Rate this book

Elas Kord Naine, Kes Tahtis Tappa Oma Naabri Last (2009)

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya(Favorite Author)

3.64 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Tänapäev

review 1: Although the title of the book describes the contents as "scary fairy tales" I would say that the works are more depressing than scary. There's lots of gore and death, but there isn't the sense of dread that comes with typical horror fiction. Rather, we get a vision of a world that is bleak but that nevertheless still offers some room to hope and to struggle. And the tale "Marilena's Secret" is outright hilarious. I really appreciate the manner in which the tales are crafted; the writing style is simple and direct, which gives us space to think about other things, such as what is actually happening in the story and what the author is trying to say. It's a collection that is a little too dreary for me to really love, but it's still some solid, good s... moretuff.
review 2: There are two kinds of stories in Petrushevskaya's imagination:[return][return]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 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.[return][return]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.[return][return]It is the one real story in the collection. less

Download links for: Elas kord naine, kes tahtis tappa oma naabri last

Advertising