... For writers of the present moment, Russian and non-Russian, the
Yeltsin years have become a caldron for a wildly imaginative, surreal
literature grounded in post-Soviet exigency, a chilly Macondo stretching
over 11 time zones. Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya
and Olga Slavnikova have emerged with distinctive, revelatory fantasies.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's fine new collection of terrifying stories,
"There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby,"
employs gothic sorcery to populate these years with zombies and demons
and ghosts. Gina Ochsner, an Oregon native, sticks her ladle into the
same overheated pot and, with luminous writing, affection for her
characters and, especially, faith in language's humanizing power,
manages to find a portion of hopefulness. 

Ken Kalfus
Post-Soviet Yearning 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/books/review/Kalfus-t.html?ref=books&p
agewanted=all

THE RUSSIAN DREAMBOOK OF COLOR AND FLIGHT
By Gina Ochsner (370 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

For writers of the present moment, Russian and non-Russian, the Yeltsin
years have become a caldron for a wildly imaginative, surreal literature
grounded in post-Soviet exigency, a chilly Macondo stretching over 11
time zones. Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya and Olga
Slavnikova have emerged with distinctive, revelatory fantasies. Ludmilla
Petrushevskaya's fine new collection of terrifying stories, "There Once
Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby," employs gothic
sorcery to populate these years with zombies and demons and ghosts. Gina
Ochsner, an Oregon native, sticks her ladle into the same overheated pot
and, with luminous writing, affection for her characters and,
especially, faith in language's humanizing power, manages to find a
portion of hopefulness. 

Driving by a certain decrepit five-story apartment building in the
Russian city of Perm in the late 1990s, you would never have imagined
you were passing a locus of magic and transcendence. There had been no
heat or working toilets in the building for months, and no running
water; most of the tenants had stopped receiving their salaries and
pensions. Feral, abandoned children hovered in packs around uncollected
refuse heaped outside the building. But Gina Ochsner, traveling there at
least imaginatively, has paused at the address, peered into the
courtyard and come away from it with a novel of startling, redemptive
beauty. 

The author of two collections of short stories, Ochsner is an American
who has spent limited time in Russia, none of it in Perm. Yet her first
novel, "The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight," is (despite the
kitschy title) soaked in baleful authenticity, with laundry boiling on
the stove and perfume doubling as an intoxicant. As she links the grim
anomie of post-Soviet Russia to the delirium of magic realism, Ochsner
elevates the tenants' struggles and makes sense of their confounding
times.

Azade, a Muslim woman whose family was deported from North Ossetia,
maintains the courtyard latrines, reading in their emerging odors the
unfulfilled dreams and about-to-be-realized anxieties of her patrons
while she rations out the toilet paper. Her Jewish neighbor Olga works
for the Perm edition of the military newspaper Red Star, translating
into reassuring euphemism the horrific news from Chechnya. Olga's son,
Yuri, a shell-shocked army vet who dreams of being a fish, leads
desultory interpretive tours at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum
of Art, Geology and Anthropology, where the exhibits are entirely fake.

In one way or another, these Russians engage in heroic acts of
translation - not from one language to another but from the absurd
gibber of everyday life to the salvation of meaning. Another neighbor,
an even greater manipulator of the prosaic, is a woman named Tanya, who
also works at the museum. In addition to checking coats, she
manufactures crude icons out of popsicle sticks and cheap fabric, using
the gold foil from candy wrappers for the saints' halos. She concedes
that the icons are also made from cardboard, but points out that it's
"cardboard of the highest quality." And sometimes, when "the long lines
of her serene sorrow guide her hand," she's touched by a true religious
and artistic spirit noticed by no one. "Outwardly stout, inwardly
anorexic," Tanya carries a battered blue notebook in which she records
bittersweet memories, the details of her crush on Yuri and her
observations of cloud formations and the colors of the sky. "Always the
girl dreamt a translation of her days into the language of clouds,
believing that by describing every skyscape she would make her life a
beautiful knowable thing."

These four souls stuck in Perm, a city whose name all but promises
immobility, are stirred into motion by two events. In the first, which
conclusively shelves the novel as Magic Realism, Russian Division,
Azade's husband, Mircha, throws himself off the tenement's roof - only
to reappear, weeks later, in the courtyard to taunt his neighbors, who
take his resurrection in stride, along with everything else that has
befallen them. The second catalyst is mostly comic, as Tanya's boss
assigns her to complete the museum's application for an American arts
grant. The loopy questionnaire captures the imagination of the museum's
indigent staffers, who have visions of using the money to buy toaster
ovens and other personal items. But the application's questions thwart
their best efforts at translation: "Describe what 'positive work ethic'
means to you." Looking over Tanya's shoulder, Yuri asks: "What is
'positive work ethic'? Do such words even belong together?"

It's typical of Ochsner's characters to step back from language like
this, in the postmodern fashion, and consider words and language as
physical things, with their individual textures and secret affinities.
Azade can "curse in Ossetian and bless in Kumyk, those fibrous languages
of mud and straw." As a girl, Olga "collected languages the same way
people collected keys or buttons. At night she dreamt in other languages
and she woke in the morning with spoonfuls of those foreign sounds still
on her tongue." When Yuri receives a beating, it's as if by -typography:
"A pounding punctuated with sharp interjections. A dash, dash. Boxer's
blows to the face. Oh Mother. A comma, a semicolon, a reprieve and then
ellipses. All the pieces of punctuation brilliantly effected by the
closed fist, the knee to the groin. Yes, he was getting the message."

Yet the message isn't all bad, since it soon translates into an act of
tenderness. Olga notes that a secondary "definition of the word
'translate' was to convey to heaven without death." And when the
building's tenants are granted a vision of a muddy apocalypse, they can
still manage to see what comes next.

For writers of the present moment, Russian and non-Russian, the Yeltsin
years have become a caldron for a wildly imaginative, surreal literature
grounded in post-Soviet exigency, a chilly Macondo stretching over 11
time zones. Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya and Olga
Slavnikova have emerged with distinctive, revelatory fantasies. Ludmilla
Petrushevskaya's fine new collection of terrifying stories, "There Once
Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby," employs gothic
sorcery to populate these years with zombies and demons and ghosts. Gina
Ochsner, an Oregon native, sticks her ladle into the same overheated pot
and, with luminous writing, affection for her characters and,
especially, faith in language's humanizing power, manages to find a
portion of hopefulness. 

Ken Kalfus is the author of four books, two of which, "Pu-239" and "The
Commissariat of Enlightenment," are set in Russia