There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (translated by Anna Summers): This is a reasonably short collection of stories about folks living in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, mostly in and around Moscow. Most of the stories are painfully sad, full of pathetic women scraping out a living and being completely trampled on by the men in their lives. And that’s when anything actually happens at all, which is fairly rare. I don’t know if it’s the way Russian translates into English or what, but I found the stories disjointed and vague. Or maybe – since I haven’t liked the other books I’ve read of this sort – I just don’t like modern Russian literature. And you know, I think I could be okay with that.
Also posted on BookCrossing.