Synopses & Reviews
1. In “The Repatriates,” a successful Wall Street professional returns to Russia, whereas in “Maia in Yonkers,” Maia leaves her son in Georgia to earn a living and help support her family. In “Asal,” Gulia abandons a more than comfortable material life to work as a nanny in Manhattan, and in “Better Half” Anya interrupts her education in Russia to work in a diner in Upstate New York. Discuss the role that financial decisions play in these stories. How are the characters motivations different from those of other immigrant characters youve read about? What motivations aside from financial ones drive them? Do the stories address a larger theme or message about the role money plays in our life decisions?
2. Most of the stories in One More Year are about women in relationships that are unresolved in some way or that require certain sacrifices and compromises. Do you see a similar vein through all of the stories? Discuss a common thread with respect to the theme of compromise in relationships.
“Companion”
1. When Ilona thinks about the waiter at Delmonicos referring to her and Earl as Mr. Brauer and Mrs. Brauer, she thinks: “Did she really look old enough to pass for his wife? Or were they playing the game, too? Well, it didnt matter to her what those people believed, whether they thought she was his wife or his girlfriend or his mistress. She was happy to cooperate with whatever public fantasy he had planned.”
How does the idea of “public fantasies” operate in this story? Do you believe Ilona when she says it doesnt matter to her what “those people” believe? What are some other “public fantasies” that people you know perpetuate, passively or actively, in their relationships with others?
2. What roles do gossip and innuendo play in the story? In what sense is Ilonas situation less scandalous than the rumors? In what ways more desperate? How does Ilona compare to nineteenth- century heroines such as Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary? In what ways is she similar to or different from these women?
“Maia in Yonkers”
1. After speaking with her sister, Maia wonders, “Must every simple decency now be counted?” How is this a telling statement about the link between money and familial obligation in the story? What are the ways in which these “obligations” get outsourced in both families?
2. Gogi is very particular about the brand-name clothes and electronics he wants his mother to send him. Hes infatuated with a hip-hop style, but when he overhears two black teenagers talking on the ferry, he surprises Maia with a racist comment. Do you see Gogi as prejudiced, or does his statement reveal more complex feelings about visiting the United States? In what other ways is his behavior surprising to Maia? In what ways does he seem younger than the image he projects?
3. The word deda means mother in Georgian. Gogi calls Maia deda at the end of the story but otherwise uses her first name. Discuss their relationship. Do you think Gogi has learned anything by the end of the story?
“The Alternate”
1. What does Victor expect from his meeting with his old lovers daughter? Why is he determined to meet her?
2. What roles do ambition and envy play in this story? In what ways have Victors aspirations been frustrated by life? Do you think its possible for a person like Victor to be happy? Do you think he has any regrets?
“Asal”
1. Gulia feels “invisible” in New York. Walking down the street, she realizes that people are not looking at her and “seeing a servant,” but that they also dont care about her at all. How does Gulias new anonymity influence her thinking and behavior? How is a metropolis like New York liberating for her? How is it disorienting?
2. Gulia tells Vlad that the Soviets would have punished open polygamy, but “now it is like time is moving backward.” What does she mean by this? In what ways are Gulia and Nasrin, though only five years apart in age, representative of two different eras?
3. Do you see Rashid as manipulative or do you find him sympathetic? Does he feel as trapped as Gulia and Nasrin or is he alone responsible for his actions?
“Better Half”
1. Do you see Anya as a victim, as somebody taking control of her life, or as both? How would you characterize her romance with Ryan? Who has more power in the relationship, in your opinion?
2. Various characters, including Nick, Alexis, and Anyas lawyer, Erin, address Anya in ways she considers patronizing. How does she tolerate their attitudes in order to benefit from them? Can you think of times in your life that youve done the same? Discuss the role of class in this story.
“Debt”
1. What are some ways the storys title applies to the different characters? What are the different types of “debt” at play?
2. Why does Levs wife, Dina, distrust Sonyas precociousness? Is her assessment fair?
“The Repatriates”
1. The theme of “cons” looms throughout “The Repatriates.” What are the large and small ways people con one another in this story? What do you think about the attitude, expressed in the story, that those who get conned have it coming?
2. How does Grishas frustrated ambition compare with Victors in “The Alternate”? The exploration of religion and spirituality plays a role in both these mens reevaluation of their lives. Do you think there is any connection between their spiritual searchings and their respective success or failure in business? Discuss.
3. Do you think there are ways in which Grisha is justified in what he is doing? Do you believe that Leras forgiveness of him is genuine? How do you read the last paragraph?
“There Will Be No Fourth Rome”
1. Like Gulia in “Asal,” Larisa feels herself at odds with the social changes taking place around her. In what ways are she and Nona mirror opposites of each other? How does Larisa represent a romantic dimension of Russia that is the opposite of the cynical dimension depicted in “The Repatriates”? Do you find Larisa to be a naive or a romantic character?
2. What do you think of Reginas use of Dr. Spock as a manual for human behavior? Do you believe that “you cant change another persons character, though you can change their behavior”?
Synopsis
Every so often a new writer appears who is wiser than her years would suggest, whose flesh-and-blood characters embody more experience than a young writer could possible know. Sana Krasikov is one of those writers. Her first published story appeared in the
New Yorker, her second in
The Atlantic Monthlys fiction issue.
One More Year is her debut collection, made up of stories of people who hold out hope, despite the odds, that life will be kind to them.
The characters who populate Krasikovs stories are mostly women–some are new to America; some still live in the former Soviet Union, in Georgia or Russia; and some have returned to Russia to find a country they barely recognize and people they no longer understand. Mothers leave children behind; children abandon their parents. Almost all of them look to love to repair their lives, and when love isnt really there, they attempt to make do with relationships that substitute for love.
Like Jhumpa Lahiri and ZZ Packer, two writers whose fully-realized characters drive their fiction, Sana Krasikov is an exhilarating talent whose first collection puts her on the map with today's most talented young authors.
Synopsis
@lt;p@gt;One More Year is Sana Krasikov's extraordinary debut collection, illuminating the lives of immigrants from across the terrain of a collapsed Soviet Empire. With novelistic scope, Krasikov captures the fates of people-in search of love and prosperity-making their way in a world whose rules have changed.@lt;/p@gt;
About the Author
Sana Krasikov’s debut short story collection,
One More Year, released in 2008, first drew critical raves for its exploration of the lives of Russian and Georgian immigrants who had settled in the United States. It was later named a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Hemingway Award and The New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, received a National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" Award, and won the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. In these stories, which appeared first in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other magazines, one catches a glimpse of the new genuinely twenty-first century moment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Praised for its unforgettable characters and impeccably crafted prose, the collection went on to be translated into a dozen languages. The
San Francisco Chronicle wrote: "There are stories you read, absorb and think you've forgotten until you re-encounter them - when the world they've created blooms again to full size in memory, like a sponge dropped into water. So it is with Sana Krasikov's stories." Krasikov was born in the Ukraine and grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and New York.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Reading Group Guide
“
An amazingly mature work for a young author. The eight stories herein are all
shrewdly humane and formally exquisite. Initial readers of
Drown and
Interpreter of Maladies must have felt the shock of discovery after encountering those stellar debut collections. Well,
now theres a new kid on the block: Krasikov is as good as Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri were at this stage in their careers. . . One awaits Krasikovs future work. If these stories are any indication, her name will become justifiably familiar.”
–Miami Herald
“Krasikovs soft, steady voice describing terrible violence creates a quiet explosion, to stunning effect. Equally remarkable is her ability to set forth complications–prior marriages, children, pervasive devaluation of women, longing for love–in a way that enters us at once, and utterly convinces. . . Graceful and keen, these stories seep into memory not only for their unflinching gaze but also for their sane compassion. It is one thing (often a writers self-flattery) to present characters in complex distress as if they were specimens. Its something else to stand alongside them, not with sentiment but with humility, with a kind of emotional and spiritual solidarity. Krasikov achieves this, and were larger for it.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Her book is more cogent, as a collection with a point, than most. . . Ms. Krasikovs short stories are some of the finest debut work to appear in recent years. Bitterness and martyrdom are the spice of these stories, and one of her characters, bewildered by the petty tit-for-tat around her, wonders: ‘Must every simple decency now be counted? But that kind of counting is precisely what makes a writer of manners superb.”
–The New York Sun
“Krasikov imbues her writing with a tangible humanity that erases the otherness an unfamiliar culture so often breeds, and in the process makes us care about each one of her characters. Whether male or female, teenage or elderly, in chaotic modern Moscow or a bucolic New York City suburb, their stories feel immediate, urgent, and gratifyingly real.”
–Entertainment Weekly (A-)
“They have extricated themselves from dead-end lives in their native Russia; now some of the emotional émigrés in Sana Krasikovs stunning debut collection of stories are in America, trapped in makeshift jobs or marriages, and waiting, always waiting, for redemption. One More Year is an exploration of ‘an entire world transposed, like an ink blot on a folded map, from one continent to another, an atlas of continental drift.”
–O, The Oprah Magazine
“One More Year riffs on the old story of the immigrant experience in America in a surprisingly fresh way… her story collection is consistently original.”
–Time Out New York
“In her stunning short story debut, Krasikov hones in on the subtleties of hope and despair that writhe in the hearts of her protagonists, largely Russian and Georgian immigrants who have settled on the East Coast . . . Though many of Krasikov's stories are bleak, there are swells of promise . . . Krasikov's prose is precise, and her stories are intelligent, complex and passionate.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“While many of the stories are told from the point of view of women, hailing from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, the characters differ greatly both in terms of economic opportunity and religious affinity–even as they all share a certain longing for love and connection. . . Filled with clear-eyed observations, this elegant debut frequently alights on romantic disappointment while leaving just enough room for hope.”
–Kirkus Reviews
“Many of Krasikovs characters in her captivating debut are immigrants of the former Soviet Union, searching for, and often finding, resilience in life and love. . . Krasikovs careful prose augments the quiet complexity of her characters as they confront love and loss within an unfamiliar landscape. Despite their melancholic situations, the protagonists in these eight tales still manage to find moments of reckoning and grace.”
–Booklist
“Sana Krasikov is a brilliant new writer. The stories of One More Year are populated by imperfect characters who always surprise, and who are gloriously brought to life with humor, sympathy, and unexpected tenderness.”
–Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns
“Sana Krasikov's memorable characters emerge, fully formed and breathing on their own, from a deep, clear pool of seemingly effortless language, a knowing and incisive but empathetic sensibility. These stories are original, resplendent, and brilliant.”
–Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man
“Sana Krasikov is the real thing. Her stories take shape inside the specific world of émigrés wrestling with language and loss and the stubborn details of survival, but they open into the largest of worlds and speak a universal language of heartbreak and desire.”
–Jonathan Rosen, author of The Life of the Skies
“Sana Krasikov's observations of the world her characters inhabit–full of big and small tragedies, laughable and lamentable incidents–are as sharp as a surgeon's scalpel, yet her understanding of her characters–most often of their follies and imperfections–are tender and sympathetic. She treats every story as a novel, and the readers of these stories will, in the end, live with the characters beyond the space of a short story. These stories are the debut of a major literary voice shaped by the literary traditions both American and Russian.”
–Yiyun Li, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Author Q&A
A Conversation with Sana KrasikovRandom House Readers Circle: What are the greatest challenges in writing fiction?
Sana Krasikov: Deciding where to begin. There are so many ways to tell a great story–especially a story with different perspectives. You spend months building a house in your mind and then have to make a practical decision about where to put the door so that the reader can enter and not feel completely bewildered.
RHRC: What or who has been your greatest inspiration for writing fiction?
SK: I’m always relying on new sources of inspiration, and they’ve changed over the years. Just talking with people has been a big part of it–conversation for me is one of the great pleasures of life. I was in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, talking to a woman who was selling lentil soup, and she said, “I hate Saddam Hussein, but I like him for one thing: invading Kuwait.” It turned out that she had been able to escape an arranged marriage, and take her kids, because she was on a plane heading to Egypt when Saddam entered Kuwait. In the chaos that followed, her husband was stuck in Kuwait while she fled to the States. An event that meant disaster for thousands turned out to be the agent of her deliverance. I heard somewhere once that Isaac Bashevis Singer would eat his meals at cafeterias on Broadway just so he could chat people up and listen to their stories. It’s such a shame we don’t have cafeterias anymore.
RHRC: Who is your intended audience?
SK: I try not to think about audience. The task of piecing together a story is all-encompassing enough without having to worry about that. While I write, my commitment is to the char - acters. This may be because as a reader I was always hypnotized by stories that contained the shape of an entire life. I remem - ber reading a John Updike story, “The Other,” about a man married to an identical twin. He watches her change physically over the course of their marriage. At the end, we meet the second twin–the West Coast version–whose skin has been tanned and weathered by decades of California sun. It’s the moment we feel how much time has really passed. That commitment to a character over a lifetime makes a story feel almost like an ode.
RHRC: What are you reading now?
SK: I’m going through a Murakami phase. When I spent a year in Moscow, I’d go into the English-language section of the book- store on the main strip and see books by exactly three authors: Candace Bushnell, a single copy of Woody Allen’s Without Feathers, and about a dozen Haruki Murakami novels. I thought, wow, they really like Murakami here. Now that I’m reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I can see why. He’s willing to push the mystical boundary of realism the way an author like Dostoyevsky did. Underneath a lot of my own writing, there is a bedrock of realism–a classical, sometimes dark realism that’s very much rooted in a Russian tradition. I wouldn’t exactly call Murakami’s writing “magical,” but I love the way he tries to get at a reality beyond the senses.
RHRC: When did you decide to be a writer? Where were you?
SK: It came in bits and spurts. My second job out of college was at a law firm in downtown Manhattan, on Battery Park. About two months after I started, I lost my sublet–and for about a month, while I looked for a place to live, I moved into one of the “war rooms,” where they kept boxes of documents for the legal cases. I kept an inflatable mattress there and showered at a gym across the street. In that month, the biggest challenge was not getting found out by the lawyers–I’d be there at eleven getting ready for bed, and people were still in the offices working. I think those few weeks shifted my frame of mind somewhat, being in the middle of that environment and also existing in an alternate reality from it. I ended up doing a lot of writing in the evenings and mornings–there was an odd seamlessness to the days. I couldn’t go on living like that, but I ended up writing a story that helped me get a fellowship a year later, and the experience gave me a taste for a kind of iconoclasm that’s served me well. After all, writing is all about finding a place for personal freedom in the public sphere.
RHRC: What is the mountaintop for you–how do you define success?
SK: I think with any art, it always takes a while for your skills to catch up to your vision. I want to become someone who is capable of executing her vision. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to be given the gift of growth without paying your dues through some form of failure. You almost have to embrace it.
RHRC: Your title, One More Year, seems to be a theme of the story collection. Did the stories come first, or did you set out to thread this theme throughout each one?
SK: The title was actually the last piece that fell into place with this collection. I wanted to find a thread that ran through all the stories and elevated them to a larger whole. I ended up recalling a line in “Maia in Yonkers,” in a scene where mother and son are arguing:
“I don’t need your rags, Maia! You’re here. You can keep your crap here.”
“You know why I’m here!”
“I don’t know anymore. Every year you say ‘It’s one more year, one more year’!”
It occurred to me that this was the predicament of so many of my characters–they were living in temporary arrangements that had somehow become permanent. Many of them weren’t “immigrants” in the traditional sense that they’d arrived in a new country to start a new life. More often they had a foot in one world and a foot in the other. In “Asal,” Gulia was still very much embroiled in a relationship with her husband. In “The Repatriates,” Grisha regretted his decision to come to the States the way some- one who marries for money regrets not marrying for enough; every year he planned on returning. Ilona kept telling herself that her arrangement with her elderly “companion” would last only another year. “One more year” seemed to be their unspoken motto.
RHRC: Can you discuss the way that your characters’ lives are affected by the political and historical changes around them?
SK: I’ve always loved the way fiction can be a window into the changes happening all around us. I think reading about the post- Soviet reality is always a bit like reading Gone With the Wind–a whole civilization was pulled out from under people’s feet and they had to scramble and hustle to get a foothold again. I think my characters are fundamentally good people who don’t always have the luxury of being virtuous. Because of various social and political forces, they’ve found themselves in situations they never thought they’d be in. But such is life.
From the Trade Paperback edition.