33 Moments of Happiness: St. Petersburg Stories
Ever since the 1830s, when Pushkin immortalized St. Petersburg in "The Bronze Horseman," the city has been the capital of the Russian imagination. It also seems to have exerted a powerful influence on the young German writer Ingo Schulze, who celebrates this swampy metropolis in his English-language debut,33 Moments of Happiness. Not that the author is invariably enchanted by his subject. His 33 slices of Slavic life include some definite downers, not least a bloody (yet oddly comical) shootout in a disco. For one of Schulze's narrators, in fact, St. Petersburg encapsulates all the defects of an entire nation: "Russians in general seem to have been so conditioned by some lifelong experiment that apathy marches in step with an astounding ingenuity for humiliating others. Everything is contrived to cause people the greatest possible unpleasantness, whether it's a lack of benches, mirrors hung too low, repairs that go on for years or the shopping, which requires standing in line three times for a pat of butter." Still, many of the characters manage to grasp some genuine bliss, even if it's simply the scent of an imported perfume or a poppy-seed pastry. These minor ecstasies--and the sizzling, sardonic pleasures of the prose--ensure that the reader's happiness will be anything but momentary.--James Marcus