Sleepwalker in a Fog: Stories

I first came across one of Tolstaya's stories in the New Yorker, and was amazed by her style. There is no western writer I know of who writes in such fluid, fantastic and yet earthy prose. The closest I could come is Bohumil Hrabal, but that is only a very distant resemblance. While the writig is breathtaking, I found the longer stories in the book somewhat difficult to get through - they are composed of a series of tightly knit anecdotes and tales which flow from one into another. I believe that Russian literature is notoriously difficult to translate, and that may have something to do with it. Nevertheless, stories like "Serafim" and "Most Beloved" are fantastic. I am looking forward to her new book, "The Slynx".

Russian literature has always been about ethics. I really can't find any other universal feature that makes Russian prose, both classical and modern, so singular a phenomenon. Command of language? Incredible as it is in the works of Russian classics, it's not unique among the world literatures, and anyway is mostly lost in translations. Universal comprehensibility? Not at all; unlike Shakespearean plays that are set in some vague pan-European context, Russian novels are always tightly bound to Russia's very own religion, mentality, and history that are scarcely known in the West. What remains, and what really sets Russian literature apart, is its moral imperative---the impossibility for a Russian writer to show any disdain or ridicule towards those dispossessed, fragile, or helpless. Deep thrilling compassion and frantic pursuit of justice are characteristic of both the Russian classic novels of XIX century and the modern short stories by Tatyana Tolstaya. "Breathing" is perhaps the best one-word description of Tolstaya's prose. It's not the suffocated gasping of Dostoyevsky, not the gentle crystalline air of Chekhov, not even the powerful storm of consciousness of Leo Tolstoy (whose great-grandniece is Tolstaya). Winds, airs, puffs are transfusing the fabric of these delicate pieces of prose; words and images are streaming, curling, twisting in long yet weightless sentences. Tolstaya's winds smell like sea, like childhood, like love; she makes us remember that the word "spirit" is derived from the Latin stem meaning "air." Reading this book is like breathing freely outdoors after endless hours in a stuffy room...