The Repatriates
One of my oldest and dearest friends, Sana Krasikov, has just published a really rad story from her new collection, One More Year. (The new cover, by the way, is a million times cooler — it’s a contact sheet. You’ll like it.) You can read “The Repatriates” here. It’s a bit depressing, but also very vivid. I for one would like to know more about these zatvornitsas. As excellent as this story is, and it is very, very excellent, it’s nowhere near the best one in the collection, which is a damn good reason to buy it, not to put to fine a point on it.
Russians are intensely xenophobic and they are scary drunks — but I find you can actually talk to them. They are a very chatty people, I say in a spirit of preposterous generalization. And I suppose that’s why I’ve always liked them. My high school was full of recent-ish arrivals, who spent countless hours debating the relative merits of St. Petersburg (smart, severe) vs. Moscow (brassy, hypersexed) vs. Odessa (trashy, full of thugs). I understood about half of it.
I’ll add, briefly, that Sana is an incredibly vivid storyteller in person, and she has an unusually powerful personality. I often half-joke that I’d happily listen to a three-hour daily podcast of her internal monologue. If you have the good fortune to meet her, perhaps on her book tour, you’ll know what I mean. Her stories are finely crafted. One day, though, I hope they’ll capture her antic energy. They certainly capture her sharp eye for detail and for the constantly shifting hierarchies that define our lives as shaved apes.
Sometimes the best posts here are the most overlooked. How come there are no comments?
It took me a while to read this story and it has moved me for a series of reasons, many of which I am not fully aware (as should be the case for good stories). It has particular resonance for me, as I have lived in Moscow and have always had a keen interest in Russian culture and what us French people grandiously (but not inaccurately) call “the Slavic soul” although of course, since it is a good story, it reaches above the particular and taps into the universal. You’re lucky to have such a talented writer as a friend.
— PEG · Apr 21, 02:23 PM · #