The Time: Night

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Book Overview

First published in Russia in 1992, "The Time: Night" is a darkly humorous depiction of the Soviet utopia's underbelly by one of the most brilliant stylists in contemporary Russian literature. Anna... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810118009
• ISBN13: 9780810118003
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 155 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.6" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

One must truly delve into this book to appreciate it.

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.

A superb novel by an overlooked contemporary author.

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.