White Walls

Starred review from February 5, 2007
Angels, imaginary friends, near-saints, shades and über-ogres fall to Earth among ordinary Russians and routinely succeed in whetting the imagination in this sparkling collection from Tolstoy's great-grandniece, a longtime New Yorker
fiction contributor. It includes her two previous story collections, On the Golden Porch
and Sleepwalker in a Fog
, along with more recent work. The opening story, "Loves Me, Loves Me Not," presents the classic hateful nanny/spoiled kids dyad, setting it in a Leningrad full of wonders: some menacing, others joyous. In "Okkerivil River," the hapless Simeonov sets off to rescue (or so he imagines) chanteuse Vera Vasilevna, who has serenaded him from his Victrola for half a lifetime. When he does find her, she turns out to be exactly like the title river: vivid, repugnant and polluted beyond human redress. In "The Circle," Vassily Mikailovich (Tolstaya wryly leaves him without a surname) turns 60 and finds little behind or ahead of him, despite meeting the ghost of former lover Isolde. In "Yorick," a baleen whale, provider of bone for button-making and enabler of childhood fantasies, is elegized as Hamlet's nursemaid and human cairn to the narrator. Beautiful, imaginative and disconcerting, Tolstaya's Russia is a labyrinth of treasures and horrors.

April 15, 2007
Tolstaya's ("The Slynx") newest work collects the short fiction of "On the Golden Porch" and "Sleepwalker in a Fog" with new stories appearing in English for the first time. Many of these 22 stories center on the contemplation, anticipation, and examination of the ramifications of mortality. In the title piece, the narrator searches his country house for tangible signs of the deceased former owner. Other themes include the reconciliation of private dreams with reality ("Hunting Fire and Dust") and the humor inherent in life ("Hunting the Wooly Mammoth"). Tolstaya's stories, frequently told in the first person, get to the heart of their characters' thoughts with their intimate, conversational narratives. This style provides vivid descriptions and detailed imagery, but when the stories are read in quick succession, it can create the sense that one has been cornered by a professional gossip. Tolstaya is a leading voice in European literature; recommended for academic collections.Heather Wright, ASRC Management Svcs., Cincinnati

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