One More Year by Sana Krasikov

Dennis Haritou: I’m glad that I deliberately moved myself into the position of introducing our discussion of One More Year, a debut collection of short stories by Sana Krasikov. There is an undercurrent of dislocation in these stories in which characters, most of whom have emigrated to the U.S., try to cope with universal human dilemmas like who I am going to love and how I am to deal with my family while trying to balance a new world with the old one.

Of the Three Guys, I’m the one who is closest to having immigrant parents. My father arrived in NY early in the 20th century after exhausting several other continents and my mother was the first in her immediate family to be born in the U.S. Now you might think that this distinction in birth status between my parents can’t be of much importance but it was a major fault line in their marriage since my father never really left the old world while my mother never wanted any association with it. Looking back on their marriage now that they gone, I can see both their points.

So it was with great personal interest that I encountered Krasikov’s stories. What I found was an old world which was like an elaborate tapestry, always in the background of the characters’ lives, even if they were very well enmeshed in their new circumstances. And sometimes it was as if a figure in the tapestry would reach out and grapple with a character in the foreground, trying to pull it back into the weave of the old world. This actually happened in one story, one of the best in the collection, There Will Be No Fourth Rome, where a character seems to walk back into the web of an almost unreal new Russia.

Jasons, I wonder if you found the new world/old world theme especially compelling or whether you chose to focus instead on human dilemmas that were more universal. I think you can look at the stories from both angles. This is the first time that the Three Guys have discussed a short story collection, so I will ask you, Jaces, to name a favorite story or two and tell us what impressed you about it.

Jason Rice: At first I found this collection to be very difficult to wrap my mind around. In a way the first stories were like listening to a radio station that is just over the next mountain, slowly the reception became clear and the closer I got to the top of the hill, which turned out to be the blistering Better Half things fell into place. There was an old world sensibility to Anya’s rigid innocent belief system. In that she thought for sure that a man would marry her, which would allow her to become a US citizen. But in this story there is more to the simple arrangement than is first set into motion. Anya is realizing that men are the same the whole world over, except this one is so angry, (at what I don’t know, Anya sounds like a dream), he even tries to kill her, the best way to show someone you like them. Anya wonders aloud how this man could be like this in a world filled with so much opportunity, albeit the world is the land of prosperity, America, where that kind of opportunity usually has a hefty price tag. There is a great deal of musing, some overt and subtle which ripple though this collection especially when it’s main characters find themselves in the presence of an American, brushing up against one seems a better way to describe it. The hinges of the old world values, family, marriage forever at all costs, the Government spinning the world for you, are never more apparent then when Ms. Krasikov returns to a homeland of sorts in the final story. She finds thieves and crooks operating in the old rusted armature of her once thriving super power. There is much made of the human dilemma within these people, but a lot of it comes flying at them with great force from the conniving humans around them.

There is displaced disgust when the son comes to visit New York City, which is just the opposite of what it seems like to me when you come to a new city, especially if you’ve grown up in a remote village all your life. Of course he hates the view from the Empire State Building, and only wants a new winter coat that carries a fashionable label. He’s a punk kid who doesn’t understand the value of things, or for that matter, freedom, and the wildness of the thrashing industrial geotopia that is NYC. These people are less specific to me, they seem like ciphers for the authors vibrant ability to soak up the world we Americans take for granted. She marvels at the excess and amount of options available to us and frowns slightly (at the reader) when she comes across people who immediately disagree with her about the lavish luxury we have here. I felt ashamed to read that Anya had let that man who would mostly likely beat her to death back in her life, it was sad, and destructive, basically fulfilling his wishes of having his very own doormat, and her wish not to change things because it would be harder to do that. The old man Ilona cares for in the first story and his eyebrow trimmings seems like a job someone who has no prospects would take. Not someone who just got to this country.

I noticed there weren’t any aspirations of bigger things in these immigrants. Especially the story Debt, where people experiencing a suburban utopia and are nicely tucked away only to realize how good they have it when someone else, a version of their former selves shows up and asks for money. The closing lines of that story reminded me of the last few lines of Rock Springs by Richard Ford, something of magic act if you ask me. His character steps outside of himself and looks down on his own plight, a riveting set of sentences. Anyone who can get that kind of response out of me is someone worthy of my praise, for what ever it’s worth. But it did sound like the writer talking not the wiser than they should be characters who claim when asked for money that they’re not a businessman or a lender. A funny and simple response that I will gladly employ in my own life should the situation ever arise. Which is to say that these stories are strictly about about the human drama of life. Ms. Krasikov balances her voice inside the head of each character she writes with a good sense of humor, all well meaning but simple over-matched by the foils of life.

Jason Chambers: I really like a lot of Russian writers. When I was nineteen or twenty, I spent a summer reading everything I could get my hands on: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bulgarov, Nabokov. Not much else: the Russian fiction section wasn’t so large at the local library, not surprisingly. I had better luck a year earlier when I read all the Robert Penn Warren I could find. Regardless, by the time I went back to class in the fall, I felt practically Muscovite.

I also like tough stories about people living on the margins of society, barely eking out a living, fighting for morsels and trying to maintain themselves in miserable conditions — we talked about that some in the Dubus discussion. And that is where a lot of these characters co-exist, but I don’t know, Dennis. I confess that the “old world -new world” motif did not carry the collection very far for me. Like JR, I had difficulty breaking through the initial fog of Krasikov’s characters. And I never liked it as much as you two apparently did

There were, however, a few great scenes and stories in One More Year, that I noted. I did like the story of Anya and her abusive husband — if, as the joke goes, anyone can enjoy that kind of pain. I don’t think you really need to know why he’s an asshole, and a borderline stalker and sociopath — “why” is immaterial. Anya’s story is not an unusual one. She takes the easy choice of the status quo over the hard work, loneliness, and shame
of separation.

The other story I really liked was another one that JR referenced as well, although I saw it somewhat differently. Yes, the teenage boy comes to visit his mother in America, and is a rude, antagonistic, selfish pain in the ass. The mother has moved to the U.S. to try to build a better life for them caring for an aged shut-in – a position far below her previous station. The boy is bitter about what feels like abandonment on the one hand, and the embarrassment for her situation on the other. The feelings come through for him, and for the mother desperate to earn his affection, by giving him a fashionable coat to take home. Sad and frustrating.

Like JR said, few aspirations here, but sometimes it is hard to have hope. Some people’s aspirations include not much more than having a better day tomorrow.

Dennis Haritou: Jasons, I appreciate the different takes we are all having on Sana’s stories. But I’m going to leave my further detailed remarks to my interview with Sana that will be posted above this discussion on Three Guys. But I want to segue to that interview, where as the Three Guys prefer, we let the artist have a chance to speak for herself, by introducing some clumsy images. If I were to pick a simile for the phrase “my life” , it might be “my life is like my favorite coat”, something that I put on, that is closer to me than anything else except for my own body. But considering Sana’s stories, I find this image inadequate. Sana’s stories are situational, like a bird caught in a wire mesh, the characters in One More Year twist and maneuver in circumstances in which their control is only partial. I also thought of children playing on a jungle gym, trying to figure the best way to get up or down while they try to avoid being kicked or bumped by their playmates.

Do the characters in One More Year understand the situations that they are in? Sana convinced me that Anya in Better Half does. But some of the kids on that jungle gym are playing with their eyes shut. More on this in the interview.