Good Citizens Need Not Fear

January 1, 2020
Stories centered on a particular apartment building in a small Ukrainian town. In the last story of this debut collection, oligarchs, tycoons, and celebrities in post-Soviet Ukraine pay good money for transformative experiences. One popular option re-creates One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: "Clients are carted out to the fringe of the Arctic Circle," Reva writes, where "they must mop the guardhouse, lay brick walls with quick-dry mortar, fight over stone-hard bread," all while "a guard flogs them." Reva's world tips slyly from Soviet-style absurdism to a more fantastical surrealism. Each of these stories is connected, in one way or another, to an apartment building in Kirovka, Ukraine. In the book's first half, the Soviet Union still stands; in the second half, it has fallen. Characters appear and reappear in various guises. In "Bone Music," Smena, who hasn't left her apartment in a year, earns a living making copies of illegal vinyl records onto X-ray film. In "Novostroïka," Daniil argues with a town hall clerk who insists that his apartment building does not, in fact, exist. "What do you mean?" he asks. "I live there." "According to the documentation, you do not," she responds. Reva has a wonderful sense of humor and an equally wonderful sense of the absurd. But the book is slim enough that the reappearances of certain characters and images feel overdone. Smena's X-ray music comes back several times. So does Mikhail Ivanovich, a low-level apparatchik who, in "Letter of Apology," is assigned to track a famous poet; later, in "Lucky Toss," he winds up working for him. The effect is somewhat claustrophobic. Still, Reva is clearly a talent to watch: Her prose has a neat efficiency, and her stories are as memorable as they are unique. The world Reva creates slips fluidly from the surreal to the absurd to the grittily realistic.

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Starred review from January 20, 2020
Reva’s hilarious, absurdist debut collection lampoons the crumbling bureaucracy leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union. In “Novostroïka,” a young man discovers that, due to a clerical error, his entire building doesn’t exist in the eyes of the government, and he follows a vertiginous, Kafkaesque course to get his heat turned on. The vicious and vulnerable Zaya, born with a cleft lip and left to an orphanage, and a poet-turned-government official named Konstantyn Illych, are indelible recurring characters. In “Little Rabbit,” four-year-old Zaya manages to escape the orphanage after discovering the mummified corpse of another orphan who was buried under the linoleum, which she takes for a saint sent to guide her out. “Miss USSR” picks up with Zaya as a teenager, having been returned to the orphanage. Konstantyn recruits her to take part in a national beauty pageant, and she disappears after spitting on the judges during the show, leaving Konstantyn with the orphan corpse that she’d kept after her escape. Later, in “Lucky Toss,” the disgraced Konstantyn makes money by charging religious fanatics to see the corpse, or “saint.” Reva delights in the strange situations caused by political dysfunction, while offering surprising notes of tenderness as ordinary people learn to get by. The riotous set pieces and intelligent gaze make this an auspicious debut.

March 1, 2020
Reva's witty first collection follows varied characters living in and around a deteriorating Ukraine apartment building during the years prior to and following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Novostro�ka finds Daniil stuck in a bureaucratic no-man's land as he attempts to secure heat for his apartment, shared by 14 occupants, after the government insists that his address doesn't exist. In Letter of Apology, Mikhail, an agent, is tasked with tracking down poet Konstantyn after Konstantyn makes an offensive joke; soon this assignment consumes Mikhail's day-to-day life. Three of the nine linked stories chart the early years of the headstrong, magnetic Zaya, an orphan who grows up in an institution and later finds herself under the temporary care of Konstantyn as the unlikely pair set off to compete in a beauty pageant. In the memorable Bone Music, an agoraphobic woman makes a living by creating bootleg records on stolen X-ray film, and her business and normalcy hang in the balance after a visit from a neighbor. Reva's tales effortlessly converge, offering well-honed portraits of her characters' realities, sensibilities, and urgencies.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)