The Time: Night (A Novel) [Hardcover]

Ludm Petrushevskaya (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 1994

Capturing the complexities of contemporary Russian life, the scribbled notes of Anna Andrianovna, written in the solitary hours of the night, chronicle her struggle to provide food, money, space, time, and love for the diverse members of her family.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Since she appeared on the Russian literary scene in the 1970s, Petrushevskaya has produced a steady outpouring of short stories and plays; today, she is generally considered to be one of the finest living Russian writers. This novel, the first of her works to appear in America, portrays the gritty, day-to-day life of ordinary Russians. The loosely structured narrative consists of a manuscript written by the now deceased Anna Andrianovna, a minor poet, interspersed with diary entries by Anna's feckless daughter, Alyona. Anna is desperately trying to hold on to her small apartment in Moscow while fending off the relentless demands of her two grown children and their families. Andrei, her son, is a petty crook recently released from prison; out of work and unable to free himself from a bad crowd, he constantly hits up his mother for money and threatens to move back home. Meanwhile, Alyona, who has a knack for involving herself with unsuitable men and getting pregnant, alternates between living at home and, after dumping her children with Anna, simply disappearing. And then there's Anna's senile mother, who clearly belongs in an institution. Petrushevskaya focuses on Anna's increasingly desperate situation and her conflicted feelings about her role as a mother, a daughter, a woman and a poet. While the facts of the story are relentlessly depressing, the author's signature black humor and matter-of-fact prose result in an insightful and sympathetic portrait of a family in crisis.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Awakened in the middle of the night, Soviet poet Anna Andrianovna pours out her grief in scribbled notes at the kitchen table. Anna is a women on the edge, a mother and grandmother scraping out a miserable existence in Moscow as she struggles to provide food and shelter for her extended family, most of whom abuse her kindness, ignore her advice, and shrink from her gestures of love. Anna's story moves at a breathless pace, becoming nearly incoherent as dawn approaches. The book's strength lies in Anna's character and the terrible irony with which she describes her daily life and frustrating attempts to understand the people she loves, with so little hope of reciprocation. This wry American debut, shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize, is highly recommended for all fiction collections.
Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo,
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 155 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st Ed. edition (August 23, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679436162
• ISBN-13: 978-0679436164
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 4.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,451,540 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars book about Russian mothers and daughters, December 2, 2010

By 

yulia (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Time: Night (Paperback)

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.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Petrushevskaya has done better, February 20, 2003

By 

Tanya Lamnin (West Bloomfield, MI, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Time: Night (Paperback)

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.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One must truly delve into this book to appreciate it., May 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Time: Night (A Novel) (Hardcover)

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.