GIVE ME (Songs for Lovers)
By Irina Denezhkina
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
Chatto & Windus, £10.99; 180pp
ISBN 0 701 17674 1
Buy the book

David Bezmozgis, born to a Jewish family in Riga in 1973, emigrated from the Soviet Union to Toronto with his parents in 1980. His first collection of stories exposes the fracture lines left by this upheaval, and explores the immigrant experience. While there are echoes of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ann Michaels, Chekhov and others, Bezmozgis absorbs his influences and writes with distinction and originality.

Young Mark Berman, the narrator of these stories, is the family’s talisman of survival and hope of success in the new society. Mark is a quick, able learner. The thousand little tricks of behaviour that define an insider will soon be his, along with the English language, a Western liberal education, and the proud uniform of Levi’s and sneakers. But an insider, he realises, he will never be. Relaxed, thoughtless inhabiting of a native space is not an option for the Berman family. In Riga they faced daily anti-Semitism, Latvians in a Soviet Union dedicated to erasing national difference, and now they are foreigners in a new land.

Despite the freedoms they possess in Canada, they continue to walk a tightrope between assimilation and the risk of disowning culture, history and identity, and thereby destroying themselves from within. These are fine stories. Bezmozgis’s prose possesses a subtle, layered candour that is as rewarding on a third reading as on a first.

Many of them are about the abrasions that result when the Bermans’ past collides with their present. In the title story, Mark’s uncle marries a Russian woman who comes over to Toronto as a “mailorder bride” with her daughter Natasha. At 14, Natasha has lived through experiences which put her in a strange, parallel universe to Mark’s suburban rebellions. Brutally neglected by her mother, she gained money and a paradoxical sense of security in the dacha of a Soviet porn film director. Aged 12, Natasha concluded that “doing it or not doing it was not a serious consideration. In the end, everyone did it.”

Mark soon realises that his mother’s tales of Latvian girlhood appeal to Natasha precisely because her own childhood “couldn’t have been more different from my mother’s if she had been raised by Peruvian cannibals”. But Natasha has fierce standards of loyalty, and Mark cannot meet them. The characterisation, economy and force of this story makes it outstanding.

Irina Denezhkina wrote most of the stories in Give Me before she was 21. Their best qualities are energy, honesty and ruthlessness about cramming the experiences and voices of her contemporaries into fiction. Mutated, desperate idealism plunges into cynicism, the dream of “the collective” becomes a nightmare, and only vodka and drugs dull the pain. Her characters drink whatever will get them drunk, long for love but settle for the clumsiest of sex, blunder about creating heroes who dissolve at a touch, and want something that they don’t know how to get. So far, so standard for a truthful account of life between the ages of 13 and 20.

What is unusual about Denezhkina’s work is her insight into how the ideals of Soviet existence are parodied in the lives of post-Soviet youth. One of her best stories is set in a children’s summer camp. Parents choose to send their children there because they have a misplaced nostalgia for the ideals of the collective, and seek the moral and social values that they imagine will accrue from the experience. The children trash the experience, drinking too much, engaging in sex that they don’t enjoy, and beating each other up. Adrift as they are, the children are packed with unfocused, vibrant life and hope, but these have already begun to sour.

Denezhkina’s translator, Andrew Bromfield, has had to work hard to create a readable text out of these highly idiomatic stories, packed with obscenities, insults, braggadocio, nihilistic impulses and moments of lyricism. But some things in Russia never change: “. . . the drink glugged out of the bottle. As usual, I felt drawn to unburden my heart.”

Read on

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy