Ulinich, Anya: Petropolis. Scribe, 2008. RRP $29.95. ISBN 9780670038190
As if producing a debut novel with the punch to stop a pugilist in their tracks wasn't enough, author Anya Ulinich manages to do so in a second language.
Such is the verve of the 34-year-old Russian-born, US-based writer. Ulinich's novel Petropolis (taken from a poem by late Russian poet Osip Mandelstam), which charts the life and times of unlikely heroine Sasha Golberg, begins in the depths of a Siberian winter before arcing halfway around the world to a quixotic Arizonian summer.
When we first meet Sasha she's a guileless 14-year-old living among the Eastern Bloc ruins in a town called Asbestos 2 with her still beautiful but slightly demented mother. Despite the old-school melancholy of her surroundings Sasha is no Russian doll. Chubby, ruddy complexioned and with blood of Negritianka running through her veins, Sasha wears her disenfranchisement like a seasoned dissident, much to her mother's chagrin.
A throwback to the pre-Gorbachev intelligencia, Mrs Goldberg clings to her idealism like a person drowning. She is prepared to sacrifice everything to turn her daughter into a good little Soviet, even her wiles, which she stashed away (along with the contraband cognac) after her husband Victor cut himself loose and scampered to America.
At the local art school, where Mrs Goldberg secures Sasha a place, Sasha spies the sleek, surly Alexei, and art and politics soon go by the wayside. As do any thoughts of contraception.
After giving birth to a daughter, who her mother steps in to raise, Sasha finds herself suddenly free of Asbestos 2 and all its shackles. What's a nice Russian girl with no particular aspirations, even fewer rubles to her name and a faint desire to find her father to do? She takes the path of least resistance and signs up as a mail order bride.
Much has been said about the perils of memory in autobiographical-style writing. Whether Ulinich falls victim to this is up for conjecture, yet taking on board her assertion that while she draws from life, her protagonist is a work of fiction, it seems counterproductive to then pick over the bones of the narrative, especially when it shimmers like this:
'Outside, the sun hangs in the gray haze, unmoving, as if it's three in the afternoon. Sasha thinks about Brooklyn's starless darkness, humid summer nights saturated with orange light and ambulance sirens,