre perfection of “The Arm,” but Petrushevskaya is certainly a writer of particular gifts.—Amie Barrodale

Petrushevskaya performs cabaret Fri 6 at Russian Samovar and reads Mon 9 at McNally Jackson Booksellers.

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