ONE THOUSAND AND A NIGHT AS TOLD BY LARISSA, UKRAINIAN CONSTRUCTION SHOCK WORKER

A kaleidoscopic assembly of vignettes about Soviet life.

Midway through Sonkina’s latest book, her narrator pauses to wonder whether her aunt Larissa’s “stories about Soviet life [were] true or fictions that she herself believed? Did it,” she wonders further, “matter?” Larissa is, of course, the titular character of this many-layered novel; now elderly, living in Ukraine with visa restrictions, she and her Canadian-émigré niece have met up in Montenegro for a brief respite. They spend each day walking to the market, buying kilos of strawberries, and walking back to their rented apartment while Larissa smokes cigarettes and reminisces about her past. And while Larissa’s niece has tried to plan a loose itinerary of tourist attractions, Larissa resists: She’s intent on her storytelling. That storytelling is where the bulk of the book—and, in any case, its best bits—lies: The reader is simply subsumed into Larissa’s memories (and, less often, her niece’s) of Soviet bureaucracy, antisemitic violence, world war, Siberia, several marriages, and the various accoutrements of a life lived to the utmost. The reader is occasionally returned to the present day by lines like this one, when Larissa and her niece are first reunited (for the first time in decades): “She looked at me intently, then quickly averted her gaze, as if we both agreed to conceal our mutual shock at time, this surreptitious and relentless sculptor that had betrayed us both.” But Sonkina’s tone is as often playful, witty, and boisterous as it is plaintive or wistful. Occasionally the narrative slackens slightly (usually in passages devoted to the present day), but for the most part, you’ll want to stay close to Larissa and her strawberries and cigarettes.

A multifaceted woman remembers her life and the lives of those around her.