{"id":11103,"date":"2019-11-24T17:52:35","date_gmt":"2019-11-24T16:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11103"},"modified":"2019-11-24T17:57:40","modified_gmt":"2019-11-24T16:57:40","slug":"olga-zilberbourg-like-water-and-other-stories-reviewed-by-alicia-j-rouverol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11103","title":{"rendered":"Olga Zilberbourg | Like Water and Other Stories<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Alicia J Rouverol"},"content":{"rendered":"

Olga Zilberbourg | Like Water and Other Stories<\/em> | WTAW Press: $16.95<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In an era of \u2018short shorts\u2019 hailed in by the venerable Lydia Davis\u2014and culminating in \u2018the fragmentary\u2019 in the recent Nobel Prize-winning work of Olga Tokarczuk\u2014one wonders if there remains space for a new collection of shorts: stories that up-end expectation and offer distinctive voice and lesser charted areas of exploration. San Francisco-based, Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 writer Olga Zilberbourg, in her first story collection published in English, allays that concern. Zilberbourg is author of three Russian-language story collections; her fiction has been widely published in esteemed US literary journals; and she has won numerous prizes, including the Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize in 2016. A native of Leningrad, raised in St Petersburg, Zilberbourg moved to the US in 2006 to study at the Rochester Institute of Technology, later earning the MA in Comparative Literature at San Francisco State University.<\/p>\n

In the remarkable Like Water and Other Stories<\/em> (WTAW Press), released in September 2019, Zilberbourg offers a collection of shorts that call us to query our sense of time and place, mortality, and most especially identity. Her topics range from migration and mobility, to parenthood and miscarriage; settings feature rural Russia to urban America (Rochester, NY; San Francisco; among others). Global place\/displacement serves as a centrepoint of the collection, making this volume particularly timely. Yet it is Zilberbourg\u2019s play with the story form in this collection that draws us in, inviting a re-consideration of how collections can at once reveal substantive stand-alone works and generate a body of work united as a whole. The blend of \u2018story play\u2019 in combination with themes that reverberate in these times makes this a collection especially rich and worthy of reading and contemplating. <\/p>\n

The collection opens with \u2018Rubicon\u2019, the story that remains my favourite (\u2018Ada at Twelve and a Half\u2019 runs a close second). \u2018Rubicon\u2019 establishes themes of time, parenthood and the chaos and uncertainty it can bring up in (or into) our lives. It features shifting time-frames, lending the piece a Borgesian feel in its play with time: \u2018Behind the wheel was this kid I used to be close to in Russia, back in the 1990s, still seventeen on this day in 2018\u2019 (3). The unnamed narrator is collecting her preschool-aged child when she encounters her former classmate. He hands her a mixed cassette tape, the kind people were making in Russia decades prior. But that isn\u2019t what\u2019s shaking her world; rather it\u2019s her fear of the \u2018nameless earthquake of the future\u2019 (the story is set in San Francisco), reflecting both her interior and exterior worlds. The opening sentence prepares us for what this collection will be about: \u2018The spring came on hard and much too early this year, which must be why the dimensions of reality shifted\u2019. <\/p>\n

Parenthood is a central theme in this collection, and unabashedly so. Zilberbourg foregrounds this in her \u2018Artist Statement\u2019: \u2018[These stories] invite the reader to consider the way becoming a parent turns one\u2019s lived experience into a battleground for potential identities\u2019. (One wonders if Deborah Levy\u2019s opening to Things I Don\u2019t Want to Know<\/em> (2013)\u2014her response to George Orwell\u2019s 1946 essay, \u2018Why I Write\u2019\u2014 may have given writers like Zilberbourg permission to write the unpopular topic of writing and motherhood.) Zilberbourg\u2019s stories about parenthood offer up the undisclosed, \u2018things [we] don\u2019t want to think about\u2019 in the realm of parenthood, setting a new paradigm for the field, or at a minimum establishing the topics as legitimate and even necessary. This comes as a welcome relief. Zilberbourg\u2019s stories defy simplistic retellings of the experience of parenthood, refusing the genre\u2019s tropes by featuring same sex couples, ambivalent mothers, husbands seemingly (if uncomfortably) outside the parental experience, and women returning to work as parents managing altered senses of identity. In \u2018Priorities\u2019, protagonist Dawn reflects on her boss: \u2018He didn\u2019t like her. It wasn\u2019t only the age and the decision to have the second child, whom he had once described as her \u201credundancy plan\u201d \u2019. Zilberbourg\u2019s narrators, though, remain effectively neutral, giving greater power to the messages of her words; the effect is to leave us understanding that none of these characters has remain unaltered by the \u2018earthquake\u2019 of parenthood.<\/p>\n

If this was not Zilberbourg\u2019s intention, it remains a happy outcome of the work. Yet the collection also extends into arenas that\u2014apart from charting the impact of parenthood\u2014run headlong into crucial and much-recognised contemporary concerns of the experience and (sometimes hidden) costs of transnational movement. Witness Tokarczuk\u2019s Flights<\/em> and Valeria Luiselli\u2019s Man Booker Prize-long listed Lost Children Archive<\/em>. Stories in this vein reveal Russian history and contemporary culture; these traverse the \u2018return\u2019 (\u2018Doctor Sveta\u2019), the \u2018mother country\u2019 childhood that has vanished (\u2018The Swallow\u2019) and the impact inter-generationally of migration (\u2018Cream and Sugar\u2019). (There is a nod too to fairy tale motifs in \u2018Sweet Porridge\u2019, with food and its role in culture emerging throughout the collection.) A recurrent theme is the refusal to surrender claims on a daughter\u2019s decision to progenerate and\/or the pressure to produce (\u2018My Mother at the Shooting Range\u2019, \u2018How to Deliver a Genius\u2019). One wonders if migration and geographical distance between family members (among women especially) have only complexified such issues or at least raised the stakes.<\/p>\n

Zilberbourg\u2019s stories often feature young narrators, itself defying some traditional norms in the story form; but that doesn\u2019t mean the themes remain exclusively in the domain of children. As essayist Sin\u00e9ad Gleeson noted at the 2019 Manchester Literature Festival, \u2018An essay is very rarely about one thing\u2019. These stories too are inevitably about far more than one thing. \u2018My Sister\u2019s Game\u2019 seems initially to chart young people coming of age through a badminton game, but swiftly veers at its close into gender, as narrator Marina recognises the divide between the boys and the girls on the playground: \u2018This was no longer my sister\u2019s game. Thinking back on those summer evenings spent playing together, I have to make a mental effort to remind myself that for a long time we\u2019d been playing without the net\u2019. (141) That story\u2019s end effectively plays with time, as her closing sentence juxtaposes the young women\u2019s past against a gendered future, yet to be played out.<\/p>\n

The short shorts format here lends itself well to this collection. \u2018Her Left Side\u2019 is reminiscent of a Lydia Davis piece, quirky and amusing in its exploration of left- versus right-side sleeping in pregnancy, whilst adhering to \u2018microfiction format\u2019. It is here that the collection most plays with form, as Zilberbourg places her one-liner shorts and brief paragraphs discreetly after stories that chart related terrain; \u2018Email\u2019, following \u2018Legacy\u2019, seems to extend that story\u2019s parenthood\/work themes, querying what constitutes the beginning and end of a story arc. As the \u2018Artist Statement\u2019 reveals: \u2018Placing the brief, one-line or one-paragraph characters sketches and thought pieces next to the more conventional short stories, [Zilberbourg\u2019s] writing highlights the process of becoming\u2019. The pieces stand alone in their own right. But adherence to related themes suggests that Zilberbourg is doing more; \u2018becoming\u2019 evokes birth, growth, evolution, change\u2014all core themes linked to time, which remains an organising principle of this volume. As she notes in the \u2018Artist Statement\u2019: \u2018Typically, we think of published stories as \u201cfinished\u201d\u2014but, as most writers know, a \u201cfinished\u201d story is a kind of fiction. In the process of maintaining a dual, bicultural identity, the artist never fully adapts, never fully belongs, never stops becoming. She keeps growing\u2014alongside her children\u2019. <\/p>\n

\u2018Rubicon\u2019 may have left me transfixed by its play with time, but it was the title story, \u2018Like Water\u2019, that left me reflecting on what Zilberbourg\u2019s book title meant<\/em>. The collection ends on \u2018Gift Exchange\u2019, in which the narrator reflects on a kind of new \u2018arrival\u2019 and the sunnier side of migration, you might say. But the collection\u2019s real ending for me was in the penultimate story, \u2018Like Water\u2019, in which an elderly Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 couple are ill at ease with drinking water over tea, despite the protestations of the physicians they visit in the US healthcare system. This insightful piece offers a telling reminder of how it is perhaps the smallest-seeming aspects of global movement and re-settling that re-shape us (or don\u2019t).<\/p>\n

Like Water and Other Stories<\/em> resonates because such stories isolate the unseen nuances of global relocation, including the refusal to change, suggesting that identity in the face of migration is maybe not as fluid as we sometimes hope. Zilberbourg will not leave us unmoved by such nuances, though; for those of us who are \u00e9migr\u00e9s (by choice) may want to believe global movement will \u2018free\u2019 us from prior difficulty or hardship rooted in our prior nation. But in this collection, Zilberbourg reminds us that the change in our world is (\u2018like water\u2019) all around us; and in the smallest of details, we are forever chained to where we\u2019ve come from<\/em>.<\/p>\n

by Alicia J Rouverol<\/strong><\/p>\n

For interested readers, Olga Zilberbourg\u2019s new blog on post-Soviet literature in and outside the former Soviet Union can be found at: https:\/\/puncturedlines.wordpress.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Olga Zilberbourg | Like Water and Other Stories | WTAW Press: $16.95 In an era of \u2018short shorts\u2019 hailed in by the venerable Lydia Davis\u2014and culminating in \u2018the fragmentary\u2019 in the recent Nobel Prize-winning work of Olga Tokarczuk\u2014one wonders if there remains space for a new collection of shorts: stories that up-end expectation and offer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":234,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nOlga Zilberbourg | Like Water and Other Stories | reviewed by Alicia J Rouverol - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11103\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Olga Zilberbourg | Like Water and Other Stories | reviewed by Alicia J Rouverol - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Olga Zilberbourg | Like Water and Other Stories | WTAW Press: $16.95 In an era of \u2018short shorts\u2019 hailed in by the venerable Lydia Davis\u2014and culminating in \u2018the fragmentary\u2019 in the recent Nobel Prize-winning work of Olga Tokarczuk\u2014one wonders if there remains space for a new collection of shorts: stories that up-end expectation and offer […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11103\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-11-24T16:52:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-11-24T16:57:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/i.postimg.cc\/76rQwBW7\/download.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Alicia J. 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