The time--night

Cast as a diary of scribbled notes written at night by Anna Andrianovna, a poet and mother whose life is an unending round of crises involving the basic necessities of living space, food, and money, Petrushevskaya's novel is a crushingly intense account of one woman's struggle for survival in late Communist Russia. Anna's oldest son is about to be released from prison; her promiscuous daughter still lives at home, along with her children and current lover; and all depend on Anna for everything. Accordingly, she lives at the edge of impossibility, yet at the novel's close, is in the process of bringing her senile, psychotic mother home to prevent her certain death in an insane asylum as well as to preserve the old lady's pension for the family. Limning the interplay between Anna's rich inner life and her desperate circumstances especially well, Petrushevskaya proffers a bleak portrait of Russian society and of the burdens carried by its women. ~--John Shreffler

Since she appeared on the Russian literary scene in the 1970s, Petrushevskaya has produced a steady outpouring of short stories and plays; today, she is generally considered to be one of the finest living Russian writers. This novel, the first of her works to appear in America, portrays the gritty, day-to-day life of ordinary Russians. The loosely structured narrative consists of a manuscript written by the now deceased Anna Andrianovna, a minor poet, interspersed with diary entries by Anna's feckless daughter, Alyona. Anna is desperately trying to hold on to her small apartment in Moscow while fending off the relentless demands of her two grown children and their families. Andrei, her son, is a petty crook recently released from prison; out of work and unable to free himself from a bad crowd, he constantly hits up his mother for money and threatens to move back home. Meanwhile, Alyona, who has a knack for involving herself with unsuitable men and getting pregnant, alternates between living at home and, after dumping her children with Anna, simply disappearing. And then there's Anna's senile mother, who clearly belongs in an institution. Petrushevskaya focuses on Anna's increasingly desperate situation and her conflicted feelings about her role as a mother, a daughter, a woman and a poet. While the facts of the story are relentlessly depressing, the author's signature black humor and matter-of-fact prose result in an insightful and sympathetic portrait of a family in crisis. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Awakened in the middle of the night, Soviet poet Anna Andrianovna pours out her grief in scribbled notes at the kitchen table. Anna is a women on the edge, a mother and grandmother scraping out a miserable existence in Moscow as she struggles to provide food and shelter for her extended family, most of whom abuse her kindness, ignore her advice, and shrink from her gestures of love. Anna's story moves at a breathless pace, becoming nearly incoherent as dawn approaches. The book's strength lies in Anna's character and the terrible irony with which she describes her daily life and frustrating attempts to understand the people she loves, with so little hope of reciprocation. This wry American debut, shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize, is highly recommended for all fiction collections.-Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Short-listed in 1992 for the newly established Russian Booker Prize, Petrushevskaya's short novel (her first to be translated into English) is especially meaningful if its literary echoes are pre-established for the non-Russian reader. The narrator is an aging poet named Anna, pointed namesake of Anna Akhmatova, who shares her great predecessor's fate of having had a son in jail. But there the close resemblances end, for this Anna is in a sense an anti-Akhmatova: a frump without mystery, grace, or beauty in suffering. Her pain is homely, and what feeds her poetry is anyone's guess. She supports and lives with any number of essentially ungrateful relatives, mostly her flighty daughter Alyona; the two children Alyona bears with various unsatisfactory consorts and then pretty much gives up to her mother's care; Anna's own gone-around-the-bend mother; and now and then her son, Andrei--no noble gulag-ite, but a cadging, thankless wretch. The life here is hectically, hilariously close: Russian domesticity at its most unsparing, with everyone in each other's hair, minds, lives. Anna's narrative is interspersed with Alyona's romantic and hopeless diaries (read on the sly by her snooping mother, who, much to the author's credit, is anything but a saint), which operate as a plane of yearning for heights that daily life never reaches. The novel's affective core, though, is Anna's love for her grandson Tima, and it's here that Anna's credibility as a poet comes to the fore: ``Great thick curling lashes, little fans! All parents, and grandparents especially, love their babies physically like this, make them make up for everything else in life. It's sinful love I tell you...But what can you do? Nature intended for us to love.'' Told in an intimate, loose, over-the-back-fence style, this is an alternately funny and desperate book--a welcome introduction to a strong talent.

Awakened in the middle of the night, Soviet poet Anna Andrianovna pours out her grief in scribbled notes at the kitchen table. Anna is a women on the edge, a mother and grandmother scraping out a miserable existence in Moscow as she struggles to provide food and shelter for her extended family, most of whom abuse her kindness, ignore her advice, and shrink from her gestures of love. Anna's story moves at a breathless pace, becoming nearly incoherent as dawn approaches. The book's strength lies in Anna's character and the terrible irony with which she describes her daily life and frustrating attempts to understand the people she loves, with so little hope of reciprocation. This wry American debut, shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize, is highly recommended for all fiction collections.-Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y. Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information.

Since she appeared on the Russian literary scene in the 1970s, Petrushevskaya has produced a steady outpouring of short stories and plays; today, she is generally considered to be one of the finest living Russian writers. This novel, the first of her works to appear in America, portrays the gritty, day-to-day life of ordinary Russians. The loosely structured narrative consists of a manuscript written by the now deceased Anna Andrianovna, a minor poet, interspersed with diary entries by Anna's feckless daughter, Alyona. Anna is desperately trying to hold on to her small apartment in Moscow while fending off the relentless demands of her two grown children and their families. Andrei, her son, is a petty crook recently released from prison; out of work and unable to free himself from a bad crowd, he constantly hits up his mother for money and threatens to move back home. Meanwhile, Alyona, who has a knack for involving herself with unsuitable men and getting pregnant, alternates between living at home and, after dumping her children with Anna, simply disappearing. And then there's Anna's senile mother, who clearly belongs in an institution. Petrushevskaya focuses on Anna's increasingly desperate situation and her conflicted feelings about her role as a mother, a daughter, a woman and a poet. While the facts of the story are relentlessly depressing, the author's signature black humor and matter-of-fact prose result in an insightful and sympathetic portrait of a family in crisis. (Sept.) Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information.