White Walls: Collected Stories (New York Review Books (Paperback)) by Tatyana Tolstaya

by Tatyana Tolstaya

Tatyana Tolstaya's short stories — with their unpredictable fairy-tale plots, appealingly eccentric characters, and stylistic abundance and flair — established her in the 1980s as one of modern Russia's finest writers. Since then her work has been translated throughout the world. Edna O'Brien has called Tolstaya "an enchantress." Anita Desai has spoken of her work's "richness and ardent life." Mixing heartbreak and humor, dizzying flights of fantasy and plunging descents to earth, Tolstaya is the natural successor in a great Russian literary lineage that includes Gogol, Yuri Olesha, Bulgakov, and Nabokov.White Walls is the most comprehensive collection of Tolstaya's short fiction to be published in English so far. It presents the contents of her two previous collections, On the Golden Porch and Sleepwalker in a Fog, along with several previously uncollected stories. Tolstaya writes of lonely children and lost love, of philosophers of the absurd and poets working as janitors, of angels and halfwits. She shows how the extraordinary will suddenly erupt in the midst of ordinary life, as she explores the human condition with a matchless combination of unbound imagination and unapologetic sympathy. A New York Review Books Original "Tolstaya carves indelible people who roam the imagination long after the book is put down." --Time

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Russia, Russian Literature, Literature, Classics, Womens

Unknown Binding

First published April 17, 2007

About the author

Tatyana Tolstaya (Татьяна Толстая) was born in Leningrad, U.S.S.R. As the great-grandniece of the Russian author Leo Tolstoy and the granddaughter of Alexei Tolstoy, Tolstaya comes from a distinguished literary family; but, according to Marta Mestrovic's interview in Publishers Weekly with the author, she hates ‘‘being discussed as a relative of someone.’’

Still, Tolstaya's background is undeniably one of culture and education. Her father was a physics professor who taught her two languages, and her maternal grandfather was a well-known translator.

Reviews

[Dolors · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you decide to immerse into Tolstaya’s stories I recommend you do it cautiously, as you might see more of yourself in her wide arrange of characters than you are prepared to.
She dexterously paints setting worlds for mature characters who look back at their pasts just for the sake of remembering, not even desiring to change what was for what could have been: men fallen prey to a voice, elderly women evoking the summer when they could have fallen in love, birds that forebode the death of a beloved, people ready to have their hearts ripped out in order not to suffer out of lost love…

With a bizarre combination of realism and fable, Tolstaya creates worlds seemingly without effort, mingling poetic stream of consciousness with refreshingly hilarious banter. Even if her characters root for freedom, they are aware that alert consciousness might not prove to be the key to their wishes and that, sometimes, unknown forces conspire against the vision they project of their future.

Surprisingly, the frustration of seeing life slip through their fingers is transformed into a soothing ode to years spent and now gone, leaving a bright trace behind, like a shooting star, that keeps shinning long after it has burned out.
Quite a fitting read for these final days of the year, days that won’t come back but will remain with us, always, like Tolstaya’s rich and boundless imagination.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

At sixty, fur coats get heavy, stairs grow steep, and your heart is with you day and night.

These stories are wistful, weighty and they elucidate the human condition during that period of, shall we say maturity? Characters suffer in silence, watch the world go by vividly, and though they've been partakers for years, they don't feel as if they have played a role. To them life is about dissatisfaction in as much as it is about desire and dreams are sometimes daydreams in which love is true and tangible. Their feelings, palpable and pure, occur in dialogue, or sometimes within their consciousness:

What are you, life? A silent theater of Chinese shadows, chain of dreams, a charlatan's store? Or a gift of unrequited love—that’s all that is intended for me? What about happiness? What is happiness? Ingrate, you're alive, you weep love strive fall and that's not enough? What? ... Not enough? Oh, is that so? There isn't anything else.

This is about what happens when one reaches a certain age and one starts to consider the paths taken in life, the loves lost, the choices one could have made. All of these characters long for something or someone and desperation seems to await them at the helm of each story climax:

After all, her soul was growing richer as the years passed., she experienced and understood her own being with ever greater subtlety, and on autumn evenings she felt more and more self-pity; there was no one to whom she could give herself- she, so slim and black-browed.

I love when I pique the curiosity of meddlesome strangers (sometimes acquaintances) with the books I choose to read in public, as if I should only gravitate toward certain books, as if reading isn't a global phenomenality. Then again, I'm sure Tolstaya, writing these stories during her generation and time, most likely surprised most. What makes this collection truly unique is the expression, the art, the way in which Tolstaya chooses to showcase ordinary lives in ordinary times, the way in which she validates aging and agelessness. The storytelling is lyrical, fantastical, magical, and it turns what could be a straightforward, lucid writing style about this everyday function of life into something extraordinary to follow, where, for instance, even sadness from characters seem almost refreshing.

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

--Loves Me, Loves Me Not
--Okkervil River
--Sweet Shura
--On the Golden Porch
--Hunting the Wooly Mammoth
--The Circle
--A Clean Sheet
--Fire and Dust
--Date with a Bird
--Sweet Dreams, Son
--Sonya
--The Fakir
--Peters
--Sleepwalker in a Fog
--Serafim
--The Moon Came Out
--Night
--Heavenly Flame
--Most Beloved
--The Poet and the Muse
--Limpopo
--Yorick
--White Walls
--See the Other Side

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

And the grey vault of the heaven over us where the squadron howled, racing by with no place to land, and the distant brown forests, and the hill in the middle of the globe where we stamped our feet in the wind that blew salt out of the carved salt cellars, and the frozen earth, shuddering under the hooves of the raven black steed, invisible from here—at that moment all this was our life, our one and only, full, hermetic, real, palpable life. This is what it was and nothing else. And there was only one way out of it. (p373)

TT is the author of the scintillant and bemusing novel also NYRB-pubbed, The Slynx—a berserk dystopian masterpiece brimful of thrilling and demanding prose brilliance. The same descriptor applies to the collected stories. Of the 24 tales featured here (comprised of two prior-pubbed collections plus extras), most are surreal, rambling and whim-full of ironical and lyrical descriptions to make the stoneheartiest realist renounce his ways. The dreamlike style tends to render the stories alike, and post-reading it is hard to pinpoint what happened in which story to whom and where, and what the meaning might be, if it matters. ‘Sleepwalker in a Fog’ (one of the longer pieces here) sums up the experience of reading TT at times, except a pleasant and magical fog from which one never wishes to awake. As the blurb limns—eccentric characters, dark humour, fairytale conventions upturned, satirical flourishes. Breathtaking writing as evidenced in the above selected passage from the fantastic ‘Limpopo.’ A dazzler. (Edit: ‘The Moon Came Out’ is a favourite. Among others).

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

When a reviewer such as myself doesn't follow their customary habit of strewing quotes amongst their thoughts, it is for one of two reasons. The more common one is that nothing stood out much from the forest of text, or at least not in a way worthy of the accompanying stripping of context. The second is that quoting a sentence would require a paragraph or a page or a story entire, and Tolstaya does not (fortunately) work in a micro form that affords such holistic referencing. As such, you'll have to take my word without any concrete artifacts that these stories are worth your time. You may be able to cull analogous pieces of evidence from my reviews of The Slynx and/or On the Golden Porch (the latter especially, since it composes around half of this more modern collection). For whatever reason, I felt (or maybe I didn't, for it's late and I haven't bothered to check if there's actually any tidbits lying around those two compositions) more comfortable with splicing off Tolstaya's writing than I do now, so doubting Thomas's will have to dig.

As other reviews have stated, there's a certain consistent richness to the stories that can inspire as well as cloy the senses, depending on one's personal preferences. Having read around half of these already, I could have easily reacted negatively out of previous familiarity with a not very diverse bunch, yet it seems that my rather fleshless background reads of government statistics and existential torments made this colorful, if rather simple, material comforts welcome. It was interesting to note that, over the course of twenty years, the firmer qualities of Soviet communism were increasingly touched upon with regards to food lines and inspection committees and international relations, resulting in some rather morbid situations which left the reader more uneasy than titillated, as had been the case in previous stories. Whether this had anything to do with the USSR falling in the year of my birth will never be fully resolved.

In terms of rankings, 'A Clean Sheet still comes first (little of the important things in life have changed), followed by 'Okkervill River' (sweet, sweet irony), 'Yorick (an overt yet worthy meditation/manipulation/magiculation of Hamlet), 'The Poet and the Muse' and 'Heavenly Flame' (tied for scathing portrayals at the nastiness of more civilized folks), and 'Most Beloved' (one of the more cohesive and heartbreakingly nostalgic tales. 'Hunting the Wooly Mammoth' is a memorably biting satire on relationships, 'On the Golden Porch' and 'Date with a Bird' do a notably good job at depicting childhood, 'Serafim' is a wonderful microportrait of the realms of internalized heaven and hell, and then there are the others. In terms of disliking, there was the odd antiblackness/anti-Romani, and I really didn't see why 'Limpopo' had to be as long as it was, but all in all, it was very much worth reading.

I'm committed to picking up any unread works of Tolstaya's that I come across, even moreso now that it seems I've run the course of her works in translation (if I'm incorrect in this, do let me know). For all my scrambling about the demographics, my works in translation counts are still woefully low, and get even more abysmally small when narrowed specifically with regards to women and Russia. Works are best read in their original language and yadda yadda yadda, but they're also best read in their original year of publication (good luck with that), so I'm going to make do with what I can until neuromods à la Prey become an actual thing and I can wreck one of my eyeballs in the effort of achieving 100% mastery of languages. Worst comes to worst, I'll run by my thoughts by my Russian-fluent Kyrgyz friend so I don't totally embarrass myself, at least while not in the realm in the Tatyana Tolstaya.

[Sandra Deaconu]

Deși Tolstaia își bucură cititorii cu vaste personaje (orfani care caută un părinte în orice adult, oameni călăuziți prin viață de ură și oameni care nu au alt țel decât să fie iubiți, bărbați care se folosesc de minciuni chiar și când ar putea alege cu ușurință adevărul, femei schimbate pentru totdeauna de o dragoste pierdută și numeroase alte tipologii), implicit caractere și destine, acestea sunt prinse la un loc într-o capcană pusă de viața care stă la pândă și unite fără voia lor de sărăcie. Impresia generală pe care o lasă este a unui soi de comă emoțională, de parcă ar realiza ce se petrece în jur, dar nu pot reacționa în niciun fel, așa că doar așteaptă pe un pat de tristețe și lasă neputincioase timpul să treacă peste ele.

E drept că mi-au plăcut cu adevărat doar câteva povestiri, dar asta pentru că eu nu sunt obișnuită cu suprarealismul și nici nu mă încântă de obicei să scotocesc printre elemente absurde pentru a găsi o analogie care trimite spre un mesaj tăios. Cred că ținta satirei ar fi fost mult mai clară și ar fi ajuns mai repede la ea criticile, dacă autoarea nu ar fi decorat cruda realitate cu fantasmagorii. Însă Tolstaia este cu siguranță o autoare care merită șansa de a fi citită de oricine, măcar de dragul diversității stilisticii. Povestirile ei sunt stranii, acide, triste, nostalgice și spuse pe un ton grav, un ton pe măsura vieților care le cuprind. Am copiat integral una dintre ele, pe cea mai scurtă, dacă vreți o mostră din această antologie. Recenzia aici: https://bit.ly/3leaagI.

,,[...] dar în interiorul ei, în casa pură a sufletului, are dreptul să țină lucrurile în ordinea pe care o crede de cuviință.''

[Rowena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every once in a while I come across a book and think this is the way I want to write ... and this is how I feel with Tatyana Tolstoya. I don't even know the name of what it is that she does - it's impressionistic perhaps - but sometimes, when I'm sitting here at my desk, I'll try and push myself to write what I'm now calling a 'Tolstoya' sentence ...

'White Walls' brings together two of her previous short story collections 'On the Golden Porch' and 'Sleepwalker in a Fog'. I'd been introduced to 'On the Golden Porch' back at university when I studied Russian Lit, and recently re-read it, and I must say I enjoyed these stories more than the 'Sleepwalker in a Fog' stories. Highlights are 'Hunting the Wooly Mammoth' with the unforgettable line 'She lay in the tent totally miserable, hating the two-bearded Vladimir, and wanted to get married to him as soon as possible.', 'Okkervil River' (inspired the band of the same name), 'A Clean Sheet' and 'Peters'. From the 'Sleepwalker in a Fog' collection 'The Poet and the Muse' is the most memorable - classic Tolstoya, love gone sour. Would have liked to have five starred all this, but I was let down slightly by the second half.

[Cristians. Sirb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aș întâmplă, nu adesea, că unii scriitori sunt atât de inteligenți încât textele lor rămân de neînțeles “prostimii”. Impenetrabile. Unele proze ale Tatianei Tolstaia mi-au rămas, din păcate, străine. Ceea ce nu scade cu nimic valoarea autoarei.

Partea a doua a cărții, mai eseistică, mai “legată”, a fost pe aceeași undă cu mine.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

she captures the feeling of otherness...that glimmering world which peaks out from the corners of our own that in her stories is best perceived by children, old people, and romantic neurotics. the first 2/3 deals with struggling with the tension between this world, how hopelessly elusive and wonderful it is, and drab reality. one character goes through surgery to get this awareness removed.

the last 1/3 seems to shift to the perspective of those "drab" people who don't seem to perceive the glimmering world at all. but they are not insensitive cartoon monsters; she does a good job of evoking their uneasiness, their own miseries and preoccupations.

and the last short short story timidly suggests that maybe that world exists after all, but we are all so blinded and scarred by disappointment and fear that we don't dare to try to live in it..

really a pleasure to read.

[Bbrown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let’s sing to the outskirts of town, sing the praises of the rain, of buildings gone gray, long evenings on the threshold of darkness. Let’s sing the empty lots, the browned grasses, the earth’s cold layers under an apprehensive foot, let’s sing the slow autumn dawn, the barking of a dog amid the aspen trees, fragile golden webs, and the first ice, the first bluish ice forming in the deep print of another’s footstep.

More than ten years ago I read Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel The Slynx and thought it was great. Shortly thereafter I purchased White Walls and read about half of the short stories in the collection, and then it sat half-read on my shelf for a decade. But I didn’t stop reading it because it was bad, to the contrary the writing alone is excellent enough to warrant giving the collection a try; rather, I think I stopped reading it because it was just too much. Unlike what the back blurb might lead you to believe, the works collected in White Walls are not whimsical, they are by and large very sad. The recurring totems here are old memories, lost youth, unrequited love, and life’s many disappointments. Not the most uplifting read. In a smaller volume the cumulative effect of stories with this focus might be bearable, but at just over 400 pages White Walls proved too much for me to finish in one go.

I’m glad I finally got around to completing it, though, because (to reiterate) Tolstaya’s writing is great. Some of the pieces in the collection are more so poetry written in prose rather than short stories, probably best exemplified by On the Golden Porch, and Tolstaya is such a good writer that she pulls it off. My favorites of the volume are the stories Sonya and Most Beloved, with the latter in particular being the best short story I’ve read in years. The only ones I outright disliked were the longest two pieces in the collection, Sleepwalker in a Fog and Limpopo, as they are written in a style that is so rambling that I found it exceedingly difficult to keep hold of the narrative thread. On balance, thanks to the couple of standout stories and the excellent writing throughout, White Walls is a very strong short story collection.

As revealed by the nyrb edition’s description of the book, White Walls combines two Tolstaya collections and additional works as well. I certainly appreciate nyrb providing an extensive collection, but I can’t help feeling that its contents would work better as two separate volumes. Of course, you can just do what I did and take an extended break halfway through the book, but if you do be sure to come back and finish it in due course. If I’d let this one remain half-read I would have been missing out. 4/5.

[l · Rating 4 out of 5]

admittedly, with one story left i have not quite finished this, but it really is a wonderful collection of stories. the narrator throws me a bit in some of these, but some of them are just beautiful - perfect combination of fantasy, humour and longing. i imagine tolstaya must be a very interesting person.

[Tanja · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came across Tolstaya's book more or less by accident, it was simply next in my queue: my long standing quest to read everything that NYRB is publishing. I enjoy reading short stories or novellas, always have, ditto with my last two endeavors from the NYRB series, Eileen Chang's 'Love in a Fallen City' (absolutely marvelous), and John Collier's 'Fancies and Goodnights' (twilight zoneish, and very, very funny). I am not so sure about 'White Walls', though, some stories I liked, such as 'Okkervil River' or 'The Moon Came Out', others, such as 'Loves me, Loves me not', not so much. I think it might be her style that I cannot quite grasp, the jumps and gaps, the poetic interludes. I am not sure that I would search out more of Tolstoya's work, I was not really beguiled with the entirety of this collection.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Faves -

Sweet Shura
Date with a Bird
The Fakir
Sleepwalker in a Fog
Heavenly Flame
Limpopo
White Walls

[Jacob Andra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A crisp voice. Tolstaya renders the world in sharp detail, as she does the internal landscape of her characters. Relatable, human: alternatively sad, comic, grotesque, pathetic, sublime.

[JJ Aitken · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an incredible and, now precious find this has been for me. Since very recently becoming a father time has become so precious, especially time to read. So I have embraced the art of the short story and fallen in love with it. Tatyana Tolstaya is an amazing voice who has the ability to jump from subject matter and style to leave you thinking you have actually been reading a book that is a collection of several well accomplished authors. Mixing classic Russian heartache and humor to blend with fantasy and everyday life. Each one of these stories left me feeling as if I had actually finished an entire novel.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm still convinced I'm going to like this Tatyana, but for now I've given up. Her writing style is quite different from what I'm used to, and the first fifty pages, at least, felt more like sketches than stories--which is cool; just not what I need right now. It's not you, Tatyana, it's me.

[Lynne Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tatyana Tolstaya's short stories are perfect for rainy Sunday reading. One of my favorite current Russian writers, Tolstaya really knows how to maintain the traditional mood of Russian literature while adding a modern touch to each story. I particularly love "White Walls" and "Okkervil River"

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I continuously buy this collection for people as a gift

[Klissia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fell echoes of Bunin's writing style in those short stories with a bit of fantasy/fairy tale who to me wrote the the most delicious and perfect book of short tales that Ive read : Dark Avenues,so measuring this book with another is unfair, but I have to say this book dont meet my expectations Some Good stories,others I dont care ,but this writer has personality and hability to write stories remarkable characteres and complex structure narrative. The russian winter revealing lonesome souls and tearing down hearts that longing for something ...3.5

[Sharlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Något av det bästa jag läst!

[Karuseliana · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection compiles stories from Sleepwalker In A Fog, which I already wrote about, with the ones collected in On the Golden Porch and a few stray ones that actually appeared in The New Yorker and so on. It is tempting to see all writing that emerged from Soviet Russia as an allegory for the political and social restrictions that were in effect, but the best stories here (i.e., ones I most liked) plainly have a universal resonance. The theme of hers I am drawn to is where the narrator, feeling trapped (as we all do,at least at times) in her life, is drawn to someone who represents an escape from the mundane. In reading I generalized this to myself as "The Grand Illusion" - there usually turns out to be an aspect of fraud or delusion to the escape on offer, but the revelation of that is not "a reality check" (in the tediously overused phrase) - we wish the narrators could have retained their illusions since it is often all they have. The only ambiguity is whether the gimcrack appeal of the enchantment distracted them from making more lasting changes on their own behalf, but that sort of Horatio Alger-ism is not always an option, certainly not in 1970s Leningrad - like movies during The Great Depression, the temporary distraction is the memorable one.

[Dirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me the collection was very inconsistent. I came to it with high expectations, because I loved her novel, The Slynx. Some of the stories were wonderful evocations of strangers in strange lands. The other tales simply went too far afield for me to feel any attachment to characters, places or events.

[Tommie Whitener · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know she's brilliant, but her stories are hard to follow. And, I never felt really invested in her characters. I read only twelve of the twenty-four stories. "Sweet Shura" and "A Clean Sheet" were great, but the rest didn't really grab me. I couldn't even finish "The Fakir" and put the book down.

[Misshouse]

Instead of admitting defeat (after only one member finished Brothers Karamazov for August) my delinquent book club decided to double down Tolstaya for September. As long as there's caviar...

[Jiji Pankajakshan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it... 'Sweet shura' is my favrt in the collection

[Bookmuppet]

I find this collection impossible to rate. When Tolstaya is at her best, you are swept into her language, the words think through you. But when you get lost in the prose, you find yourself completely mapless. It's not merely a matter of the realities of communism and the later political transition, though these figure in the stories unapologetically obliquely (as, in all honesty, they do in other literatures affected and shaped by this historical trajectory). No, the issue is one of an imagination that refuses to explain itself when it comes to its crucial terms -- while leaning in closely to spin fairy tales about details you might have previously considered mundane.

So here is Tolstaya at her best -- in my humble opinion, of course (from the story "The Moon Came Out"):

And in the heights above everything stretched the world of grownups—noisy, droning high overhead like pines in foul weather. Grownups: large warm pillars, reliable, eternal columns that held out glasses of milk and offered trays of latticed blueberry pie, that ran out with prickly wool sweaters in their outstretched hands and got down on their knees to fasten small dusty sandals.

And then something broke, something went wrong. The kaleidoscope—and everything in it—shattered: a handful of dull glass shards, bits of cardboard, and strips of fiery, crimson-backed mirror. The world began to dwindle and wither, the grass receded, the ceiling lowered, borders started to show through, the delightful games were forgotten. The evening fog, the wolves and the forest, it turned out, were painted on canvas carelessly tacked on wood stretchers that leaned against the cold wall. Grownups broke all the rules and died: Father was crossed out by the red line of war, Mother shriveled and extinguished; their faces dissolved in a tremulous netting of rain. The only one to dig in, hold on, the only one to stay—was Grandmother. And like a barrier, like Baba Yaga’s pike fence, impenetrable, pitch-black adolescence rose up in front of Natasha: twisted dead-ends, shameful thoughts, revolting conjectures.

The sky was silent, the earth died. Slushy rains fell for centuries.

[Ion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lectura nu a fost ușoară, prima secțiune (Foc și Praf) din carte solicită din plin atenția și răbdarea, firul narativ e uneori subțire, dar știința profundă a lucrurilor trecătoare, sensul ascuns din fapte, poezia care luminează trecerea, mențin bucuria lecturii. Ultimul sfert ar fi putut să lipsească, ține de alte zone de interes, însă rămâne, ca în alte dăți, amintirea celor mai frumoase pagini, săritura cea mai înaltă.
”Vasili Mihailovici a învățat astfel să curețe linguri, și principiile psihologiei comparative a chiftelelor și pateurilor. Știa pe de rost durata vieții dureror de efemeră a smântânii – una dintre sarcinile lui era să o distrugă de la primul semn de agonie - , știa unde se nășteau măturile și telurile, distingea profesionist între soiurile de grăunțe, știa toate prețurile paharelor și în fiecare toamnă ștergea ferestrele cu amoniac, ca să stârpească livada cu vișini de gheață care începeau să înflorească peste iarnă.”
”Lumea e înconjurată de-un zid de întunecime. Luna își va presăra zahărul imaterial din frunză în frunză, tremurătoare și strălucitoare. Pudră de zahăr, zăpadă, vise, adîncimi, totul a înghețat și moare, încremenit în frumusețea nesăbuită și fără de sfârșit, totul e uitat, iertat, în fine, oricum nimic nu s-a întâmplat aievea, și nimic nu se va întâmpla vreodată.”

[Socrate · Rating 4 out of 5]

La început a fost grădina. Copilăria era o grădină – fără sfârșit ori limite, fără granițe ori garduri, cu zgomote și foșnituri, cu soare auriu și nuanțe de verde pal, groasă de o mie de straturi, de la buruieni până la coroana pinilor. Spre sud se găsea fântâna cu broaște, spre nord, trandafirii albi și
ciupercile, spre vest, rugii de zmeură plini de țânțari, la est, tufele de afine, viespile, stânca, lacul. Copiii povesteau cum, într-o dimineață devreme, văzuseră un bărbat gol-pușcă pe malul lacului.
— Pe cuvânt de onoare. Să nu-i spui Mamei. Știi cine era?
— Nu se poate.
— Pe cuvânt, el era. Credea că e singur. Noi ne ascundeam în boschete.
— Ce-ați văzut?
— Tooot.
Ei bine, acela a fost noroc chior. Așa ceva se întâmplă numai o dată la o sută de ani. Fiindcă singurul bărbat despuiat disponibil, anume cel din manualul de anatomie, nici nu există cu adevărat. Dând dovadă de curtoazie față de lecția de anatomie a unor elevi de-a opta, tipul își dăduse jos pielea ca să se înfățișeze în toată splendoarea sa nerușinată, cărnoasă și roșie, și să se laude cu mușchii săi clavicularo-sterno-sfârculieni (toate sunt cuvinte vulgare!). Când vom ajunge și noi – într-o sută de ani – în clasa a opta, tipul va face la fel și pentru noi.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read 4 of the stories, as my bookshelf is bulging. I liked what she was doing here, but i grew a bit impatient. i loved Okkervil River... the story of a man obsessed to the point of closing everything else out - with his love of the great Soviet film star Vera Vasilevna. He lives alone and translates books. He brings home women - but ushers them out- knowing they aren't the one. Finally he chooses to try to track her down - how many years later (?) - and finds her out in the suburbs. His vision- of course - is dashed. She is no longer the siren of yore, but a rather boorish middle to getting older woman. She even has a cadre of devotees circling around her- he is only one of many he finds. He thinks he may just settle for Tamara - his devoted attached woman whom he has scorned for so long. But- she comes back to him in the end to bath in his tub. It is sordid awful and beautiful. And White Walls.. the story ... the fading of a man / family from the dacha he had built 50 + years ago... a story speaking to the drifting away of memory / resonance in the world. Poignant. However i tried a few others and found them a little airy to my tastes. Yes, i like airy- but .... to a point. Anyhow, i plan to read more of Ms. Tolstaya.