There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children Until They Moved Back In

There Once Lived A Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya   Trans. from the Russian by Anna Summers
NY: Penguin, 2014, c2002.
181 p.

Bleak. Hopeless. Misery, existential ennui, lack of money and love. If you're looking for stories full of these elements, you've found the mother lode.

I read another collection by this author last year, and really liked it. There was black humour and a lot of shorter stories so maybe that's why I found it less overwhelming. Or perhaps it's just 2020, and its burdens, that made this book feel so dark and dreary, without any light in it at all.

This one has three novellas, one longer than the others. They all focus on families, and the completely dysfunctional parent/child relationships that continue across generations. The first has a woman who dotes on her criminal son, who is involved with bad company and shakes down his mother for her few rubles each month. Meanwhile she's taking care of a grandson, her daughter's child who has been abandoned to his grandmother while the daughter goes off with a new man and has yet another child. There is no money, people treat her terribly, and her own mother is in an asylum and is yet another burden on her. There's no happy ending here or elsewhere. 

The other two stories are much the same; the final one is terrifying in its cold hearted and violent decisions, all made for the benefit of a grandchild. I felt that there was a lot of despair in these ones, and no redeeming "resilience" but the truth of how the Soviet system ground down regular people into disconnection and survival mode. 

If you are already feeling down or hopeless, I don't recommend adding this book to your pile at this point. Unless it is as a warning of what could be if we continue down the path of looking out for number one and letting totalitarian politicians thrive.