The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Time: Night by Ludmilla PetrushevskayaMichael Pinker
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. The Time: Night. Trans. Sally Laird. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2000. 155 pp. Paper: $14.95.
Anna Andrianovna’s night thoughts begin almost comically, providing an intimate glimpse of her life and thought as the Soviet hegemony wanes. Her mordant remarks, punctuating a journey with her grandson Tima in search of food for the hungry child, reveal Anna’s near-desperate plight in hues of gray and black. She is a poet who gives readings, when she can get them, to children. Of late, Anna lives from hand to mouth with little Tima, while her estranged daughter, Alyona, the boy’s mother, moves in and out of her flat, taking lovers, bearing children, and finally fleeing when she no longer can stand Anna’s constant criticism. Anna’s son, Andrei, equally feckless, remains the apple of his mother’s eye. A youthful felon released from prison under an amnesty, later crippled tumbling out of a second-story window, Andrei is no longer a young hood, but a drunkard who periodically hits up Anna for cash while keeping well beyond her urgent embrace. Anna’s expectations for her children receive little respect and much scorn. Her ceaseless harping, intended to make them feel guilty, only drives them away. To top it off, Anna’s schizophrenic mother lives in a mental institution to which her daughter consigned her some years ago. With its closing imminent, mother must be moved, but where? To Anna’s home? To another institution, farther away? Though scraping together a living for herself and her sometime dependents, even while she tries to cope with the tangled affairs they create, takes its toll, still Anna would be, is, lost without them. This reprint of Petrushevskaya’s 1992 novel purports to present Anna’s literary remains, dubbed “Notes from the edge of the table.” In their harassed, frequently sarcastic reflections, life appears reduced to a series of strains taken and accommodations made, her troubled story mirroring that of the society collapsing about her. [Michael Pinker]