IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD, MY LOVE

Fantasies and grotesqueries permeate a post-perestroika coming-of-age tale.

An unnamed narrator launches Gorbunova’s ambitious story with a recounting of her childhood and teenage years in and around St. Petersburg in the 1990s. As a young girl, the enigmatic narrator is acutely aware of the natural world surrounding her, particularly during the time she spends at her grandparents’ dacha. Her goal, as a neophyte poet during a turbulent and rebellious adolescence, is to catch and transform the ephemeral into words. Writing primarily in the first person, Gorbunova creates a vivid picture of a Russian teenage wasteland in the earlier sections of an increasingly complex and episodic narrative. As the story unfolds, the “dark Russian collective unconscious” and associated folklore emerge as motifs (and an unwary reader may never look at the forest the same way again). A significant portion of the book is composed of 21 separate short sketches dealing with folklore and fantasy as well as challenging scenes of misogyny and child abuse. Hidden in and among the sketches are references to previously described episodes in the narrator’s life (although characters, confusingly, appear to carry more than one name with them throughout the work). Occasional moments of sly observational humor occur, and some episodes demonstrate the complexities of the human spirit more clearly than others. (A sequence involving a “wasted youth party” where adults are given a chance to correct earlier mistakes is particularly poignant.) Gorbunova, a poet, provides a skeleton key to understanding the work with a recitation of the many ways a book can be understood; careful readers will discern the name of the previously anonymous narrator and are provided with clarity about her philosophy of life by the end of this challenging series of startling scenes.

Gorbunova draws a crystalline life, fractured and recomposed, with the words of a poet.