Review of 'Zhila-byla zhenshchina, kotora︠i︡a khotela ubitʹ sosedskogo rebenka' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I'd found a hold list already at the library for their few copies in English. And not many more in stock at Powell's. So, to leave those copies available for everyone else, I checked out the Russian edition, hoping that my rusty Russian was up to the task. And it was, sort of, at least for the first section of the short stories - Песни восточных славян - tales of modern life, but written in a fable-ish style, with short sentences and an easy vocabulary. But the stories had enough twists that I was often startled, wondering if I'd really read that last sentence correctly.
I really bogged down in the second section - Сказки и истории - with longer stories using more complex language. Here I really got lost, having problems even following the thread of each tale.
It got to be pretty slow going, and I was only …
I'd found a hold list already at the library for their few copies in English. And not many more in stock at Powell's. So, to leave those copies available for everyone else, I checked out the Russian edition, hoping that my rusty Russian was up to the task. And it was, sort of, at least for the first section of the short stories - Песни восточных славян - tales of modern life, but written in a fable-ish style, with short sentences and an easy vocabulary. But the stories had enough twists that I was often startled, wondering if I'd really read that last sentence correctly.
I really bogged down in the second section - Сказки и истории - with longer stories using more complex language. Here I really got lost, having problems even following the thread of each tale.
It got to be pretty slow going, and I was only about a fourth of the way through the book by the time the book club met. There I found that I was not alone in my problems in comprehension, with the people who had read the English version wondering if they had a poor and confusing translation. We spent a great deal of the dinner comparing notes on specific stories, trying to decide exactly what had transpired in it.
Update:
I checked an English edition out of the library and re-read the stories that I'd previously read in Russian. And found that there was nothing at all wrong with my reading comprehension. Or with the translations. The stories are weird. The main difference with the second time around was that I remembered the twisty bits and could see them coming.
There were a couple of changes introduced in the English versions. Raya would scrub the flat with bleach, rather than caustic cleaning powder. It's what an American woman would have used. But it'd be sort of difficult to swap bleach for baking soda. And the radical black man was named 'Jim', instead of 'uncle Tom'. It's possible that Petrushevskaya used that term ironically. Or maybe she just didn't realize what it means.