| Title | : | Moscow But Dreaming |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1607013622 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781607013624 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 |
| Publication | : | First published October 30, 2012 |
Moscow But Dreaming Reviews
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These stories would hit the spot for anyone who enjoys Russian lit (dark, depressing, consequences) or fantasy (creatures, beings, unexplained events). The combination of the two is magical. Somehow a depressing event becomes epic sorrow when laced with supernatural elements. Sometimes the true story is only hinted at, and the reader has to unravel the words to discover the truth. To me, this is the very best kind of story.
A few highlights:
A Short History of Lunar Seas - Beautiful world building here, what a way to begin.
"One rain everyone still remembers occurred a few years ago, when words fell from the sky... The inhabitants groaned and suffocated under the weight of accumulated regrets, promises, lies, report cards, great literature, pop songs, and shopping lists."
You Dream - Where a boy dies repeatedly, or is it that he died once and haunts her?
Ebb and Flow - A deeply sad story about a prince from the land and a princess from the sea, only with a Japanese twist.
There is a Monster Under Helen's Bed - Adoption is a theme in these stories, but this is a terrifying combination of a childhood yellow wallpaper and a monster under the bed.
The Bank of Burkina Faso - A lighter tale. What if the spam e-mails we get from African royalty are actually true, but the reason they can't get to their bank accounts is that they only exist in dreams?
Seas of the World - Oh goodness. Almost all the sea stories are just terribly sad. This one took a moment to sink in. -
Ekaterina Sedia is a Russian-born author who now lives in New Jersey, and Moscow But Dreaming is her first short story collection - which I enjoyed, but with a few reservations.
I think that cities can be great protagonists. Cities are interesting, especially ones which have been founded centuries ago - and carry within themselves histories far longer and often much more compelling than those of individuals that walk their streets. The first story in this collection, A Short Encyclopedia of Lunar Seas, begins with this entry:
1. The Moscow Sea (Mare Moscoviense)
Moscow is one of the most landlocked cities on Earth, but whatever disappears from it ends up in the Moscow Sea. The local inhabitants see a certain irony in that, and celebrate every new arrival. They cheered when the churches burned by Napoleon appeared and stood over the shallow waters of the sea, reflecting there along with the sparrows and the immigrants. They greeted the dead priests with coppers on their eyes, the hockey teams, the horse-drawn buggies. They are still waiting for the jackdaws, but the jackdaws are resilient, and they stay in their city.
Nowadays, if one looks into this shallow pool, one can still see the marching Red Armies, Belka and Strelka, and the Great October Revolution.
This is a great image, and one which I was hoping would set the mood and tone for the whole collection - a set of fantastical stories set in Moscow, one of the most mythical and legendary cities on Earth. Unfortunately this was not the case - most of Sedia's stories in this volume are not set in Moscow, some not even in Russia. Although they maintain a connection to Russia, they do so through allusion to folklore and history - and these connections are sometimes just too slim to distinguish and keep them from molding into other fantastical stories such as those by Kelly Link or Aimee Bender. Sedia is at her best with her stories which are set in Russia and feature Russians - such as Citizen Komarova Finds Love - as these are the ones that I'd remember, and others I'll quickly forget.
Nonetheless, even if the volume didn't completely deliver what I was looking for I can recognize her talent aa an author, and look forward to reading her novel - hopefully more concise and consistent thematically - with a promising title,
The Secret History of Moscow. -
I tend to start these reviews with something like "I have a love/hate relationship with short story collections". However, looking back at my short story shelf, I actually realise that is bullshit. What happened is I read some short story collections when I first started that I disliked, and now they are burnt into my brain. I am changing that now.
This one, actually, put me off straightaway. I really disliked the first story. But to be honest that was the only one I actively disliked. After those first 10 pages or so, everything improved dramatically. I think as a whole the book worked well, nothing really jarred which is an achievement in a short story collection.
I loved the use of Slavic and Russian mythology. I got such a kick when I found kikimora, leshy, rusalki, and the like in the stories. Sure fire winner for me, particularly if done well and not just lip service. Besides this, there were some brilliant stories in this one. I have been telling people about the Bank of Burkina Faso story for the past few weeks.
I recommend this one. If you can get past the first story, you are in for a great ride. You won't love all of them, but there is something for most people in here and most will make you think if nothing else. And what more can you ask of short stories really. -
This is an uneven collection of stories that has more good points than bad ones. There were stories I was absolutely enchanted by, many stories I liked a good deal, some that were only so-so, and at least one that I thought was truly terrible. But as a writer, Sedia is growing on me. I was only slightly enthused by her steampunk book, the name of which escapes me at the moment. But there were moments in Moscow But Dreaming that were stunning.
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision
here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at
Smorgasbook -
So, I am an idiot and did not realize this was a book of short stories until I was well into it. Don’t ask me why. I have an ebook copy, and so there was no real description or anything to clue me into it. I just started reading, assuming it was a novel. After a few chapters there were no obvious connections between these characters and their respective stories, but that’s Ekaterina Sedia for you: she’s good at building parallel plots and then bringing it all together. Except when it turns out that she’s actually writing short stories, and you’re just being stupid.
So this has made me feel exceedingly guilty about not enjoying Moscow, But Dreaming very much. It’s probably not Sedia’s fault at all. Clearly this entire book has gone over my head.
I’d like to think it’s a mood thing. That is, if I were in a more relaxed state of mind, perhaps I could have sunk into this book, soaked in it for longer, and meditated upon what each story is trying to say. Sedia offers a diverse buffet of meal choices here. Although they all have a fantasy element to them, some are more surreal than others. As the title implies, they are all connected by Sedia’s fascination with the character of Moscow and its inhabitants after the fall of Russian communism.
Most of the protagonists in these stories are dissatisfied and disaffected. They want something their life cannot give them, something unobtainable because of their circumstances. They live in harsh worlds, with cold, unforgiving edges. Sedia likes to show the grime and grit that builds up in the spaces between our thoughts and deeds. This should be depressing, but I don’t think that’s the point—rather, Sedia is drawing upon the tradition of the darkest of those unrevised European fairytales, the ones told to children to terrify them just before bedtime.
All of this makes for very effective and compelling stories, even if they don’t always make sense on a first reading. And this is where we come back to the idea of mood and how it affects one’s experience with a book. I don’t want to say these are bad stories, because when I look at them from a craftsmanship point of view, they are exquisite. However, Sedia brings it, and that can be exhausting to read at times.
These are excellent stories if you are looking for a short collection of short fiction that you can read by the fire on a dark, stormy night. It appeals to the primal and visceral parts of us, the parts that most want to believe in fear and magic—as well as hope and romance. Don’t look to this to be a quick and easy read with likeable, or even comprehensible, characters and plots. But these stories are beautiful in their own way, and each one demonstrates Sedia’s strong ability not just to write but to create amazing, mythical places.
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Come suggerisce il titolo questi racconti sono tutti ambientati in quello spazio che divide la realtà dal sogno, dal mito, dall'aldilà.
Tutti i racconti contengono un elemento fantastico che, oltre a affascinare, aiuta i personaggi nell'acquistare consapevolezza di cosa sono e di cosa vorrebbero essere in realtà e in molti casi è il motore del cambiamento.
Trattano temi impegnativi come la consapevolezza di non appartenere al tempo e al luogo in cui si vive e per questo sono pervasi da malinconia.
Ogni racconto avvolge il lettore impedendogli di pensare ad altro, così come dovrebbe fare ogni buon libro.
---
As the title suggests, these stories are set in the space dividing reality from dream, from myth and from afterlife.
Each story contains a fascinating fantastic element that helps the characters in increasing the awareness of who they are and who they want really to be; in some cases this element is the driving force of the change.
The stories are about serious themes like the understanding of not belonging to the time and place one's living and for this reason they are full of melancholy.
Each story ties the reader preventing any other thought, such as every good book should do. -
This is probably the best book of short stories I have ever read. The prose is excellent, finely honed and beautiful to read. The author skilfully uses words to paint stories with a memorable and distinctly Northern European atmosphere, somewhat reminiscent of the great Russian authors.
Although distinctly different to each other, these magical realism stories share a voice so similar that it could have almost been the same character speaking, particularly in the first half of the book. This gives it more unity than many collections of short stories and would make it more readable for those who prefer longer works.
These are stories to be savoured, like a fine meal not to be rushed, so much so that I read them over a long period of time, reading just one between longer works. As in all collections of stories, I enjoyed some more than others, but the image that remains with me most strongly is fox stoles, complete with glass eyes, seemingly coming alive in a shop full of musty old things.
I recommend this to anyone who likes magical realism and fine literature with a haunting flavour. -
Alla fine del primo racconto, A short encyclopedia of Lunar seas, sapevo già che sarebbe stata una lettura da cinque stelle. Giusto perchè non ce ne sono altre da assegnare. E questo nonostante io non ami i racconti - non sia tipo da racconti - provi una certa allergia ai racconti.
Ma quelli di Ekaterina Sedia sono squarci di realtà - o, meglio di realtà a cavallo fra reale e immaginario, fra passato e presente, fra Russia e Occidente, fra fiaba e orrore, con l'unico filo conduttore di una (neanche tanto) sottile malinconia.
Rusalki e Upiyr, orfani e fantasmi, calzini e topolini ti trascinano da un mondo all'altro, sempre al limite, come se camminassi sulle lame, da novella Sirenetta russa: e non sono meri fondali quelli contro cui si dipanano le storie, ma per quanto differenti sempre ambientazioni quasi tangibili, nello spazio e nel tempo, nell'estraniamento dei personaggi.
Ekaterina Sedia mi ha insegnato cosa vuol dire "realismo magico"; e questo è il minore dei suoi meriti. -
I would give this book 6 stars if I could. These heart stomping, jaw slacking stories are immense in their shortness. 'Moscow But Dreaming" is a completely perfect name. It encompasses the dreamlike loves and terrors held between these pages. Read this book. You'll be sorry if you don't.
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I only listened to the short story The Bank of Burkina Faso in this collection through the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. We are all familiar with the scam of a foreign-born prince who needs our help in attaining his funds...but what if were true? In this story, an exiled prince now living in Moscow teams up with the widow of a military general to recover their fortunes from the Bank of Burkina Faso. This magical realism tale weaves together dogs and dreams into a very odd conclusion.
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Ekaterina Sedia awakens between pure white sheets. She stretches luxuriously, gazing over the expanse of untrodden snow. A single leafless tree rises in the distance like a black claw. A second black spot beside it becomes a wolf, bounding toward her.
The tree becomes the black lacquered back of the chair in front of her vanity mirror. The wolf remains a wolf. As it nears her she sees, clamped between its jaws, a parchment scroll. It is her next story idea.
*
Or so I imagine, anyway. Certainly, Sedia's stories spring from no ordinary source. Whether brief, as in the tales that comprise
Moscow but Dreaming, or at novel length, she always writes from a unique perspective.
Moscow is, I would contend, the world's most melancholy great city, and Sedia's mixture of Russian folklore with post-Soviet realism perfectly portrays both its greatness and its melancholy. Most of these stories have appeared elsewhere, but many in places which aren't exactly high-profile... I had not read any of them before. Each one was a treat, in a different way, but these are a few of my favorites:
"A Short Encyclopedia of Lunar Seas"
I wish I'd thought of this concept when I was posting to the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre, back in the 1990s. This is exactly what it says on the tin; Sedia takes a list of the Moon's maria and describes the surprising reasons for their fanciful names.
"Chapaev and the Coconut Girl"
Elena, the protagonist of this more science-fictional tale, tries with some success to recreate a hero of the Russian Revolution in an AI lab at M.I.T., and to learn from her friends Cecilia and Veronica "their effortless laugh and ability to not become tongue-tied when faced with people" (p.133). Elena may be cold and difficult to understand to her co-workers and acquaintances, but in Sedia's hands she becomes warmly human.
"Kikimora"
This romantic fable sweetly merges post-Communism and ancient swamp spirits. If there's a single story that encapsulates the theme of
Moscow but Dreaming, I think this is it.
Oh, and don't skip the Introduction by
Jeffrey Ford; he draws some interesting connections between Sedia and other 21st-Century fabulists.
*
It must be extremely difficult to proofread Sedia's work, though. I noticed a lot of errors in this volume, "if" instead of "of" and the like, as well as other word choices that I couldn't decide about. But although her prose is idiosyncratic, often even wrong, it's always luminous and evocative—and always rewarding. -
‘Moscow but Dreaming’ by Ekaterina Sedia is a collection of 21 short stories that excellently capture her range of work. This is her first collection, though most have been published before, with only two new to the public.
Sedia is known for her take on twisting the mundane into something more fantastical, with heavy calling to Russian history, folklore and lifestyle, and displays her way with words with most of her shorts being only a dozen pages long. These aren’t lacking, instead they leave you with sudden impact.
The list of shorts include:
A Short Encyclopedia of Lunar Seas
Citizen Komarova Finds Love
Tin Cans
One, Two, Three
You Dream
Zombie Lenin
Ebb and Flow
There is a Monster Under Helen’s Bed
Yakov and the Crows
Hector Meets the King
Chapaev and the Coconut Girl
The Bank of Burkina Faso
Kikimora
Munashe and the Spirits
By the Liter
A Play for a Boy and Sock Puppets
The Taste of Wheat
Cherrystone and Shards of Ice
Seas of the World
End of White
A Handsome Fellow
A reoccurring topic is that of the ocean, with the starting piece titled appropriately, another being of a daughter of the ocean spurned by a man of the land, and another being of seals.
We also meet zombies, vampires and other spirits not so commonly named (though even the zombies and vampires are known otherwise) and overall it is a refreshing take to see folklore of other countries so easily accessible.
Most characters are somehow accessible, despite what their issue or trouble may be. We see the human side of them all – even when they’re not human – and each are easy to sympathise with.
Several of the stories may not be appropriate for young ones, but some can be shared and this is encouraged, to give them that taste of something not so Disney or softened.
Anyone a fan of ‘The Bronze Horseman�� by Paullina Simons – in reading of Russia and that time, rather than the romance – would probably enjoy this collection.
Thank you to Prime Books and Net Galley for this electronic copy.
Originally posted:
http://sentientonline.net/?p=3777 -
Despite containing several stories I loved, this collection was a disappointment to me. Sedia is clearly a talented writer, but too many of the stories either took risks that didn't pay off or remained completely opaque to me, even after turning to Google to see if I was missing references. I was also confused by the inclusion of two distinctly non-Russian stories; one is a retelling of a Japanese folktale, the other is a pseudo-African folktale, and both seemed completely out of place in the collection and lacked the depth of history and mythology that Sedia brought to her Russian-set stories. And while Sedia has been lauded as a feminist writer, concerned with the place of women in the world and the power dynamics between women and men, these stories more often than not positioned their female characters as victims. Not agent-less victims, I will grant, and victimized more often by the patriarchal machinery of society as a whole rather than individual men, but still victims. Several of the stories also positioned fatness as grotesque and malignant, and there were hints of cultural appropriation and classism that made me uncomfortable.
Still, when Sedia was writing in what appears to be her comfort zone, magical realist and fairy tale influenced stories set either in modern-day Russia or among Russian immigrants elsewhere in the world, she was quite impressive. "Citizen Komorova Finds Love," "Tin Cans," and "You Dream" were all incredibly evocative, packing both significant thematic and emotional punches into not very many pages. None of these three are happy stories -- actually none of the stories in the entire collection is happy -- but they resonate the way short fiction ought, illuminating little corners of much larger worlds. -
This excellent collection of 21 short stories is sheer wonder.
Sedia has a remarkable talent and her writing is really outstanding.
I got mesmerized in the tantalizing and evocative tales she wonderfully depicted.
She is brilliantly able to turn the mundane into something more fantastical (at times marvelous and enchanting, at others eerie and frightful), which largely recalls Russian history and folklore.
Her stories are deeply interweaved with themes like misplacement, loss, yearning, with a sense of wonder, magic but also nostalgia and melancholy.
Her charming characters have to deal with being part of two worlds, feeling lost and alone, wishing to be in another elsewhere.
I loved this precious book and I’m looking forward to reading more by this great author. -
A surrealist blend of magical realism and Russian social culture...it was interesting to read through.
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Moscow But Dreaming is a collection of Ekaterina Sedia's short stories. Most of the stories were previously published in various magazines and anthologies and two are original to the collection. I hadn't read any of the stories before, though I have read Sedia's novel The Secret History of Moscow, which I quite liked. Several of the stories in the collection are in a similar vein.
Moscow But Dreaming contains twenty-one short stories, with an average length of about thirteen pages — on the shorter side, with nothing approaching novella length. I made some comments after finishing each story which originally posted in the progress report thing here on goodreads to help me keep track and that I've reproduced below. (Don't expect anything overly deep from a half-sentence about each book, though.)
I would class the stories included in Moscow But Dreaming into three rough categories: stories set in Russia or the Soviet Union, non-Western fairy tales, and stories with more present-day Western settings. Of course there is some overlap, particularly if you feel foreignly about Russian fairy tales (which I don't). In general, my favourite were the Russian-flavoured stories; they resonated most with me and, as someone who grew up as much with Russian folklore as with Disneyfied Grimm and Andersen, felt both familiar and rare. Many of Sedia's stories are about mundane tragedies, everyday difficulties of lives that have rarely been easy. The result is generally sad tales of lives made better or worse by small magic. Or big magic, out of the main character's control, as a means of escape.
Some stories that stood out were "Citizen Komarova Finds Love", which started off unsurprisingly, but then took a surprisingly gruesome turn and, like many of Sedia's stories, ended sadly, as it also began. "You Dream" is written in a more unusual style — second person — and is a story where now, long after reading it, the Muscovite setting stands out most strongly. "The Bank of Burkina Faso" was one of my favourite stories and one of the few to have a happy ending (not that most of it wasn't sad). It didn't take me where I expected to go and it even featured the Moscow subway dogs (wiki, although google for more exciting news story renditions). I liked the idea in "By the Litre", of being able to imbibe souls and not have it be something terrible and evil. The main characters aren't monsters, they just stumbled upon a way to remember other people's memories and what's wrong with that, if the alternative is nothing?
"Chapev and the Coconut Girl" was about an AI scientist from Lithuania working at MIT. I enjoyed the description of her being other (foreign) and lacking a shared cultural history with those around her. I think this was one of the longer stories, so there was plenty of space for the character to develop. The way she romanticises both Chapaev — a hero of the Red Army — and a folk tale from her mother's travels to Bali was fascinating. Both figures were well outside her time and experience and yet she made up elaborate back stories (or front stories in the case of Chapaev who she fantasised didn't die as presumed) while refusing to get to know many of the people around her. She was one of my favourite characters to appear in this collection.
"There is a Monster Under Helen's Bed" and "A Play for a Boy and Sock Puppets" are both set in the US and feature troubled children. Helen's story, told in part from her adoptive mother's point of view, was tragic in a no-win way and the ending wasn't what I was expecting. The play, although not strictly a play per se, was told from the sock puppet's point of view and was very touching.
Of the non-Western fairytale type stories, my favourites were "Munashe and the Spirits", an African morality tale with overt magic but beginning and ending in the contemporary real world. And, although it had a moral, I hasten to add that it wasn't preachy. And "The Taste of Wheat" in which the fantastical element was a bit uncomfortable — rats turning into babies — but the narcoleptic main character seeing Buddha in her dreams appealed to me.
I also really enjoyed the last story, "A Handsome Fellow". Although I read it most recently and hence it's difficult to gauge how memorable it will be, I have a feeling the final scene will stay with me. A teenage or young adult girl working to keep her mother and young brothers alive during the Siege of Leningrad (WWII).
My least favourite part of the collection was the introduction by Jeffrey Ford. I didn't read it in full when I started the collection because I got bored and wanted to get to the stories (happens with most introductions for me). Reading it afterwards, it rather annoyed me. I suggest skipping it altogether. But then, I don't entirely get introductions to collections. I'd much rather read about what the author thinks of the stories or how it came into being (blame Asimov for that).
In my recent review of Cracklescape, I compared Margo Lanagan to Sedia. It's only fair that I now point out that if you're a fan of Lanagan, giving Sedia a go would be a good move. I strongly recommend this collection to people looking for fantasy stories that are a bit off the beaten path. I've no doubt that the fairy tales will seem exotic to many readers. Anyone with a passing interest in Russia or the Soviet Union will probably find something to like in Moscow But Dreaming. Fans of sad stories (of which I sometimes think there aren't enough in the fantasy genre) will enjoy this collection. If you enjoyed the setting and vibe of The Secret History of Moscow, I strongly recommend this collection.
5 / 5 stars
A side note: it was hard to choose a rating for this; I didn't love every but I loved enough of them to rate it up (and I wanted to put it on my favourite books side panel, which is what 5 star ratings are all about).
A review copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley.
You can read more of my reviews on
my blog. -
"The only happy stories you will ever hear are told by men--they spin their lies, trying to convince themselves that they cause no devastation, and that the hearts they break were never worth much to begin with."
"There's more to people than the way they died."
"When people starve, their eyes become large and luminous, enough so as to invite comparisons with visages of saints on the icons. Which makes sense, since the saints were traditionally ascetic--anorexic even."
"On the playground, every father is a war hero." -
Ekaterina Sedia weaves her tales with bone-chilling cold, Russian legends and glipses of the Communist regime. There was something nostalgic and bitter in the stories, something that smells of winter nights and unknown creatures lurking in the pitch black.
Some of the stories I didn't quite understand, like "Seas of the world", "A short encyclopedia of Lunar seas" and "Hector meets the King".
Some of them I loved, like "End of White", "A Handsome Fellow", "There is a Monster under Helen's bed", "Yakov and the Crows".
In "One, Two, Three" there's even a mention of Bulgaria, which was nice :)
Often times, the stories' theme was abuse or they ended in suicide, so be warned.
It's a dark and cold and very cruel world, in "Moscow but dreaming", but it definitely caught my interest and I'd like to check out more of the author's work - hopefully a novel. -
An interesting book. A mix of horror, science fiction and magical realism, the book explores the landscape of Post-Soviet Russia and America through the eyes of Russian immigrants and a mythical lens. The book is hard to define, but worth the read.
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I stumbled upon this book by chance. I heard nothing about it but was fascinated by the fact that Russian history/culture was weaved into this book (plus, magical realism is always a go-to for me). From the first story, you become spellbound into a world of magical seas, winters, and the ever-complicate bridge between grief and hope as you read this. The writing is fantastic, and if you are a fan of Russian works, magical realism, or Kelly Link's MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS, I really recommend this book. Every story truly does capture that place between sleep and awakening.
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This review first appeared on the magic realism blog -
http://magic-realism-books.blogspot.com.
The twenty-one short stories in this stunning collection often focus on the outsider or displaced, whether it be the adopted Russian child, the ex-countess in Soviet Russia, the impoverished Prince of Burundi in exile in Moscow, or Hector of Greek myth with a mundane job yearning for a heroic death. Magic realism works when there is this sort of dichotomy and in these stories it works really well.
The stories are often infused with Russian myth and history. In Kikimora a lesbian couple discover their true magical natures. In Tin Cans an old man working as a security guard at the Tunisian Embassy faces the ghosts of girls, sadistically raped and murdered by Stalin's henchman and KGB chief Beria. Other stories are set at the end of the October Revolution or at the Stalingrad Seige. All combine historical realism with fantasy and often violence.
Another element of alienation that we find in many of the stories is an alienation with post-communist Russia, in which many people have seen their livelihoods and neighbourhoods decline in the face of materialism and gangsterism. In By the Liter two men absorb vodka and the memories of murdered mafia victims.
Sedia is brilliant at taking a story in a way you don't expect it. It is virtually impossible to predict the ending even though the stories are short (about 15 pages). In addition she will often take a fictional genre and twist it: as in Zombie Lenin, in which a girl is pursued by the mummified Bolshevik leader, or in A Handsome Fellow - a take on the vampire myth (Upyr in Russian) set during the Stalingrad Seige. One of my favourite stories is The Bank of Burkina Faso which is based on this premise: what if those email scams about money frozen in overseas banks were actually true - and what if the banks only exist in dreams.
All the stories in this collection were excellent. The two that didn't work quite as well for me weren't set in either America or Russia (Ebb and Flow and Munashe and the Spirits), but that is quibbling. The author's writing is beautiful, her imagery unusual and the psychology of her characters is complex, even if she only has a few pages to draw it.
Quite simply this is one of the best books I have read as part of my magic realism challenge. -
It was sometime last year that I got into a mood for something russian in the stuff I read. Not necessarily a Russian author - a proper setting would be enough. You know, to read fantasy of a different kind, the anglo-american feeling is nice and all that, but slavic people do a great job too, left and right. I don't recall anymore what caused this, possibly finding the anthology "Paper Cities" and looking from there, in any case, I bought Moscow But Dreaming very soon after it came out and spent some time marveling at its cover art. Then it took me a year to get around reading it.
The book delivered on many fronts. Its full of stuff I was looking for - nostalgia, people who lost their lives and somewhat just get by, despair. Sure, there are cheerful bits too, but that was not the point for me. I gave the book four stars, for all that. It came short of five, since the most important parts for me tended to be hidden under the layer of the main storylines, that, sometimes, struck me as redundant, vessels to carry a load of melancholy along. In this way, in the last sotry of the book, it was not all that important for me to figure out who the mysterious man turns out to be, instead I loved the part talking about the children saved from Leningrad, who would be put into orphanages all around USSR and stories they would tell each other about their fathers, all war heroes, because it would be a shame had your father starver to death. Things like these.
A book like this, where the market is admittedly limited (yet, but I hope for this to improve with time), is bound to be compared to others. Short and to the point, my favourite book from this genre still firmly remains Cat Valente's Deathless, but as of now, Moscow But Dreaming comes nicely second. As a Slavic person living far west, these stories offer a nice reminder that there is a world out there, without Walmarts and forced smiles, where even the simplest name sounds poetic and you can see the vast extent of Siberia in the eyes of the people and hear it in their voices.
See, it even made its poetry into me! -
I didn't realize this was a short story collection when I picked it up, and I maybe wouldn't have picked it up if I had known, because that's not really my thing. That said, for the first half of the book, I found it pretty pleasant reading and very much in keeping with my other exposure to Sedia's work, in that there was some lovely writing but not a lot of plot or resolution.
Unfortunately, I gave up pretty soon after that first half, and I think a full night's sleep is what made the difference. You see, during my first session of reading, I was a bit over-tired, and the dreamlike quality of the writing really hit the spot for me. However, when I settled in to try to finish the book the next day, I was fully rested and there wasn't enough plot in any of the short stories to keep me engaged.
So I'll give this book two stars because these stories have their strengths. There just weren't enough of those strengths to give me incentive (once non-sleep-deprived) to keep starting a new story when the last one had only puttered about being atmospheric. -
This collection of 21 unusual short stories by one of the newer, brilliant voices in the SF genre mixes dark Russian stories and fantasy and myth. This mix of the mundane and the completely fantastical is reminiscent of Neil Gaiman, but Ekaterina's voice is completely her own. Her characters often live in a bleak world, where their inevitable fate is completely known. They still march straight toward it in the face of starvation, death or being haunted and stalked by the fantastical and unknown.
Among the stories in the collection are one about a woman running a kind of pawn show and the soldier who sells her parts of his horse with each visit ("Citizen Komarova Finds Love") and a man trying to find a missing treasure among a city of the dead ("Cherrystone and Shards of Ice"). There are also sojourns to Africa and an undersea kingdom.
I had quite a few favorites among the collection, and I plan on reading more by this author. -
I don't know if I was just not tuning in until the last third of the book, but some of the last stories were suddenly hitting all the right buttons. I particularly liked the weird and strangely heart-tugging "A Play for a Boy and Sock Puppets", the nicely creepy twisting a reincarnation-tale "A Taste of Wheat", the awesomely shudder-worthy "Cherrystone and Shards of Ice" (loved this one), and the Irish-sad-classic-tale reimagined "Seas of the World".
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4.5 stars
This is the second book I've read by Ms. Sedia. It will by no means be the last. Her imagery is masterful; her pacing is spot-on; her plots are intriguing; her characters never feel unrealistic or flat.
Obviously, I loved this short story collection. I even enjoyed the stories that confused me or that didn't resonate with my particular tastes. That's good writing! -
I don't know why, but Sedia's Eastern European sensibilities speak to me on a deep level, and I very much enjoy her work. This is typical - melancholy, rather dark stories often bringing traditional folklore into the contemporary world. Tin Cans remains one of the most powerful and disturbing stories I've read recently, still impressive on my second encounter.
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This is now one of my all-time favorite books. The stories are not just imaginative and inventive, but a very lyrical representation of the strangeness if the decaying monster that is the former Soviet Union.
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One of the strongest short story collections I've ever read. Most usually have a couple of clunkers and there are no bad stories here. In particular 'Chapaev and the Coconut Girl', which is original to the volume, stands put as a masterpiece. Just a brilliant book.
