KLOTSVOG

A woman describes her life in the Soviet Union.

Maya is a self-aggrandizing woman, not at all self-aware. She’s the narrator of Khemlin’s (The Investigator, 2015) stunning novel, and a thoroughly misleading narrator at that. But first the facts: Maya is Jewish, a teenager during World War II. She grows up in Ostyor, a small village outside Kiev. Her father dies in the war, and Maya and her mother move to Kiev. This is mostly background; in her narrative, Maya doesn’t dwell long on the war, and instead, the book gets going as she woos her first husband. By the book’s end, she’ll have had several, each one an upgrade on the last. With each transition, Maya’s living quarters get bigger. The machinations she enacts to acquire a better apartment might be confusing to readers not already familiar with Soviet housing practices. What’s clear, though, is the exquisite depth of Maya’s character. It’s easy, at first, to judge her for her materialism. But as Lara Vapnyar points out in her introduction, Maya’s childhood home was destroyed by German soldiers. Her selfishness—or what seems to be selfishness—takes on a slightly different hue when considered against the trauma she survived. But perhaps the finest aspect of this very fine novel is the language Maya uses to relate her experiences. That language is an odd blend of institutionalized jargon, Soviet cliché, and florid prose. “As a pedagogue,” she says at one point, “I worried very much about the absence of established contact.” At another point, she claims that “my soul had gradually begun begging for a holiday filled with new sensations.” The result is somehow both funny and enraging, moving and deeply felt. By the end, you’re filled with sympathy not only for all the characters that Maya has wronged, but also for Maya herself—flawed as she is.

A subtle, nuanced take on one apparently selfish woman and the difficult choices she makes.