ONE MORE YEAR

By Sana Krasikov

Portobello Books, June 2009, £10.99

Anyone who expects a short story to be an impressionistic wash, a glimpsed moment that requires less than full concentration, should know that the eight stories in Sana Krasikov’s debut collection permit the reader no such idleness. On the contrary, One More Year demands commitment. Its narratives are intricately woven, populated by idiosyncratic characters, of whom many — the boyfriend’s mother, for instance, who lectures on the psychology of endurance after surviving a plane crash — are merely mentioned in passing. Each tale is alive with the minutiae of a fully-realised world and in each the author has amassed enough material to create at least one novel.
Like most of her characters, Krasikov is an émigré from Eastern Europe. Born in the Ukraine, she grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and moved to the United States when she was eight years old. In this acclaimed collection, for which she was awarded the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, she describes the immigrant experience from eight different angles, in unsentimental prose laced with bruised compassion. Her characters, whether striving to assimilate in the States or reacclimatise themselves to Russia, are adrift in equally inhospitable lands: ‘an entire world transposed, like an ink blot on a folded map, from one continent to another.’ Read more

Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love

By Lara Vapnyar

Pantheon Books, June 2008, $20

The comingled complexities of love and food are familiar ingredients in modern fiction, but in Lara Vapnyar’s new collection of short stories it is largely the absence of love that is assuaged or intensified by cooking and eating. Like Vapnyar herself, the protaganists of Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love are émigres from Eastern Europe, cast dazedly adrift in the United States, suspended between assimilation and homesickness. Varying in age, gender and preoccupations, the characters nonetheless share an air of stunned dismay, a somnambulant passivity akin to depression. In each of these six elegantly crafted stories, it is the experience, memory or consequences of a meal that in some way bring them back to life. Read more