Each step leads you closer to your destination, but who, or what, can you expect to meet along the way?
Here are stories of misfits, spectral hitch-hikers, nightmare travel tales and the rogues, freaks and monsters to be found on the road. The critically acclaimed editor of Magic, The End of The Line and House of Fear has brought together the contemporary masters and mistresses of the weird from around the globe in an anthology of travel tales like no other. Strap on your seatbelt, or shoulder your backpack, and wait for that next ride... into darkness.
An incredible anthology of original short stories from an exciting list of writers including the bestselling Philip Reeve, the World Fantasy Award-winning Lavie Tidhar and the incredible talents of S. L. Grey, Ian Whates, Jay Caselberg, Banjanun Sriduangkaew, Zen Cho, Sophia McDougall, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Anil Menon, Rio Youers, Vandana Singh, Paul Meloy, Adam Nevill and Helen Marshall.
***
For his fourth anthology for Solaris, a sister of sorts to 2010's very fine The End of the Line, editor Jonathan Oliver has turned to the road story: a genre, as he explains in his insightful introduction, widely mined in film and literature alike — in epic fantasy, for instance, insofar as the road represents the length of the hero's quest — though the fifteen short fictions which follow show that the form has much more to offer.
Thanks in part to Lavie Tidhar, whose guidance Oliver acknowledges, End of the Road is composed of stories from an expansive assortment of authors; some familiar, some fresh. The former camp includes Adam Nevill, S. L. Grey, Rio Youers, Philip Reeve, Ian Whates and, indubitably, Tidhar too; in the latter, a goodly number of newcomers hailing from here, there and everywhere. To wit, tales from Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, South Africa, Thailand and the like lend End of the Road a welcome and indeed defining sense of diversity.
The score and more of stories to be told can be divided down the middle, into those that revolve around the road, and those that are more interested in where the road goes. As the aforementioned editor asserts, "destination (expected or otherwise) is a theme running throughout this anthology, but often it is the journey itself that is key to the tales. And that needn't be a physical journey (though, naturally, the majority of these stories do feature one); the journey into the self is also explored in various ways." (p.7)
It is known that the strangers will sail from some part of the Ancient Lands and will cross the Yentru Sea. All our predictions and sacred books clearly say the same thing. The rest is all shadows. Shadows that prevent us from seeing the faces of those who are coming.
In the House of Stars, the Astronomers of the Open Air read contradictory omens. A fleet is coming to the shores of the Remote Realm. But are these the long-awaited Northmen, returned triumphant from the war in the Ancient Lands? Or the emissaries of the Son of Death come to wage a last battle against life itself?
From every village of the seven tribes, a representative is called to a Great Council. One representative will not survive the journey. Some will be willing to sacrifice their lives, others their people, but one thing is certain: the era of light is at an end.
***
For generations, the Husihuilkes have lived off the land, making "use of all the forest and the sea could offer. Here at the Ends of the Earth, the Creatures faced the wind and the rain with strategies almost as old as the elements themselves," (p.6) and though they have become comfortable in the years since a real threat arose, they have not forgotten their nature. The Husihuilkes are a warrior people, the most fearsome fighters in all the Fertile Lands, and in the months to come, they will be called upon to take up arms again.
Why? Because there's a storm coming, of course! What epic fantasy saga would be complete without one?
As had happened every winter in living memory, another long season of rains was returning to the land of the Husihuilkes. The storms came from the southern seas, brought by a wind that spread heavy clouds over the Ends of the Earth and left them there until they had exhausted themselves. (p.5)
The Days of the Deer does not chronicle the Husihuilkes' war with the weather, however. Instead, the storm is an ill omen; a symbol of some encroaching force. But what shape will it take? And what might its appearance mean for the peaceable Creatures of the Fertile Lands?
The Magic of the Open Air has learnt beyond a shadow of a doubt that there will soon be a fleet from the Ancient Lands coming to our continent. It is known that the strangers will sail [across] the Yentru Sea. All our predictions and sacred books say the same thing. The rest is all shadows. Shadows in the stars and our books. Shadows that prevent us from seeing the faces of those who are coming. Who are they? Why are they travelling here? (p.57)
These are the questions that the central characters of Liliana Bodoc's debut are asked, and the longer they take to arrive at an answer—any answer—the worse the consequences will be. "The fate of everyone living in the Fertile Lands" (p.57) hangs in the balance, in fact... a responsibility so very terrible that it should be shared, surely, rather than shouldered by a single soul.
To wit, representatives of each of the Creatures who call the continent home—including Dulkancellin of the Husihuilkes—are called to the far-distant city of Beleram in the Remote Realm. There, they form a council of sorts, to talk about the right and proper response to this dangerous state of affairs. They're well aware that their situation grows more desperate by the day—or rather, some among them are; primarily our protagonist—but without more information, what else are they to do other than discuss and debate?
As they hum and hah, however, the host of Eternal Hatred—led by Misáianes, the Son of Death herself—draws closer and closer to shore.
"Hear this and remember. Misáianes came to destroy the time of mankind, of animals, of water, of living green and of the moon, the time of Time. Many will be intoxicated by his poison; many more will fall in battle. Better to fall in battle. [For] if we are defeated in this war, Life will fall with us. If we are defeated, light will be condemned to drag itself over ashes. And Eternal Hatred will stride through the twilight of Creation." (p.94)
Eternal Hatred, eh?
Initially, I cringed at the blunt terminology too, but the more I read of The Days of the Deer, the more fitting it felt. Above all else, this is an elemental epic, and its author is particularly interested in the opposition which exists between the aforementioned forces. Thus the Ancient Land's army of darkness and death invades a continent of bright light and life. The natural is set starkly against the unnatural; order against chaos; and this trend extends to the narrative's depiction of good and evil in the old mould.
Ultimately, then, the idea of Eternal Hatred makes a certain amount of sense, but that doesn't detract from the bland fact of it at first. Nor is this the only obvious genre shorthand made use of over the course of The Days of the Deer: a book of broad strokes, at best.
That said, there remain reasons to recommend Liliana Bodoc's debut. Originally published in Argentina in 2000 as Los Dias del Venado, The Days of the Deer is the first part of an acclaimed fantasy trilogy—namely The Saga of the Borderlands—that has gone untranslated for thirteen years, and I am pleased to see it in English... though the translation is, I think, too literal. I'm certainly no expert, but I had Google go to work on a short Spanish language excerpt and it spat out something surprisingly similar to the text Nick Caistor and Lucia Caistor Arendar render.
So there's an abundance of clunk and some frankly laughable Fantasy Capitalisation: a problem given how very seriously we're asked to take The Days of the Deer. Nevertheless, its setting is excellent. Both historically and ecologically, Bodoc develops her world deftly; if the characters who inhabit it lack life, the Fertile Lands themselves positively vibrate with vim and vigour and taste and texture.
I'm not quite convinced that the author is "the Tolkien of the Americas," as the publicity promises, but I can understand the comparisons. There's a fellowship and some songs; an unknowable evil and a complex yet credible setting. By and large, alas, this is unhelpful hyperbole, and it does The Days of the Deer few favours.
More useful is the cover quote from Ursula K. Le Guin, who, when asked who she admires within her genre, can only come up with one name: Liliana Bodoc's, obviously. Understand, though, that her genre—environmentally-aware fantasy, shall we say—must be a small one, because though The Days of the Deer is indeed decent, if it represents the best of anything, there simply can't be much competition.
A woman goes into a bakery to buy a strawberry cream tart. The place is immaculate but there is no one serving so she waits. Another customer comes in. The woman tells the new arrival that she is buying her son a treat for his birthday. Every year she buys him his favourite cake; even though he died in an accident when he was six years old. From this beginning Yoko Ogawa weaves a dark and beautiful narrative that pulls together a seemingly disconnected cast of characters. In the tradition of classical Japanese poetic collections, the stories in Revenge are linked through recurring images and motifs, as each story follows on from the one before while simultaneously introducing new characters and themes. Filled with breathtaking images, Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty.
***
Consume them independently at your own peril, but taken together, the eleven dark tales contained in Revenge by Yoko Ogawa make for a single, delectable dish. One best served cold, of course.
Behold the beauty of the quote below. Know, though, that there's something very wrong with this picture:
"It was a beautiful Sunday. The sky was a cloudless dome of sunlight. Out on the square, leaves fluttered in a gentle breeze along the pavement. Everything seemed to glimmer with a faint luminescence: the roof of the ice-cream stand, the faucet on the drinking fountain, the eyes of a stray cat, even the base of the clock tower covered with pigeon droppings.
"Families and tourists strolled through the square, enjoying the weekend. Squeaky sounds could be heard from a man off in the corner, who was twisting balloon animals. A circle of children watched him, entranced. Nearby, a woman sat on a bench knitting. Somewhere a horn sounded. A flock of pigeons burst into the air, and startled a baby who began to cry. The mother hurried over to gather the child in her arms.
You could gaze at this perfect picture all day—an afternoon bathed in light and comfort—and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing." (pp.1-2)
So begins Stephen Snyder's sublime translation of Yoko Ogawa's 1998 short story collection, originally published in Japan as Kamoku na shigai, Midara na tomurai, and "Afternoon at the Bakery" is an ideal opener. It isn't about much at all, if the truth be told—an anonymous woman reminiscing about her son whilst waiting in a bakery to buy the strawberry shortcake she always orders on the anniversary of his untimely and doubly discomfiting death—yet this exacting introduction to the motifs and ideas which recur throughout Revenge does a great deal to prime readers for the unsettling efforts ahead.
"Fruit Juice" follows. It chronicles the fleeting first meeting of a distant father and daughter from a characteristically uncertain external perspective. Out of the blue—they're certainly not friends or anything—the daughter invites our narrator, whom Ogawa once more disdains to name, to accompany her to a French restaurant for this excruciating reunion. Afterwards, they hang out near an abandoned post office inexplicably stuffed full of fruit. Kiwis, even!
This is the first of several symbolic threads which run the length of Revenge, though the story it arises in is again fairly forgettable in itself. However the next narrative—namely "Old Mrs. J"—is effective even absent the chilling context of the stories surrounding it. Old Mrs. J is the landlady of a quiet apartment surrounded by gorgeous orchards, and it should come a little surprise to you that the author only allows us to glimpse her from a distance.
(That is to say the author of "Old Mrs. J," not the author who moves into this beautiful building—recommended to her, incidentally, by the editor of an arts and crafts magazine who dies at the outset of the subsequent story—and observes her attending her kiwis.)
Old Mrs. J also grows carrots, if you can credit it: carrots which to a one take the shape of "amputated [human] hands with malignant tumors, dangling in front of us, still warm from the earth." (p.36) Soon enough a reporter is dispatched to the apartment to write an article about these vile vegetables, and in the aftermath of its publication an appropriately depraved discovery is made, the repercussions of which ripple through the remainder of Revenge.
Oh, and the photo accompanying the aforementioned reporter's story proves pivotal to the narrator of a later tale... a narrator who may have appeared in a deceptively incidental role in Revenge already.
As one character wisely advises, "Even if something seems pointless at the time, you mustn't take it lightly. You'll see how useful it is later on. Nothing you study will ever turn out to be useless. That's the way the world is." (p.108)
To wit, almost everything is connected in this incredible collection, to the point that those things which are not seem far stranger for their isolation. As indicated, occasional people reappear, seemingly at random, yet rarely compared to the images the author summons up in one narrative after another. Some of said are sumptuous, others appear absurd; all are in service of the same resounding result, for Ogawa's tendency to delight is adequately matched by her impulse to disgust. See for example the stories at the dark heart of this awesome volume: "Sewing for the Heart" and "Welcome to the Museum of Torture."
Indeed, in a sense, reading Revenge is not dissimilar to torture of a sort.
"For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls, drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead—indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can't sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed." (pp.93-94)
This device describes the overall impact of Revenge: a sterling ensemble of short stories about darkness, death and depression, by way of love, loss and, at the last, blinding new life. As yet another of Ogawa's arrayed narrators notes, "The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy undercurrent running under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again." (p.148) You should, too.
Though only a few of the stories collected in Revenge impress as individual entities, they gain far greater power and persuasiveness when read together, and recollected afterwards as a single, shocking thing.
It's taken 15 years for the first of Yoko Ogawa's uncanny collections to be rendered into exquisite English, and obviously this is no overnight process. I wouldn't want to lose the lens of Stephen Snyder, either. Be that as it may, I hope you'll join me in wishing that we see subsequent efforts from the rising international star... somewhat sooner.
London, 1896. Andrew Harrington is young, wealthy and heartbroken. His lover Marie Kelly was murdered by Jack the Ripper and he longs to turn back the clock and save her.
Meanwhile, Claire Haggerty rails against the position of women in Victorian society. Forever being matched with men her family consider suitable, she yearns for a time when she can be free to love whom she chooses.
But hidden in the attic of popular author and noted scientific speculator H.G. Wells is a machine that will change everything.
As their three quests converge, it becomes clear that time is the problem – to escape it, to change it, might offer them the hope they need...
***
Imagine a tray of cupcakes.
Cupcakes are delicious, you think, so you eat one. Perhaps you earn your icing by nibbling away at the sugar-sweet sponge first, or perhaps you just pop the whole thing into your mouth -- how indeed do you eat yours? It actually matters a great deal. But whatever the method to your particular madness, your suspicions are borne out: the cupcake was indeed delicious. In fact you enjoy your first cupcake so much you take a second; you've hardly eaten anything else today, so in a sense, you've earned it. In short order, if you're anything like me, a second has turned into a third, a fourth into a fifth and finally a sixth...
...and just like that, all the cupcakes are gone! How did that happen?
To make matters worse, now you hate the taste of cupcakes, you've eaten so very many of them. Now the thought of even the sight of one more cupcake makes you nauseous.
The Map of Time can be like that, if you read it unwisely. As I did, when I realised what a delicious (if not strictly nutritious) treat it was. I couldn't get enough of The Map of Time, until one marathon reading session later, I realised I had had enough. But if sheer greed does not spoil your appetite for it - if you can tame the temptation coiled tight inside you like a sugar high - you will find in award-winning Spanish author Felix J. Palma's first novel to be translated into the English language a thing of some decadence, indulgence, and delight.
The Map of Time is not so much a story in three parts as it three stories, told as one - though each enriches the next to a certain extent, incrementally feeding in to a single greater tale as Palma raises curtain after curtain, by and large the three phases of The Map of Time function in isolation. In the first, beginning in the late 1800s, disillusioned young cad Andrew Harrington falls for the prostitute Marie Kelly - none other - then into a decade of despair after Jack the Ripper claims the last of his victims. Andrew wants nothing more than to be able to turn back the clock that he might somehow save his dearly departed from a fate worse than death... and if the writer H. G. Wells is to be believed, there may be a way.
Meanwhile, Claire Haggerty seems a modern woman out of time in a city of old: in turn-of-the-century London she feels desperately disconnected from the high society that clamours on incorrigibly around her... that is until until she takes passage on Gilliam Murrary's magnificent Time-Travelling Train, a startling expeditionary voyage which deposits Claire and her fellow passengers in the year 2000, when the fate of the human race is decided in a duel between the courageous Captain Shackleton and the evil automaton called Solomon. With the past fast receding and the present dead to her, maybe - just maybe - she will finally find love... in the future!
In the third of The Map of Time's three parts, Wells himself takes charge of the narrative; moreover, he takes charge of his own narrative at last, as he becomes embroiled in a murder investigation in which all the evidence points towards an impossible perpetrator: a time-travelling serial killer. But what does this man from the future want? That is besides a trail of bodies that should not be? And what has H. G. Wells of all people got to do with it?
The Map of Time is a delightfully digressionary novel: at once a whimsical send-up of all things Victoriana, an rip-roaring, old-fashioned adventure and a lovingly throwback scientific romance, a la the novels of Wells himself. On all fronts, it succeeds to a certain degree, but each, I think, is ever-so-slightly held back by a sense of irreverence; a notion that perhaps there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Palma's prose is knowingly purple, and often prone to disappearing down the rabbit-hole of its own inspired imagination, so The Map of Time tends to drag when it is not in full flow. In those moments where the narrator - an affable, all-seeing sort perfectly pleased at other times to rudely intrude upon affairs - seems content to revel in his own cleverness, or expound upon this or that (occasionally fascinating) aside at disproportionate length, almost as if he were a non-fiction novelist dedicated to the details... in those moments - and there are a fair few such moments - Palma's long-windedness can come off as not a little over-indulgent, and pace-breaking besides.
Then again, Palma has what you might describe as an "undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all," (p.437) and there is too a great deal to The Map of Time. I would not suggest it is at all understuffed -- and perhaps if Palma had not, by way of his mysterious narrator, stopped so often to take the measure of one flight of fancy or another, his novel would have proved more exhausting that it is. The Map of Time is a tad bloated, assuredly, but it is at no point truly tiresome. Testing, yes, and yet it will repay your meagre investment a hundredfold by the end, if you stick with it, and consume it correctly. In short bursts, then, Felix J. Palma's first novel to make it across the straits between Spain and our English-speaking territories is by turns funny, witty and winning. And - to paraphrase Palma's easily-distracted omniscient narrator - other such pronouncements.
I would also add that as The Map of Time hopscotches merrily from the Great Fire of London to the Autumn of Terror to the ultimate millennial conflict between man and machine, by way of Jack the Ripper, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and Timecop - or at a least time-travelling detective inspector out of Scotland Yard (so much of a muchness, really) - Palma is tremendously well serviced by his translator, erstwhile BBC Radio 4 journalist, presenter, author and man of many talents Nick Caistor. He provides Palma with what feels a pitch-perfect translation, capturing the light touch of the original author wonderfully, with none of the awkwardness or the imprecise turn of phrase one must typically tolerate in fiction first written in another language. As the pioneer Gilliam Murray says, "aren't there lies that make life more beautiful?" (p.418) I dare say Nick Caistor's fibs fall ably into that category.
The Map of Time is a terrific feat, in the final summation, full of twists and turns and surprising reversals of fortune, which touches - tangentially - on questions of fate and predestination, of life imitating art and art imitating life in return. It is sometimes very lovely, and though on occasion it can be slow-going, heed my advice: take no more than three chapter-sized measures of The Map of Time a day until your prescription is finished, and I guarantee you'll come away from Felix J. Palma's fabulous farce a healthy, happy specimen of humanity indeed. In fact, since I do not know you will be able to help yourself, shall we say... doctor's orders?
Traumatized by memories of his war-ravaged country, and with his son and daughter-in-law dead, Monsieur Linh travels to a foreign land to bring the child in his arms to safety. The other refugees in the detention centre are unsure how to help the old man; his caseworkers are compassionate, but overworked. Monsieur Linh struggles beneath the weight of his sorrow, and becomes increasingly bewildered and isolated in this strange, fast-moving town. And then he encounters Monsieur Bark. Neither speaks the other's language, but Monsieur Bark is sympathetic to the foreigner's need to care for the child. Recently widowed and equally alone, he is eager to talk, and Monsieur Linh knows how to listen. The two men share their solitude, and find friendship in an unlikely dialogue between two very different cultures.
***
"An old man is standing on the after-deck of a ship. In his arms he clasps a flimsy suitcase and a newborn baby, even lighter than the suitcase. The old man's name is Monseiur Linh. He is the only person who knows this is his name because all those who once knew it are dead." (p.1)
So begins Monsieur Linh and His Child: bitter and sweet and wistful - the very notes on which the curtain closes, come the occasion - it is a Kafka-esque elegy of friendship which handily sustains the sense of uncomplicated beauty evidenced above over its abbreviated course. A 2005 novella, lately translated from the French by Euan Cameron, from Philippe Claudel, author of Brodeck's Report and erstwhile director of the sublime foreign-language film I've Loved You So Long, at 100 small-format pages of oversized font, Monseiur Linh and His Child is in stature hardly more than a short story, but it has all the emotional impact of a gut-punch to the soul.
There is an old man, and a fat man. A doddering refugee from a war-torn state whose only reason for living is the infant girl he clutches tight against his chest, rescued miraculously from the battlefield on which her entire family lay dead, and a cheery chain-smoker with a penchant for hot toddies who hasn't connected with anyone since his wife passed away. One day, they sit on the same bench. So begins a friendship that will come to mean much to Monsieur Linh and his bench-fellow, Bark.
"He recalls the touch of the old man's hand when he placed it on his shoulder. He then remembers that he is alone in the world, with his little girl. Alone together. That his country is far away. That his country is no longer there, so to speak. That it is nothing but fragments of memories and dreams that survive on in his weary old man's head." (p.42)
Both men have been certain of their identities, in their lives, only to have tragedy steal everything away. Bark and Linh have lost their selves, in a sense, and though they share neither a language common between them nor even their names - a miscommunication leaves each calling the other "good day" - what each of the men have lost, the simple truth and goodness of sharing a moment with another living soul helps them begin to come to terms with.
But as Monsieur Linh reflects, staring out at the "thousands of lights in the city that sparkle and seem to move about [...] as if they were stars that had fallen to earth and were trying to fly back into the sky once more," "you can never fly back to what you have lost." (p.87) There is thus an ineffable impression of sadness about Monsieur Linh and His Child, building and swelling like a lump in the throat even as the old man and the fat man find some measure of solace in unexpected company.
Canny readers will likely see a rug-from-under twist I hardly dare discuss coming, and while such premonition perhaps robs Monsieur Linh and His Child of some of the sense of revelation Claudel seems to be shooting for in the final scene, this isn't The Sixth Sense; there's more, much more, to Monsieur Linh and His Child than a tidy trick. It is a timeless testament to the enduring beauty of friendship, and in its powerful last moments, an ode to - of all things - better tomorrows for us all. For "miracles can sometimes happen, and there can be riches, and laughter, and hope once more just when you think that everything around you is nothing but destruction and silence." (p.119)
A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a colonel is warned not to lift the veil from his dead wife’s face; and a distraught father brings his daughter back to life by eating human hearts in his dreams. In these blackly comic tales of revenge, disturbing deaths and haunting melancholy, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya blends miracles and madness in the darkest of modern fairy tales.
***
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby is the fabulously telling title of a collection of scary fairy tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, "Russia's best known living writer." (p.ix)
I'd never heard of her.
But then, the story goes, there's good reason for that: for much of her writing life, Petrushevskaya was ostracised because "her stories about the lives of Russian women were too dark, too direct, and too forbidding. Even her fairy tales seemed to have an edge of despair to them." (p.viii) The Soviet Union was having none of it.
More fool them.
In time, of course, the Soviet Union collapsed, and having scraped the decades away writing scripts for television, radio and the stage, all of a sudden Petrushevskaya's off-kilter fiction was embraced by Russian readers, such that "her seventieth birthday in 2008 was a government-sponsored celebration on a national scale." (p.ix) There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby is thus the first major translation of her work by an American publisher - so sayeth the great Wikipedia - and courtesy of Penguin Modern Classics, at long last we Brits have a chance to see for ourselves what all the fuss has been about.
Petrushevskaya is a sharp shock to the system indeed. A modern-day Grimm with none of the thematic whitewashing we've come expect from such stories as "There's Someone in the House," "The Black Coat" and "The New Robinson Crusoes: A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century," Petrushevskaya is at her most disquieting when she sets her pointed sights on undermining the monotony of the everyday - as with the shut-in who becomes convinced there's an intruder in her flat in the first of those stories, and the family who are told the world will end if they leave their apartment in the second.
But this collection also serves to showcase another side of the Russian cause celebre: her scary fairy tales, as per that there subtitle. And in "The Father" and "The Cabbage-patch Mother," not to speak of several others, a glimmer of light cracks the dark, of love and hope and wonder amongst the bleakness of life as we know it.
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby is a lamentably short collection with which to begin what I can only hope becomes a long tradition of Petrushevskaya translations, each as precise as this, and yet it's long enough - I dare say a single story would be long enough - to bring to mind the likes of Tolstoy, Chekov, Beckett and Edgar Allen Poe. These are the sorts of names you throw around in company with Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby will be argument enough as to why for any reader with a hankering for an entrancing bedtime story - or twenty.
Just don't expect to sleep soundly any time thereafter.
***
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
UK Publication: January 2011, Penguin US Publication: September 2009, Penguin
