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White Walls by Tatyana Tolstaya: book review



White Walls: Collected Stories  (2016) is a collection of 24 short stories set in Russia (mostly Moscow and Leningrad), gleaned from two previous collections by Tatyana Tolstaya: On the Golden Porchand Sleepwalker in a Fog.

I liked Sweet Shura – especially the description of Alexandra Ernestovna’s hat – and it being so big that patrons could not see the movie at the cinema as she ‘rattled foil candy wrappers, gluing together her store-bought teeth with sweet goo.’ And the description of her three husbands. The story is actually a reference to Tolstaya’s sister Shura.

Heavenly Flame is also a favourite. Set in rural Russia, old Korobeinikov leaves the hospital to  visit the home of Olga Mikhailovna regularly – ‘for him the time has come to wither.’ He talks of aliens and flying saucers: ‘these little green men are always picking up the wrong people.’ He talks too of the heavenly flame: ‘about how one fine evening, see, the skies over Petrozavodsk convulsed and a heavenly flame descended, a column of horrendous force, and everything turned bright as day …’ His conversation ‘flags, halts, dries up, as if everything on earth had already been said.’

The story, Poet and the Muse, is about Nina, a 35-year-old doctor who needed ‘a wild, true love … and animal passion, dark windy nights with streetlamps aglow.’ She meets a poet, Grishunya.

These are autobiographical stories. There are stories of childhood, of uncles and aunts, lovers, idiots, and angels. There are stories of hardship, depression, and illness, but also stories of hilarity and food – ‘old ladies grumble at the hot stove, they’re stewing poison in pots.’ Mostly Tolstaya writes about people over 50 years of age. 

Tolstaya uses the word ‘disgusting’ a lot (her nanny, someone’s dog, the cold weather, and so on). The sentences are long, long, long, but desciptive and whimsical. It’s so refreshing when there is a short sentence – it’s like finding a gem in the Moscow snow. But there are other gems - intermingled in the stories are song lyrics, children’s rhymes, and poems.

This is a great collection of stories. With an abundance of eccentric characters and the absurdities of everyday life, Tolstaya presents a random collection of unpredictable surprises. 






MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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