This was a great collection of short stories. Tolstaya's writing is like a voice, it begins with a whisper running in and out of your mind and then slowly slowly it gains volume, and before you know it, it's bellowing, and haunting you while all you can do is sit and try to catch your breath.

While she has a beautiful way with words, the stories are disjointed, having nothing in common. I can't say I didn't like it, I just wouldn't read it again.

On the whole I enjoyed this collection of 18 stories from acclaimed Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya, but I must admit that having come to review the book after having read it a few weeks ago I found that few of the stories remained in my memory. So while I found them interesting and very readable at the time, they don’t seem to me to be of any overwhelming merit. Certainly a must-read for anyone interested in Russian literature, which I am, and certainly a useful and pleasurable introduction to Tolstaya’s writing and with one or two stand-out stories, plus an intriguing mix of the quotidian with the more fantastic. Overall, however, I didn’t find the collection as outstanding as some other reviewers.

Wow. I had high hopes for this one after I cleared the first couple stories which were quick and weird and somewhat accessible. However, I hit a wall when trying to get through the first lengthy story. I was completely turned off and started skimming, waiting for some type of action or relevance to jump off the page. Instead, tedium set in and I found myself wondering why I was even pushing on. It seemed like the label of stories (both short and <i>long</i>) were a mere guise for the author to write semi-autobiographical tales of her family and dealings with living as a Russian ex-pat in America. Although initially interesting to get the POV of such an intellectual living abroad, the writing was WAY too masturbatory to make me feel like I didn't waste my time here. I wondered if the author had gone ahead and written a memoir if that would have made the writing more appealing to an average reader.

I'm so appreciative of *Net Galley* for approving me to read an advance copy of this book.

'They passed on, their personal suns went out, and there was no one left to speak of them, to think of them and to tell their stories, to laugh and shake one’s head while remembering.'

I loved each of these stories, from tales about art, love and loss, politics and war, childhood and aspic, there wasn’t one story that didn’t captivate me. How does a man falling in love with a marble statue lead to losing his wife and children? Is a gypsy to be believed when she tells a woman every man who loves her will die? How does a life go on with the sad order of ‘vitamin drops in the eyes’ and ‘big stiff pillows in her bed’, as if love just flew out the window?

The artist Kazimir Malevich in The Square makes quite a name for himself after painting a thick black square the ‘most famous, most frightening, enigmatic painting known to man’. The author ties an experience Leo Tolstoy had years before that to the meaning behind the painting. The dissection that follows is engaging, death meets life, and expresses itself through art, a sort of terror facing us all.

Aspic reminded me of the horror facing me in the refrigerator when I was 4 years old. In Hungary they call it kocsonya, a pork broth that is jellied, cold after setting in the fridge in which is suspended pig knuckles, rinds, and ears. It’s more of an entire meal for us and nothing in the world could get me to have another bite when I was little. As an adult, my palate craves the foods my family made but that niggling fear from childhood always rises. I laughed when she wrote, “Truth be told, I’ve always been a little afraid of it, since childhood.” Because it can be intimidating. I am reminded of my childhood friends staring at some of our other dishes while at my house, curious, afraid (even if it was just chicken paprikash because so many american children hated vegetables, and who ate cooked peppers floating in gravy in the 80’s). We always ended up throwing a burger or hotdog on for said friend. That fear always came alive in me in the face of kocsonya, much to the shame of my grandparents.

In Smoke and Shadows, it feels like an affair against her desires. How can she possibly be in love with Eric, this man who is so very limited and yet she is. She sits down and eats the meal his wife prepared, imaging hatred in the woman’s heart. It could be the exoticism he projects on her Russian background that has him enraptured. But what is it about him that has made her love for him obsessive. She sinks into a fantasy about his wife, that witch Emma.

The Invisible Maiden was my favorite, with one of the best lines I’ve read in years. “Growing in it were yellow lilies that smelled like mermaids.” What a beautiful sentence, lilies that smell like mermaids, how perfect. The family arrives at the dacha, and prepares it for their stay. It’s atmospheric, I fancied myself alongside them all, inhaling the smell of fried potatoes, cozy in the warmth. Who knew kombucha could be a pet, this before kombucha became all the rage with Americans aspiring to be healthy. Each character is a creation, alive as you and me. Curly, the ‘imbecile’ who built the dacha, and how he came by the moniker tickled me. The grannies, oh the wonderful grannies Aunty Lola and Klavdia Alekseevna and their sad, beautiful habits. This chapter would make a wonderful novel, dare I hope? I wanted to get lost in this family and remain.

The stories are full of humor, wit and intelligence whether about love, death, politics or tradition each is engaging and invoked memories of my own childhood. I could be laughing about her cynical take on life or feeling gutted over a disappearing , an old woman simply left with nothing and hoping to fade quietly. Tales from the Russian perspective, wonderful! I understand why Tatyana Tolstaya is a celebrated author.

Publication Date: March 20, 2018

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group'

Sometimes life becomes very hectic so that reading becomes a cherished commodity pushed aside which is where short stories step in. This is a beautiful collection of stories that interlock one with another but that can be read at your own pace and can be put down when the time comes. It's definitely worthy of being pre ordered and savor every story as you go along because this book will stay with you long after the last story has been savored. Looking forward to more by this author.

Tatyana Tolstaya's writing is a gift. I've waited so long for this new translation of her work, I can’t even say how excited I was for it. Her previous short story collection, White Walls, is one of my favorite books. Aetherial Worlds is very different from that book, but at the same time her preference for certain themes is clear, and I was happy to see them again. She always has something new to say even on familiar ground.

This collection has a different translator than White Walls did, so I was happy that Tolstaya’s voice came across like I remembered - lyrical, sarcastic, stylistic, interspersed with a few mysterious lines of poetry recalling some eerie but nostalgic corner of childhood. And full of descriptions I wanted to think about, like describing a house standing atop a hill that “poured down.” I was a little bothered by the use a few too many times of “crepuscular” to describe St. Petersburg, but ok. It’s a twilighty place, to be fair.

This collection opens with “20/20” (my favorite piece here), a story that seems more like an autobiographical essay (and I read some form of it as such in the New Yorker, so maybe I’m not sure how much of it is fictionalized at all). She writes about the old method of vision correction surgery, and how this was what led her to beginning to write at age 32 (despite being a relative of Tolstoy). She couldn’t see for days after the surgery, while in terrible, blinding pain, especially at any hint of bright color. But her vision came from within, appearing to her like doors opening onto other worlds. So she began to write, and that’s become one of those consistent themes in her work - some mysterious transition between worlds, a question of what’s real and what’s imagined, and the blurring of the line between them.

She writes about being able to access those interior worlds: “I don’t know its geography, its mountains, or its seas; it’s so vast, it must be limitless. Or perhaps it’s not simply one world - perhaps there are many. They are unpredictable: they can show themselves to you, or not. Some days they may not let you inside: Sorry, the doors are locked, we’re on holiday. But to the patient and the devoted, they will in the end always yield. The doors will open, and you won’t know what you will come across until you enter.”

Another theme common to these and her previous stories is the recollection of childhood and its framing as a world all its own - some preserved relic of the past but one that a story’s central figure is repeatedly drawn to, reliving people and places and events seemingly ad infinitum. She also has that ability to inject a sharp, irreverent sense of humor into the serious subjects of life - jealousy, greed, heartbreak, ennui, the ways in which the universe seems to be at work on a narrator in Paris (“Throughout my life, Paris has been marked on my road map in a distinctive red color.”)

Her characters are dreamy but mired in reality, hardened by the world but still vulnerable. It’s this always mysterious combination of fantasy and reality and lives lived between them, always with a longing for somewhere else. Normally I don’t like a fantastical, fairy tale element in stories, but here, like in White Walls, she writes it so well. And everything she writes is tinged with a distinctly Russian influence (if not set there) adding another layer of either something darkly magic or disquieting.

Many of these pieces feel more essay-like than fictional, more autobiographical than strictly imagined. Where they are fictional is clear, incorporating that special brand of magical realism that often permeates Russian storytelling. As an almost solely nonfiction reader nowadays, this was still completely appealing, and I think it would’ve been even if I didn’t love her already.

Favorite lines:
Perhaps it turned out that the universe really is made out of copper and cabbage juice, packed away in a suitcase with leather patches on the corners and interspersed with tiny little mothballs. And that this prevents nothing - not the unrelenting light of a billion diamantine stars, not the curvature of space-time, not the splashing of waves, not the stillness of time, nor the roads, nor the love.

Each one had a person, or a dream, or an idea, or a garden, or a house around which their life orbited, as if around the sun. They passed on, their personal suns went out, and there was no one left to speak of them, to think of them and to tell stories, to laugh and shake one’s head while remembering.

You could say that nothing bad had transpired, but as often happens with introverts, I felt as if my soul had been trampled on.

I stood at the fork in the road, looking,
Yanked out the needle from my heart and walked away.

Best short stories collection I've read this year!
PS: Thanks NetGalley for the ARC.