What Isn't Remembered: Stories by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry (review)
2023; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2023.a902834
ISSN2153-4578
Tópico(s)Canadian Identity and History
ResumoReviewed by: What Isn't Remembered: Stories by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) what isn't remembered: stories Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry University of Nebraska Press https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496229137/ 266 pages; Print, $19.95 The Russian worldview is built on theories, the American on slogans. Which is the better way to go—the cold, dour approach of Russian theorists or the optimistic "Western cheer," as one character puts it in Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry's new short story collection—is something not even the Cold War could settle. Yet throughout What Isn't Remembered, Gorcheva-Newberry, her characters, and likely her readers will remain engaged in this debate, as if it ever could be settled. The theory that perhaps best applies to the painstakingly crafted chronicles of Russians, liberated Soviet émigrés, and the American generations that encounter them is Kurt Gödel's incompleteness axioms. They are voiced by a chorus of Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Moldovan, Armenian, Georgian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Tajik, and Turkmen orphans halfway through the collection in "Beloveds." As they understand it, after having discovered Gödel in their orphanage library, "Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove." How can they talk about themselves, their torturous dreams of familial love and escape, when they don't know the origins of such dreams—the parents who either lost or abandoned them? Still, they construct fantasies of running away, of finding a woman who will take them in, though they are fated to wind up where they started—in the orphanage. Another way of putting it might be to remember how Gödel has been interpreted: there is neither a consistent nor complete set of axioms that explains mathematics. The pattern is that there is no pattern for those living in a corrupt and crumbling Soviet Union or in the promised land of America. Nor is there anything to justify the betrayals, disappearances, and deaths that seem to follow people across continents. But the search for a governing principle to all this misery endures through the trail of details and metaphors that [End Page 102] Gorcheva-Newberry has planted. What may seem random, even purposeless, in one story will explicate, if not amplify, the horrors of the next. In "Second Person," for instance, a woman having one last meal with her ex-lover tells herself: "Pray to disappear. Disintegrate." This admonition may be familiar, particularly as it's voiced by the American in the relationship. Disappearing for purposes of reinvention is what Americans do. But by the time the narrator urging herself through this harrowing goodbye utters this advice, it's clear through two previous stories, "All of Me" and "Boys of the Moskva River," that the word has a much more perilous meaning. The narrator of "All of Me," a blocked writer with a stalled marriage, tries to explain her lack of libido and creative animus by remarking, "Growing up in Soviet Russia … things continuously disappeared." She should be accustomed to loss, even when what can be lost evaporates with such nonchalance, as it does in "Boys of the Moskva River." In that story, the narrator advises his mother how to survive the loss of her grandson: "the trick is not to love someone so much that he doesn't disappear or run away." The blocked writer has to relearn this lesson in the suburbs of Roanoke, Virginia, when she sees, by chance, in the supermarket the friend who betrayed her. Her friend is dressed in "black yoga pants and a down coat, tennis shoes. Her hair swept up in a choppy bun." Not only has the twenty-year relationship between these two women dissolved, but the admiring picture of the woman who likely guided the writer as she assimilated into Western life, including a realm of frank sexual talk, has also dissipated. "She was so ordinary, so familiar," the writer remarks, as if shocked by this revelation; "so far away." Such haunting particulars are not the exclusive burden of Gorcheva-Newberry's Russian characters; the Americans navigating their interactions with Russians also see their experiences...
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