In her latest collection, Russian author Petrushevskaya is interested in the emotional and psychological toll living in Soviet Russia took on families, with an emphasis on how women, specifically mothers, coped. The novella "The Time Is Night," an extended interior monolog of the poet whose troubled home life is the subject of the piece, will be a difficult read even for readers familiar with Petrushevkaya. Anna is unreliable and overwhelmed and her narration chaotic. This is intentional, a stylistic representation of a woman on the edge in a culture of silence and secrecy. The remaining two stories, "Chocolates with Liqueur" and "Among Friends," are more typical of Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby-the narration is easy to follow, and there's a twist at the end of each-but they are darker, more in line with "The Time Is Night." VERDICT Though first-time readers of Petrushevskaya may want to start with the two short stories before tackling "The Time Is Night," this is an important if disturbing work, one of the few translations available focusing on the domestic life of Soviet Russia and one of the most challenging examples of "women's fiction" available in English.-Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

IT IS HARD to resist Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's darkly comic new collection of novellas, "There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In." The suffocating domestic life she renders so vividly begins before you even open the book. The cover itself is cleverly claustrophobic with the title crammed above a drawing of an unhappy family staring at a picked-over roast. This sense of scarcity and deprivation recurs in all the stories, each of them set in the bleak Soviet-era communal housing blocks, known as kommunalkas, where multiple families, sometimes related, sometimes not, were placed in a single apartment and forced to share kitchen and bathroom quarters. This system was put into place after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and heralded as a way to address inequitable living conditions. "We have everything we want; we are very happy," as a slogan of the time went. But the reality of communal living was often very different from its state-sponsored ideal. The most meager of possessions were jealously guarded or fought over. It was not unheard-of for light switches to be claimed as "mine" and "yours" by feuding neighbors. The walls were thin too. In the world of the kommunalka, there was little or no privacy, and family members and neighbors could hear the goings-on of everyone around them. Petrushevskaya spent part of her childhood and adolescence in such a place and called it a "mini-gulag." She tried to carve out a space for herself by living under a desk in the bedroom of her grandfather, who was slowly going insane. Yet as terrible as such circumstances were for a young girl, they would prove to be indelibly powerful material for a fiction writer. In the first, and best, of these novellas, "The Time Is Night," Anna (based on Anna Andreevna Akhmatova), an impoverished poet, ekes out a living writing rejection letters for a literary magazine. Her grandson has been left in her care by her beleaguered daughter, and Anna must find a way to provide for him too. She does so by making unexpected visits to her better-off neighbors at mealtimes, hoping to cadge a bit of bread or cake. The catch seems to be that she must never ask directly for it; her pride is one of the few things she still possesses. There is something agreeably and bleakly comic about the description of the rounds grandmother and grandson make. The suicidally proud beggar of Knut Hamsun's "Hunger" feels like a kindred spirit, as do Jean Rhys's worn-out charmers roaming the streets of Paris in search of favors. A tale of such hard luck runs the risk of feeling maudlin, but Petrushevskaya avoids this with her brilliant, piercing characterization of the desperate poet. Anna is endlessly loving and giving to her grandson, but bitterly vicious to her daughter, who seems more incompetent than malicious. When her criminally reckless son comes home from jail, she lets him steal from her, all the while pleading for his respect and gratitude. She is, in short, a thoroughly maddening person, full of contradictions, one moment self-sacrificing, the next self-aggrandizing. Somehow Petrushevskaya has made her into a distillation of familial love, both unbearable and stubbornly persistent. The novella that follows, "Chocolates With Liqueur," feels thin and contrived by comparison. The story revolves around a nurse and her murderous husband who are locked in a brutal struggle for control of a small Moscow apartment. The twists and turns of the plot are baroque, but there is still much pleasure to be found in Petrushevskaya's beautifully textured depiction of an ordinary life lived under terrible circumstances. the collection ends with one of Petrushevskaya's most controversial works, "Among Friends," in which she details the parties of a group of friends who meet each week at the home of the luminous Marisha, who presides serenely over their gatherings even as marriages crumble. The narrator of the story is another of Petrushevskaya's canny old birds, pinpointing the pettiness and venality of those around her without ever being able to rise above it herself. The novella ends with a brutal act of sacrifice, as surprising as it is emotionally resonant. In "Among Friends," there is a hardeyed clarity about impossible choices and constricted lives, making it a fitting end to this unsparing and unsettling collection. Yet in the expansive world of Petrushevskaya's fiction, the suffocating halls of the kommunalka open out into something more, a glimpse of what it means to be a human being, living sometimes in bitter misery, sometimes in unexpected grace. JENNY OFFILL is the author of the novel "Dept, of Speculation."

Three deceptively simple tales explore the dark terrain of the greedy human soul. Winner of Russia's Triumph Prize and deft chronicler of beset Muscovites, 76-year-old Petrushevskaya (There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself, 2013, etc.) returns with three bewitching novellas. Although her writing is not overtly political, her gimlet-eyed appraisal of humanity resulted in her work being banned in the Soviet Union for decades. The emotional palette here is gray-toned: love reduced to sex, motherhood to jealousy, empathy to guilt. The ethical dimensions contract; instead of questioning how one ought to behave, Petrushevskaya's characters simply react, trying to safeguard their meager possessions from suffering relatives. In the longest novella, The Time is Night (previously published as The Time: Night and shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize), an older woman struggles to make financial ends meet and emotional debts balance. Both an insightful poet and a vindictive woman, Anna can at once tenderly care for her grandson and viciously insult her own daughter. The moral quandaries intensify, however, when her son returns home from prison, her daughter hints at moving back home, and her own mother's bed at the local hospital is lost. The second tale, "Chocolates With Liqueur," grafts an Edgar Allan Poe motif onto a tale of marital horror. Lelia, a young nurse who has lost her parents and grandfather, manages to carve out a life for herselfthat is, until Nikita comes along. Too frightened to reject his advances, Lelia soon finds herself in a loveless, abusive marriage to a man sinking into mental illness. The final novella, Among Friends, traces the Friday night parties of a group of friends. They are bound primarily by their fear of informants and their infatuation with the seductive yet mercurial Marisha. Together, they endure political pressures, broken marriages and deteriorating parentsall of which the shrewd, often calculating narrator observes mercilessly. But there is one betrayal that cannot be endured. Infernal, haunting monologues. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.