Customer Reviews

The Time: Night

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4 star:		(2)
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I read this book a while ago, and while I forget a lot of stuff I read, this was very memorable. In my view, it's about a wide-spread Russian cultural phenomenon: mothers abusing their daughters. I remember I didn't catch it in the beginning and sympathized with the main character (Anna), thinking what a heroic mother and grandmother she was, taking care of her unfortunate grandson, the victim of his mother's (Anna's daughter) neglect. And then it dawned on me: this Anna is terrorizing everyone around her--her daughter, her mother, and her grandson--and is building a monument to herself on top of their remains... There's probably more to the story, but that's what really got to me. This is my favorite piece by Petrushevskaya.

Reading Ludmila Petrushevskaya is like snooping around the darkest corners of one's own soul. She mixes the day-to-day reality with urban legends, religious mysticism, dreams, ghosts, you name it. And she is usually really good at it--in this book, however, she sticks with reality, and, I think, shortchanges the reader.

This is a good book, of course. You cannot help sympathizing with the narrator-mother and feeling furious about the irresponsible slut of a daughter (though AA does begin to annoy you with her moralizing as she is reading the daughter's diaries, adding offensive comments along the way about her daughter's sex life). The choice AA must make in the end (and the futility of it) is the perfect finish to this very dark, depressing, at times heart-wrenching book. This book, however, is nowhere as good as some of Petrushevskaya's terrifying short stories.

The Time--Night is one of the most powerful books on poverty that has ever been written. The reader must look beneath the suface of Anya and her daughters relationship to find the true meaning of the novel. Once you see that this novel is truly about what lengths a woman will go to support her family, and inversily what she must do to protect her own heart in the process. Upon first reading one will want to despise all of the charecters, even little Tima, yet under the surface is a novel about a woman who can not love another person because loves means one must care for he loved one. Anya is unable to provie for any more people so how then can she love them if she can not provie for them. At the core this novel exposes the real struggles that people suffer through when there really is no way out.

I have to confess: I had mixed feelings about this book. I meandered along, enjoying the brief and naive sections plagiarized from the narrator's sluttish daughter Alyona, but muddling through Anna's daily life of suffering. Occasionally the anti-social antics of her grandson Tima livened up the scene. However, something pulled me forward, and, toward the book's close, as Anna stood in a surreal industrial landscape holding her senile mother, the whole series of events leading to this moment washed over me. The combination of stream-of-consciousness and deliberate straightforward narrative, the will of a woman to survive in a hostile environment, and the concerns of four generations of Russians fell together into a dirty ice crystal of great beauty. I highly recommend this book.