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.’
Many of Krasikov’s protaganists are lone women, forced to sacrifice the possibility of love for the pursuit of security. Ilona in ‘The Companion’ allows an elderly man to nurse fantasies about their relationship as long as he provides her with accommodation, while in ‘Better Half’, waitress Anya weds the laddish Ryan in the hope of acquiring a green card. When Ryan becomes violent she takes out a restraining order against him, but loneliness reunites them and they begin an affair which threatens her new visa application. Despite her pragmatism and his immaturity, Anya knows that if she is to leave him for good, ‘she’d have to overcome the urge to look for him…like some gaunt animal migrating uphill before a flash flood without quite knowing why’.
It is not only romantic love that requires sacrifice. In ‘Maia in Yonkers’, the story from which the book draws its title, Maia cares for an elderly lady in New York in order to support her teenage son back in Georgia. When he visits, her son is both consumed by greed and incensed by America’s conspicuous wealth. ‘Why are you showing me all of this? I can’t stay here anyway!’ Gogi protests, accusing her: ‘Every year you say its one more year….!’ Meanwhile Mrs Trapolli, the old lady for whom Maia works, over tips cabbies and waiters so that her aquisitive daughter has nothing to inherit. When Mrs Trapolli’s generosity collides with Gogi’s avarice, she only adds to the layers of resentment, gratitude and guilt between mother and son.
Although the stories share a pervasive bleakness, Krasikov’s understated humour runs throughout the book. In ‘The Alternate’, middle-aged Victor invites the daughter of his long-dead lover to dinner, hoping to seduce her but ultimately finding that ‘what he wanted now, most of all, was for her to like him’.When they speak on the phone he worries that his echoing of her Americanised ‘Terrific’ sounds like an over-eager ‘Chrifeeg!’ Over dinner, Alina confides that she argued with her boyfriend because he asked her to hide his laptop before leaving his flat unlocked. ‘So I put it in the oven,’ she explains, ‘And then I left. When he got home he set the oven on preheat because, who knows, he wanted to bake himself a potato.’ These stories might be short on hope but they are constantly uplifted by moments of wry humanity.
Only in Asal, the tale of Gulia, whose husband Rashid divides his time between her and his other, Islamic wife, does Krasikov’s writing seem overwrought. Here, the characters’ elaborate histories come at the expense of clarity. Gulia herself has been previously married and, in the course of the story, leaves Rashid, finds work as a childminder in New York, marries a third man in order to stay there and toys with a relationship with a fourth, still trying to quash her enduring love for her husband. Asal is unpredictable, intriuging and finally shockingly sad. But it took, for this reader certainly, more than one reading to untangle the plot.
That apart, One More Year is an accomplished collection from an original new voice; subtle, uncompromising and wise. Having enjoyed Krasikov’s densely packed stories, I look forward to her forthcoming first novel. Freed from the confines of the shortened form to develop the cast of fascinating characters at her disposal, I have no doubt that she will find a rich seam of inspiration and relish the extra pages in which to share it.

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.
Vapynar left her native Russia in 1994 and became fluent in English only after settling in New York. She drew on the immigrant experience in her first collection of short stories, the critically acclaimed There Are Jews in My House, and her subsequent novel, The Memoirs of a Muse. Here she continues to address displacement, loneliness and loss of status with wry humour and lightness of touch, sidestepping sentimentality and inviting genuine sympathy for her disenfranchised characters; isolated individuals slaving to send money to their aspirational families back home; scientists, artists and intellectuals turned into computer programmers in the heat of the melting pot.

In the opening story, ‘A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf’, Nina is one such computer programmer. But unlike her new circle of bohemian fellow-immigrants, Nina was a computer programmer in Russia too. She feels dull among these aquaintances, to whom her husband introduces her simply as ‘a lover of vegetables’. Since her arrival in the United States, buying vegetables has been Nina’s passion. She revels sensuously in the delights of the markets and lingers over receipe books in bed, meanwhile neglecting to cook what she has bought and allowing it to rot in the ‘vegetable graveyard’ of her fridge. When her husband leaves her, Nina can only stare numbly at the index in her cookbooks: ‘broccoli:gratin, 17; macaroni with, 7…’, lacking the heart to turn the pages. But it is thanks to her love of vegetables, specifically the eponymous broccoli, that Nina is coaxed tentatively towards new hope when a fellow-émigre invites himself over for a ‘cooking date’.
It is with food that Vapnyar’s love-starved protagonists share their real moments of romance. Food warms and tenderises them, returns them to an almost childlike state of trust, enables them to be vulnerable and honest. In ‘Borscht’, lonely carpet-fitter Sergey seeks out a prostitute from the small ads in a Russian newspaper but finds himself miserably unaroused, even repelled by the ministrations of the woman he visits in Brighton Beach (‘the parody of Russia, that made the real Russia seem even further away and hopelessly unattainable’). It is only when she persuades him to stay for a bowl of soup and he watches her ‘light, fast hands’ preparing the dazzlingly colourful borscht that he begins to see the beauty in this ordinary woman, and the similarity in their shared exile.
In not all of the stories does food have such a positive effect. Perhaps the most memorable tale in the collection is ‘Luda and Milena’, in which two aging women in an English-language class vie for the attentions of an elderly widower by cooking him traditional Russian fare, with catastrophic results.
Vapnyar is gleefully comic here, describing Milena’s face as ‘a battlefield for anti-aging creams’ and the sound made by Luda’s armchair when she sinks into it as ‘the groan of someone who was profoundly annoyed with Luda but still loved her very much’. Alongside the humour come sharp, painful insights: Luda notes that her presence disturbs married women of her age, ‘not because they saw her as a threat but rather because her widowhood and loneliness reminded them that they could soon end up like that too’.
My favourite story in the collection is ‘Slicing Sauteed Spinach’, in which Prague-born Ruzena, fearful of the unfamiliar words in restaurant menus, allows her lover to order for them both. Consequently she eats nothing but various forms of spinach, her lover’s favourite food. When he attempts toend their affair on the grounds that Ruzena is becoming too dependent, she invents an imaginary boyfriend in Strasbourg, whose existence reignites her lover’s interest. Over many lunches the fictitious Pavel grows in character and conviction until Ruzena finds herself expressing Pavel’s loathing for spinach, and realising that it is in fact her own.
The collection ends with a round-up of the receipes featured in the stories. Chattily informal and full of infectious enthusiasm for good food, it is a delightful conclusion to a highly enjoyable read, which whets the appetite for hot borscht and more work from Lara Vapnyar.