Georgians in Love
PALMER, ANDREW
Georgians in Love The world of post-Soviet immigrants in America. BY ANDREW PALMER Sana Krasikov’s debut short story collection is, it’s true, full of post-Soviet immigrants— mostly...
...Andrew Palmer is a writer in Brooklyn...
...In Krasikov’s universe, unlucky people— often divorced or widowed or betrayed women—grasp for the faintest intimations of love, or friendship, or goodwill, only to be rebuffed by other people seeking the same things in different places, or by people who care mostly about money...
...But even if there is some novelty to this subject matter, and even if part of our interest in these stories may be sociological, Krasikov’s lens points squarely at the individual, rather than the type...
...She’s slim to the point of gauntness, the result of some kind of exercise-mania the two of them must be involved in together”—and fewer solecisms: “[A] high squealing of brakes” . . . “She’s amazed to see not just families inside but also adults...
...The prose is professional and unfl ashy, with a few highlights— “The elevator greets them with a faint odor of cat piss, a scent she’s breathed so many times she can smell it now only because Gogi is inhaling it too...
...In the end, the pieces fall more or less neatly into place...
...Consider: Like anyone else, Lawrence would be gracious until the time came to be cruel...
...When she fi nally fi nds a man enough like her to have sex with, a middle-aged refugee who was a physician in Georgia and now lays carpet, he regales her with civil war-era stories about fending off drug addicts trying to raid a hospital or about pretending to save a dead man’s life for the sake of his onlooking friends...
...I remembered all the times in my life I had begun to fall in love, had fallen in love, and then told myself I had been wrong...
...It is a method that lends itself to almost complete sympathetic identifi cation with the protagonists...
...Stories begin in medias res, then wriggle out from the rubble of backstory (more cleanly in some stories than in others) and tiptoe forward in discrete scenes delineated by space breaks...
...Her true reason for leaving Georgia, though, her dirty secret, is that she had fallen in love with the husband of her best friend...
...45 years old, has left Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, where she worked as a nurse and her husband as an administrator at an electronics institute...
...Emotion is encrypted in action: “Her elbow knocked the nail polish over and spilled a pool on the newsprint...
...Then the electronics institute had closed, bankrupt without the contracts that had come from Russia...
...And in the end, most of these eight stories pack a substantial punch—a dampened blow, at least...
...She dates losers and attends parties thrown by the same friend whose husband was the reason for her immigration...
...BY ANDREW PALMER Sana Krasikov’s debut short story collection is, it’s true, full of post-Soviet immigrants— mostly Georgians— struggling to make their way in and around New York...
...They all have the same problem, though, and it is everyone’s problem: love...
...Neither world offers much hope...
...The civil war had not yet begun...
...We see few signs of the author, both because she does not distance herself critically from her subjects and because she does not adjust her style much from story to story, no matter the variety of her characters...
...After a few years, their decision proves retrospectively prudent: The friends who had stayed began to write letters full of horror stories: demonstrations stopped by troops armed with shovels and clubs, backed by tanks, spraying tear gas and chloropicrin in people’s faces...
...And so the worst in human nature is confi rmed...
...her endings are sad...
...The best of them—“Companion,” “Maia in Yonkers,” “Debt”—set personal disturbances against a backdrop of political and economic upheaval...
...When she voiced her suffering in their living rooms, they listened closely to the parts of her story that confi rmed that her common sense had gone slack...
...The dialogue captures, sometimes disarmingly, the nuanced speech patterns of the variegated characters, and Krasikov’s descriptive eye is discerning and unfl inching...
...And yet it’s a comfortable bleakness...
...As a whole, One More Year presents convincing evidence for the duplicity of love—its enduring pull, its apparent eagerness to plunge the knife into your already-stooped back...
...It is a universe ruled almost exclusively by selfinterest, and worse...
...The gradual revelation of the characters’ pasts, and their intricate relationships to one another, contribute to a quiet but irresistible tension...
...Predictably, Ilona’s marriage falls apart in America...
...Each has come to America for a different reason, often (and surprisingly) not directly connected with Communist pressures, postCommunist economic hardship, or Georgia’s 1991-95 civil war...
...Because people, when you got down to it, always ended up being so disappointing...
...When asked why she left, she replies, “Everybody was leaving, all our friends...
...They lived, in her words, “a good life” there...
...Thought is rendered in rhetorical questions or in ejaculations beginning with “How” (“How she hated him...
...Take “Companion...
...The drooped-shoulders tone is almost requisite in this strain of realism, and Krasikov’s method is conservative and consistent, to a point that may make some readers fi dget...
...The Russian families they knew were fl eeing and settling in remote towns where the government in Moscow had given them asylum and a bit of land...
...From now on, he thinks, she will speak his name in the same uncharitable way that she talks about all the others who’ve failed her...
...A heated prickle was spreading down her arms...
...Her affair is cut off, and she is compelled to take a job answering phone calls at a urologist’s offi ce and sublet a tiny bedroom in the apartment of a benignly lecherous 70-year-old man, for whom she also acts as a caretaker...
...And the array of characters she tackles is dazzling, cutting across lines of gender, generation, religion, occupation, and class...
...Even if her husband had wanted to return, there would have been nothing to return to...
...Not quite total: We are allowed occasional glimpses of successful marriages and real friendships...
...I didn’t want to be in the last wagon on the train...
...There is humor (“He was thin, in the famished way of grazing animals and endurance athletes”) and it is often funny, but it’s the soggy kind—the mirthless, unredemptive humor of near-total cynicism...
...another a Russian professional who is lured to America by IBM, only to return to Moscow in a fi t of dubious Christian spirituality...
...There are not many surprises, and few real lunges toward the sublime— those sudden, disorienting leaps in perspective that we see in clear infl uences such as Chekhov or Munro, or in Jhumpa Lahiri, to whom Krasikov will be compared...
...another a divorced Tajik Muslim formerly married to a man with another, concurrent, wife...
...Here, as in the similar but superior “Maia in Yonkers,” the world of the protagonist’s family and friends—the Old World—is deftly counterpoised against the world of her elderly employer—the New World—and the two worlds rush together in neatly orchestrated climaxes...
...One story features a 22-year-old Georgian immigrant working as a waitress in Westchester County...
...Krasikov’s beginnings are ominous...
...All but one of the eight stories is told in the limited third-person perspective, with all of its trappings...
...Ilona Siegal (a lone seagull, anyone...
...To think he’d driven back just to torment her...
...but on the whole, these are bleak stories...
Vol. 14 • October 2008 • No. 5
