The Time: Night (A Novel)

The Time: Night (A Novel)

From Library JournalAwakened in the middle of the night, Soviet poet Anna Andrianovna pours out her grief in scribbled notes at the kitchen table. Anna is a women on the edge, a mother and grandmother scraping out a miserable existence in Moscow as she struggles to provide food and shelter for her extended family, most of whom abuse her kindness, ignore her advice, and shrink from her gestures of love. Anna's story moves at a breathless pace, becoming nearly incoherent as dawn approaches. The book's strength lies in Anna's character and the terrible irony with which she describes her daily life and frustrating attempts to understand the people she loves, with so little hope of reciprocation. This wry American debut, shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize, is highly recommended for all fiction collections.Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo,Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.Capturing the complexities of contemporary Russian life, the scribbled notes of Anna Andrianovna, written in the solitary hours of the night, chronicle her struggle to provide food, money, space, time, and love for the diverse members of her family.From Publishers WeeklySince she appeared on the Russian literary scene in the 1970s, Petrushevskaya has produced a steady outpouring of short stories and plays; today, she is generally considered to be one of the finest living Russian writers. This novel, the first of her works to appear in America, portrays the gritty, day-to-day life of ordinary Russians. The loosely structured narrative consists of a manuscript written by the now deceased Anna Andrianovna, a minor poet, interspersed with diary entries by Anna's feckless daughter, Alyona. Anna is desperately trying to hold on to her small apartment in Moscow while fending off the relentless demands of her two grown children and their families. Andrei, her son, is a petty crook recently released from prison; out of work and unable to free himself from a bad crowd, he constantly hits up his mother for money and threatens to move back home. Meanwhile, Alyona, who has a knack for involving herself with unsuitable men and getting pregnant, alternates between living at home and, after dumping her children with Anna, simply disappearing. And then there's Anna's senile mother, who clearly belongs in an institution. Petrushevskaya focuses on Anna's increasingly desperate situation and her conflicted feelings about her role as a mother, a daughter, a woman and a poet. While the facts of the story are relentlessly depressing, the author's signature black humor and matter-of-fact prose result in an insightful and sympathetic portrait of a family in crisis.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.From BooklistCast as a diary of scribbled notes written at night by Anna Andrianovna, a poet and mother whose life is an unending round of crises involving the basic necessities of living space, food, and money, Petrushevskaya's novel is a crushingly intense account of one woman's struggle for survival in late Communist Russia. Anna's oldest son is about to be released from prison; her promiscuous daughter still lives at home, along with her children and current lover; and all depend on Anna for everything. Accordingly, she lives at the edge of impossibility, yet at the novel's close, is in the process of bringing her senile, psychotic mother home to prevent her certain death in an insane asylum as well as to preserve the old lady's pension for the family. Limning the interplay between Anna's rich inner life and her desperate circumstances especially well, Petrushevskaya proffers a bleak portrait of Russian society and of the burdens carried by its women. John ShrefflerFrom Kirkus ReviewsShort-listed in 1992 for the newly established Russian Booker Prize, Petrushevskaya's short novel (her first to be translated into English) is especially meaningful if its literary echoes are pre-established for the non-Rus