(Th)ings and (Th)oughts

The 61 stories in this razor-sharp collection from Gorbunova (It’s the End of the World, My Love) evoke the absurdity of everyday life in post-Soviet Russia. Often, the tales take a dark turn, as in “Janja and the Vulture,” about an impoverished scholar who sells her blood to survive, and who forms an ominous bond with a vulture. Gorbunova mashes up Dante and Kafka with “The Case of Shchaveliev,” in which modest clerk Veniamin Shchaveliev is tricked into signing a deal with the devil while getting his passport renewed, damning him to “the jolly flames of Hell” alongside all of his fellow citizens including Putin and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. A series of 21 linked vignettes detail the misfortunes of hapless Ivan Petrovich, who is trapped on a train, left by his wife, and terrorized by a mass-murdering Christian among other trials, for reasons that routinely escape him. Whether in depictions of gaslighting bureaucrats (“you’re imagining things,” the woman at the passport office tells Veniamin) or the twisted logic of a religious fanatic (“the Light has come and allowed me to freely choose evil”), Gorbunova’s sketches are consistently hilarious and poignant. It adds up to a refreshingly sane depiction of an insane world. (Nov.)