There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In
Three Novellas About Family
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $5.99
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, the masterly novellas that established her as one of the greatest living Russian writers—including a new translation of the modern classic The Time Is Night
“Love them, they’ll torture you; don’t love them, they’ll leave you anyway.”
After her work was suppressed for many years, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya won wide recognition for capturing the experiences of everyday Russians with profound pathos and mordant wit. Among her most famous and controversial works, these three novellas—The Time Is Night, Chocolates with Liqueur (inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”), and Among Friends—are modern classics that breathe new life into Tolstoy’s famous dictum, “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Together they confirm the genius of an author with a gift for turning adversity into art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This third collection of Petrushevskaya's short fiction to be translated into English brings together three stories about family by a Russian writer whose work was long suppressed, primarily for its daring to express such controversial topics as domestic dissatisfaction and discord. In "The Time Is Night," originally written in 1992 and published in Germany before it was available in Russia, a sharp-tongued woman juggles committing her elderly mother to a mental hospital, caring for her beloved young grandson, coping with her alternately manipulative and ungrateful adult children, and keeping them all afloat with her poetry. "Love them they'll torture you; don't love them they'll leave you anyway," remarks the narrator in the midst of her long, often caustic and increasingly desperate monologue. In the intentionally melodramatic "Chocolates with Liqueur," a woman endures domestic violence silently until a crisis brings the situation to a head. And in "Among Friends," the strongest story of the group, a woman convinced she's dying takes shocking measures to ensure the well-being of her son. Written in 1988 but censored for 17 years, "Among Friends" offers a glimpse into Soviet politics and culture at both what they valued and at what they feared.
