Status
Available
Publication
Penguin Books (2009), Edition: Original, 224 pages
Description
Masterworks of economy and acuity, these brief, trenchant tales by Russian author and playwright Petrushevskaya, selected from her wide-ranging but little translated oeuvre over the past 30 years, offer an enticement to English readers to seek out more of her writing. The tales explore the inexplicable workings of fate, the supernatural, grief and madness, and range from adroit, straightforward narratives to bleak fantasy. Frequently on display are the decrepit values of the Soviet system, as in The New Family Robinson, where a family tries to outsmart everyone by relocating to a ramshackle cabin in the country. Domestic problems get powerful and tender treatment; in My Love, a long-suffering wife and mother triumphs over her husband's desire for another woman. Darker material dominates the last section of the book, with tortuous stories, heavy symbolism and outright weirdness leading to strange and unexpected places. Petrushevskaya's bold, no-nonsense portrayals find fresh, arresting expression in this excellent translation.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member andreablythe
Modern settings and dark undertones make for fascinating collection of what the editors dub scary fairy tales. Some examples of the tales: A family is forced to hole up and hide from strange disease infects the city. A woman encounters a friend who has married Poseidon's son. A family migrates to
What seems to make them fairy tales or folk lore as opposed to simply fantasy and science fiction stories is the tone of the writing combined with the use of modern day archetypes. For example, in the title story the classic witch is transformed into a jealous neighbor who tries to get rid of her friend's baby.
The first few stories didn't quite grab me, but the later stories (the Allegories and Fairy Tales) seemed to have more depth to them, and I was completely fascinated by them.
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the country in an attempt to escape the collapse of society. What seems to make them fairy tales or folk lore as opposed to simply fantasy and science fiction stories is the tone of the writing combined with the use of modern day archetypes. For example, in the title story the classic witch is transformed into a jealous neighbor who tries to get rid of her friend's baby.
The first few stories didn't quite grab me, but the later stories (the Allegories and Fairy Tales) seemed to have more depth to them, and I was completely fascinated by them.
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LibraryThing member TheBookJunky
These stories are like entering into the vivid and tormented dreams of someone with a feverish delirium. Yet they are oddly refreshing and often touching tales. The author displays an astonishingly original creativity. I particularly liked "The Fountain House" which had been previously published in
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the New Yorker. It fulfills the promise of its' opening line: "There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life." Show Less
LibraryThing member varwenea
Originally banned from publishing in the Soviet Union (aren’t they all?), Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is now a famed Russian contemporary writer with this collection being one of the first introductions to English readers. This collection of not-so-fairy fairy tales is a mix of Edger Allen Poe and
The 19 tales are separated into 4 categories: Songs of the Eastern Slavs, Allegories, Requiems, and Fairy Tales.
The most lauded tale is “The New Robinson Crusoes”; it read a bit like a mini version of “The Road” where a family is constantly staying ahead and away from the bandits who will rob and kill everyone they encounter. From darkness, the family unit grows stronger.
My two favorites are “The Shadow Life” and “Marilena’s Secret”. The former addressed an orphan girl who grew up to be a self-reliant woman and gained closure of her missing and deceased mother’s love. The twin girls in the latter triumph over an evil wizard, greedy fiancé, and murderous future sister-in-law.
Not an easy read to stomach and a dose of ‘what just happened’, I can’t recommend this book without caution. Nonetheless, I thought it was a worthy read.
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Grimm’s. Dark, bleak, and occasionally grotesque, they represent the difficult past (and present?) of the Soviet and Russian lives. At first glance, they are filled with negativity, from hungry families and towns, distrust and envy amongst neighbors, selfish youth, to murders, death, and overindulgent parents with what little they have. Deeper within is a repeated theme of resilience, whatever it may take to work through the hardship, often with sacrifice that may be ‘rewarded’, even if in a twisted way. The 19 tales are separated into 4 categories: Songs of the Eastern Slavs, Allegories, Requiems, and Fairy Tales.
The most lauded tale is “The New Robinson Crusoes”; it read a bit like a mini version of “The Road” where a family is constantly staying ahead and away from the bandits who will rob and kill everyone they encounter. From darkness, the family unit grows stronger.
My two favorites are “The Shadow Life” and “Marilena’s Secret”. The former addressed an orphan girl who grew up to be a self-reliant woman and gained closure of her missing and deceased mother’s love. The twin girls in the latter triumph over an evil wizard, greedy fiancé, and murderous future sister-in-law.
Not an easy read to stomach and a dose of ‘what just happened’, I can’t recommend this book without caution. Nonetheless, I thought it was a worthy read.
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LibraryThing member seidchen
These stories are striking in their dreamlike structure and straightforward intensity. The pitch to the U.S. market seems a bit off: "scary fairy tales" doesn't do justice to the singular voice of these fundamentally social fables.
LibraryThing member lauriebrown54
Imagine Angela Carter’s dark, surrealistic stories are even darker than they are. Got it? Now, go even darker. Now you’ve got the tone of Petrushevskaya’s short tales. Set in Soviet era Russia, these stories explore extremes of poverty and despair. This is a world where there is never enough
These are surreal, magical tales. A number take place in that liminal place between life and death, and love can beat death. Some characters find themselves in strange places or even strange bodies. Are these events real, or are they illusions brought on by stress? Are the characters alive or dead? The author leaves us to decide for ourselves. Human relationships are more important than physical reality. Highly recommended.
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to eat, where if you have even a little bit you are at once a prime target for theft, where sons rob their mothers and neighbors plot murder. These are surreal, magical tales. A number take place in that liminal place between life and death, and love can beat death. Some characters find themselves in strange places or even strange bodies. Are these events real, or are they illusions brought on by stress? Are the characters alive or dead? The author leaves us to decide for ourselves. Human relationships are more important than physical reality. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member g026r
There's a decent amount of Russian literature on my bookshelves, but from an age standpoint most of it dates from the Khrushchev Thaw or earlier, with a little bit sneaking into the early Brezhnev years. As a consequence of that I've been trying to read more contemporary Russian authors — a
In keeping with that attempt, I picked up Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's collection of short stories, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby. It's subtitled "Scary Fairy Tales", but honestly none of the stories are scary (or, at least, the vast majority of actual fairy tales are far more frightening) and most don't feel like fairy tales. Rather, most of the rather short pieces in this volume feel more like, both in structure and narrative voice, the type of stories you told around a campfire or late at night among friends when you were younger. You know the ones; they almost invariably ended with "and then they discovered that _____ had been dead all along!" (Think "The Phantom Hitchhiker" for the canonical example of this type.) In fact, what feels like a large number of stories actually do end in that manner, with one of the characters revealed to have been dead or dying during the majority of their appearance in the tale.
Overall, as scary stories they aren't terribly frightening, as fairy tales they just don't fit lacking most of the standard marks of the form (including many Russian folk tales), as ghost stories they're unoriginal and unvaried, and as just plain stories they feel too short and fragmentary to be satisfying. Perhaps a better collection might work, but if this is representative of Petrushevskaya's output then I have to say I'm uninterested.
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somewhat difficult task due to the dearth of translations of their works. (e.g. Vladimir Sorokin, by some accounts one of the most popular authors in modern Russian literature, has had a grand total of 2 books translated over 25 years.)In keeping with that attempt, I picked up Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's collection of short stories, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby. It's subtitled "Scary Fairy Tales", but honestly none of the stories are scary (or, at least, the vast majority of actual fairy tales are far more frightening) and most don't feel like fairy tales. Rather, most of the rather short pieces in this volume feel more like, both in structure and narrative voice, the type of stories you told around a campfire or late at night among friends when you were younger. You know the ones; they almost invariably ended with "and then they discovered that _____ had been dead all along!" (Think "The Phantom Hitchhiker" for the canonical example of this type.) In fact, what feels like a large number of stories actually do end in that manner, with one of the characters revealed to have been dead or dying during the majority of their appearance in the tale.
Overall, as scary stories they aren't terribly frightening, as fairy tales they just don't fit lacking most of the standard marks of the form (including many Russian folk tales), as ghost stories they're unoriginal and unvaried, and as just plain stories they feel too short and fragmentary to be satisfying. Perhaps a better collection might work, but if this is representative of Petrushevskaya's output then I have to say I'm uninterested.
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LibraryThing member jasonlf
I wanted to like this more than I actually did like it. Some of the stories are quite striking, original and memorable. But there is something overly defiant of any internal logic or coherence that gets in the way of them being fully satisfying. And there was a certain repetitiveness to them. That
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said, some are about as imaginative as anything I've read -- from about as macabre and twisted mind as one could imagine. Show Less
LibraryThing member lobotomy42
These stories are more like the kinds of stories you read as a kid in those "Scary Stories" collections than fairy tales or contemporary fiction. They are mostly of the half-horror, half-comedy type, where the ending is a punchline that makes everything that came before seem somehow "creepy." But
There are a few that linger in the mind after reading them. Post-apocalyptic "The New Robinson Crusoes" works precisely because it avoids the punchline syndrome so prevalent in all the others. The efforts that the Crusoes go to in order to flee from whatever danger has engulfed the rest of civilization says more about the horror than any manufactured twist ending.
Scary Fairy Tales is supposedly an attempt to gather up a group of thematically related stories from across Petrushevkaya's career, and perhaps it suffers for it. Individually, some of these stories might be shocking or haunting, but when read all at once it's hard for them to avoid blurring together.
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most of them aren't much more than this.There are a few that linger in the mind after reading them. Post-apocalyptic "The New Robinson Crusoes" works precisely because it avoids the punchline syndrome so prevalent in all the others. The efforts that the Crusoes go to in order to flee from whatever danger has engulfed the rest of civilization says more about the horror than any manufactured twist ending.
Scary Fairy Tales is supposedly an attempt to gather up a group of thematically related stories from across Petrushevkaya's career, and perhaps it suffers for it. Individually, some of these stories might be shocking or haunting, but when read all at once it's hard for them to avoid blurring together.
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LibraryThing member aliceunderskies
I'd love to do theory on these stories. I really loved this book despite my prejudice against the short story. Petrushevskaya is as bleak and troubling as the title of this collection suggests, but since her work is so firmly rooted in soviet history and culture she never seemed gratuitously grim.
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I couldn't put this one down, and I really hope more of her work will be translated--if what comes next is as good she'll be an auto-read. Show Less
LibraryThing member librarybrandy
Liked this well enough, but it was already overdue and I wasn't inclined to finish it.
LibraryThing member Y2Ash
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby was good but I liked her previous and equally tongue-tying title about a woman's sister's husband who hanged himself. I feel with this novel either I didn't get the symbolism, something got lost in translation,
The really great stories were Marilena's Secret and The Black Coat. Marilena's Secret was about two dancers named Maria and Lena whom are cursed by wizard to become an overweight person. I will always have sympathy for an overweight character who is being used and abused because they're overweight. The Black Coat was about some girl's eerie and existential descent into some very mean streets to escape her life. This was a doozy but very good. The perfect blend of symbolism, realism, and creepiness.
I would like for more of Petrushevskaya's work to be translated. She has a real knack for imagery for depicting the less than stellar life in Russia. She does have a handle on the Creep factor.
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or both. There were some stories that I found really great, creepy but boring, or just boring.The really great stories were Marilena's Secret and The Black Coat. Marilena's Secret was about two dancers named Maria and Lena whom are cursed by wizard to become an overweight person. I will always have sympathy for an overweight character who is being used and abused because they're overweight. The Black Coat was about some girl's eerie and existential descent into some very mean streets to escape her life. This was a doozy but very good. The perfect blend of symbolism, realism, and creepiness.
I would like for more of Petrushevskaya's work to be translated. She has a real knack for imagery for depicting the less than stellar life in Russia. She does have a handle on the Creep factor.
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LibraryThing member -sunny-
This was interesting to read so soon after reading "Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology," since this collection's stories would have been right at home in that volume. "Slipstream," to anyone not familiar with the term, isn't the most readily defined of genres, but it generally describes
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stories that may combine elements of genres, or not fit any genre, and/or are simply "strange." Vague, I know. But that would pretty well describe the stories in "There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby." Some of the tales in the volume are a lot like ghost stories, others seem like realistic fiction until the strangeness begins to creep in, and others contain elements of the paranormal and fantastic. In any case, I enjoyed this, and though many of the stories did have a similar "feel" to them, they didn't seem repetitive. Surreality mixed with pure reality, affording some insights no less true for their odd surroundings. Show Less
LibraryThing member -sunny-
This was interesting to read so soon after reading "Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology," since this collection's stories would have been right at home in that volume. "Slipstream," to anyone not familiar with the term, isn't the most readily defined of genres, but it generally describes
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stories that may combine elements of genres, or not fit any genre, and/or are simply "strange." Vague, I know. But that would pretty well describe the stories in "There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby." Some of the tales in the volume are a lot like ghost stories, others seem like realistic fiction until the strangeness begins to creep in, and others contain elements of the paranormal and fantastic. In any case, I enjoyed this, and though many of the stories did have a similar "feel" to them, they didn't seem repetitive. Surreality mixed with pure reality, affording some insights no less true for their odd surroundings. Show Less
LibraryThing member amanda4242
Take equal parts Edgar Allan Poe and The Brothers Grimm, throw in a good helping of classic urban legends, and add a light dusting of the bleakness of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and you'll come up with something close to Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to
The book is divided into four sections: "Songs of the Eastern Slavs", "Allegories", "Requims", and "Fairy Tales". I didn't much care for the stories in the first section, which seemed kind of abrupt and unfinished to me, but the stories of the remaining three sections were nearly all very good. Some of the standouts were "The New Robinson Crusoes", about a family trying to survive in the country, "The Miracle", wherein a mother considers how far she is willing to go to help her son, "The Father", concerning a man who finds his family in a most peculiar fashion, and "The Old Monk's Testament", a tale about a monk that I’m not quite sure how to summarize.
This is a strange collection that I won't read cover-to-cover again, but I wouldn't mind revisiting some of the stories in the future.
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Kill Her Neighbour's Baby.The book is divided into four sections: "Songs of the Eastern Slavs", "Allegories", "Requims", and "Fairy Tales". I didn't much care for the stories in the first section, which seemed kind of abrupt and unfinished to me, but the stories of the remaining three sections were nearly all very good. Some of the standouts were "The New Robinson Crusoes", about a family trying to survive in the country, "The Miracle", wherein a mother considers how far she is willing to go to help her son, "The Father", concerning a man who finds his family in a most peculiar fashion, and "The Old Monk's Testament", a tale about a monk that I’m not quite sure how to summarize.
This is a strange collection that I won't read cover-to-cover again, but I wouldn't mind revisiting some of the stories in the future.
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LibraryThing member nosajeel
I wanted to like this more than I actually did like it. Some of the stories are quite striking, original and memorable. But there is something overly defiant of any internal logic or coherence that gets in the way of them being fully satisfying. And there was a certain repetitiveness to them. That
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said, some are about as imaginative as anything I've read -- from about as macabre and twisted mind as one could imagine. Show Less
LibraryThing member JimElkins
There are two kinds of stories in Petrushevskaya's imagination:
1. Those that come from a desire to be black, surreal, spiritual, ghostly, and macabre. The desire is a very familiar thing in Russian and other European fiction, and surprising as some of these stories are, in the end it is exhausting
2. Those that come from aggressions, terrors, and weirdnesses in Petryushevskaya's imagination. The title story, about a woman who tries to kill another woman's baby, is of this kind. A reviewer said that it was the best story, but it's more than that: it isn't the same kind of story as the others in the collection. It is a real story, reporting real passion and pathology. The only thing that's false about it is the ending, which takes some strategies from fin-de-siecle ghost stories and surrealism -- that is, it borrows the desires of the first kind of stories, and uses them to pretend that this story is nothing but a scary fairy tale.
It is the one real story in the collection.
1. Those that come from a desire to be black, surreal, spiritual, ghostly, and macabre. The desire is a very familiar thing in Russian and other European fiction, and surprising as some of these stories are, in the end it is exhausting
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and uninteresting. It's an old desire: it goes back to the nineteenth century, to fin-de-siecle mysticism, and to late romanticism, and so it's as if modernism and postmodernism hadn't quite ever taken place, or as if she wishes they hadn't. But I find I can't take pleasure in the desire to re-inhabit those cultural spaces that ended, in most of the world, so long ago.2. Those that come from aggressions, terrors, and weirdnesses in Petryushevskaya's imagination. The title story, about a woman who tries to kill another woman's baby, is of this kind. A reviewer said that it was the best story, but it's more than that: it isn't the same kind of story as the others in the collection. It is a real story, reporting real passion and pathology. The only thing that's false about it is the ending, which takes some strategies from fin-de-siecle ghost stories and surrealism -- that is, it borrows the desires of the first kind of stories, and uses them to pretend that this story is nothing but a scary fairy tale.
It is the one real story in the collection.
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LibraryThing member hemlokgang
Meh. Rave reviews for this collection of morality tales are everywhere, so I may just be the odd woman out on this one.
Awards
Shirley Jackson Award (Nominee — Collection — 2009)
World Fantasy Award (Nominee — Collection — 2010)
Nocte Award (2012)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
2009
2011 (English translation)
Physical description
224 p.; 5.08 inches
ISBN
0143114662 / 9780143114666
Local notes
fiction