Ulitskaya is a rare bird in Russia's modern literary landscape. On the one hand, she is acutely aware of everything that has happened in world literature during the last century or so, and this is evident on any page of her writing. On the other hand, she is still compelled by that old-fashioned desire to tell a story, which makes her books immensely more readable than those of many other writers of comparable caliber. Moreover, Ulitskaya is only interested in a handful of subjects, yet she still manages to find new ways to treat them, avoiding repetition.
Her new collection offers a broad sampling of these subjects: family relationships; the philosophy of lies; the interaction between nurture and nature; old age and dying. Ulitskaya is expert at manipulating the reader's feelings, and even the stony-hearted will feel a lump in the throat when reading her more poignant stories -- such as one about a beautiful woman trying to find a man who can appreciate her inner beauty, or one about a poodle called up for military service during World War II (small dogs were used to blow up German tanks) and concealed by its owners until the end of the fighting.
This might be my opinion, but when I read Ulitskaya, I find that she describes people who exist in real life: good-natured old ladies, hard-drinking working-class men, neophyte Orthodox believers on the verge of hysteria, bums, professors and bookstore owners. In contrast, when I'm reading a glossy magazine or a book targeted at the glossy magazine audience, I'm not always sure that the characters described therein are possible, or that the author knows more about them than I do -- that is, zilch.
"Our King's People" is not uniform, which means it avoids monotony but is also somewhat patchy. The author's observations about life abroad fall short of her "domestic" insights and tend to repeat the usual touristy impressions of foreign places. The book's final section, consisting of short, unconnected pieces of text, seems artificial, a forced tribute to postmodernism. And more than once, Ulitskaya finishes her story a bit too late and says more than should have been said. When she doesn't do this, however, she comes across as perhaps the best storyteller in Russia today.
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