None of the stories in Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya's collection White Walls is like her post-apocalyptic novel The Slynx because every one of them is set firmly in the mid-to-late 20th century, among the petit bourgeois of the Soviet Union. And yet almost all of them somehow feel like The Slynx, with its palpable odor, its atmosphere of decay, its fairytale-like fantasy. But the fairytales in Tolstaya's stories are confined to the mind, to the nearly inarticulable private experience of the individual.
All of these stories really feature only two kinds of characters: little children, whose fairytales are quite literal and literally taken, and grown-ups, whose fairytales are no less complex or vivid, but who bury them beneath the social modes of the middle classes; while they talk about overcoats and pastries, desires churn within them in the shape of monsters, fairies, princesses, creatures. When it comes to children, Tolstaya's talent reminded me of Mavis Gallant's, whose also able to slip ingeniously between realism and the landscape of a child's mind, but Gallant always seems so controlled, whereas Tolstaya's prose is riotous and overstuffed--more appropriate, perhaps, to the experience of children. Tolstaya is likely to change from past tense to present to subjunctive and from the third to the second person all on the same page, and her sentences are so metaphorical it's hard to dig beneath them to find a sense of realism at all.
It's the adults, though, that stick with me. Tolstaya's adults are the heirs of her children; they're people who were told that growing up is a process toward a blessed life, but who never seem to find it. They are like the insidious Natasha of "The Poet and the Muse," who believes "she'd certainly earned the right to happiness, she was entitled to a place in the line where it was being handed out," or like the main character of "The Circle":
At times Vassily Mikhailovich imagined that he would finish out this life and begin a new one in a new image. He fussily selected his age, an era, his looks: sometimes he wanted to be born a fiery southern youth; or a medieval alchemist; or the daughter of a millionaire; or a widow's beloved cat; or a Persian king.
In one of my favorite passages from this story, Vassily Mikhailovich becomes the owner of a Rubik's cube, that symbol of the possibility of transformation and perfection:
Having stood four hours in the cold along with thousands of grim fellow sect members, Vassily Mikhailovich became the owner of the marvelous cube and spent weeks twisting and twisting its creaking movable facets, until his eyes grew red, waiting in vain for the light to another universe to shine at last through the window. But sensing one night that of the two of them, the real master was the cube, which was doing whatever it wanted to with helpless Vassily Mikhailovich, he got up, went to the kitchen, and chopped up the monster with a cleaver.
Our fantasies control us, Tolstaya says, and not the other way around. I first heard of Tolstaya because the band Okkervil River named themselves after one of her stories; in "Okkervil River" a hermit dreams of meeting an old pop singer whose music he listens to every night. And then he looks her up and really does meet her, but it turns out that he's just one of a dozen admirers who meet at her house as a kind of club, and before he knows it, she's coming over to his apartment regularly to use his bathtub.
After reading the fifteen-odd stories collected here, I don't think I could tell you what half of them are about. It's not that they're so similar--though, like I said, the characters follow familiar patterns--but that any of Tolstaya's stories is liable to erupt at any minute into severe pyschedelic weirdness, like an angel riding a bus, and they sort of blend together in one long phantasmagoria. Is it literal weirdness? Metaphorical weirdness? Is the angel really on the bus? Before you can really consider the question, Tolstaya's already moved on.
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