Anya UlinichReviews

This book was great. Funny, relateable, and engaging.

So I tried to read this book, I really did. I really wanted to like it, but I could not get past page 100. It was too bizarre, too depressing and just too hard to follow. I hope someone else can love this little book, because I just couldn't.

An interesting graphic novel. The art is distinctive but not elaborate, it does add to the story, but is not the kind of art you'd display for its own sake.

The story itself is interesting in a kind of schadenfreude type of way, you sort of wonder if the main character is ever going to get her life together, but in some ways know that her struggles are more fun.

I read this book, but I wasn't very fond of it.
To me it wasn't as interesting as the blurp on the back side cover promised. Too bad, but matbe it was not the right book at the right time.

This novel is lots of fun: it's a beautifully written debut that combines humor with a picture of the depressing landscape of glasnost'-era Russia.

I particularly enjoyed the first and last fourths of the book, though the middle also presented memorable characters and settings.

This book is so tediously awful that I almost stopped reading at page 50. But I decided to hate read it all the way to the end so my condemnation couldn't be dismissed with a simple, "Well, he didn't read the whole thing."

Reading this book is the equivalent of being stuck on a eight-hour bus ride next to a person who will just not shut up about themselves for even a single second.

Giant word balloons and captions literally crowd the mediocre art off half the pages. It would be easy to take away the art, typeset the text and publish this as a short story. I wish that had been the case, because then I never would have picked this up. Damn my compulsive need to read every graphic novel I come across!

I came to this book with no preconceptions or expectations, and ended up loving it.

I liked this a lot. Ulinich manages to weave so many individual characters, settings, and situations into this very cool and atmospheric mosaic—I was pleased at the end how complete the whole she built out of all these parts felt. I'm also partial to her style, warm and droll. This was a sweet book, and a lot of fun.

After her divorce, Russian immigrant Lena Finkle discovers the comedy and tragedy of dating as an adult.

Leaning more toward the novel side of graphic novel but filled with incredible artwork, Anya Ulinich is able to touch on intimacy, adulthood and love with a wonderful blend of clarity and humor. The drawing shifts from realistic to cartoonish and crude in flashback scenes, creating a unique way to mark both time and growth.

A beautiful study of character, and the most robust collection of metaphor I think I've ever read.

Ulinich does something extraordinary here by combining her storytelling and drawing skills to create an absorbing graphic novel featuring the drama of an adult woman searching for love. This is not ordinary entertainment, but instead a realistic and riveting examination of the vicissitudes of finding love and keeping it.

Lena Finkle is the twice-divorced mother of two who is about to get herself involved in an inter-continental relationship with a married man. When a friend wisely suggests Lena get more experience with men before she jumps into another unsuitable relationship, Lena forays into the world of online dating. Lena’s trenchant observations about her stumbling first steps in this direction are cringe-worthy best friend talk, admitting confusion, bad choices, and failure. To top it off, Lena has a homunculus on her shoulder making snide asides and expressing the observations Lena’s less rational side needs to hear.

There is an energy in this novel that derives from the combination of cartoonish drawings and the wrenching real-life agony of misplaced and unrequited love. References to the online dating site OkCupid lower the tone; comparisons of Lena’s work as a novelist with Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Anton Chekov heighten the tension. It is an absurdist romp with heartbreaking consequences, and yes, this is indeed a sort of classic literature filled with naked vulnerability and deep intelligence. There is movement, introspection, growth, and understanding.

The central character, a Russian, a Jew, and a mother, has all the strengths and weaknesses of those categories we use for shorthand. Lena denies her Jewish background (“I fail the faith test in God”) at the same time she pulls out her angst for us to contemplate. “Oh my God, I’m turning into a Russian wife!” she exclaims when she instinctively over-cares for her sick lover. In the next line she denies being slotted into that category: “I will never, ever be a Russian wife!” She is practical and loving as a mother, and also claims to be “impersonating a mother” when her love affair goes sideways. She tosses her homunculus into the gutter: “Your knee-jerk skepticism, your materialist rationality, and your stupid irony—what use are they to me now?”

Buying a pair of shoes might set off a flood of introspection, self-criticism, and a peering into the larger society: “buying a pair of red shoes wouldn’t constitute a punishable offense, but would certainly invite questions…which would load the shoes with too much significance to ever actually wear…which is why married people in Brooklyn are stuck in horrible moccasins and fleece sweaters they buy online…” The Scottish philosopher-lawyer-author Alexander McCall Smith couldn’t have said it better.

The man she chose to learn from was not the perfect man: he was a device for making her more self-aware and accepting. Lena wanted to ignore her homunculus and friend Yvonne who told her not to close her eyes to the bright yellow caution tape in his conversation. Lena needed to be able to see, to listen to her homunculus even when she didn’t want to. Finally, understanding dawns.

“No one ever really arrives. We just nudge each other along muddy ruts of suffering, occasionally peeking over the edges of our ruts in search of a better way.”

The name of Ulinich’s central character, Lena Finkle, is derived from two references that situate the character in the absurdist canon. Lena Dunham’s droll movie, Tiny Furniture, about a college graduate moving back into her mother’s apartment in the City, has an unforgettable scene about the struggle for intimacy—in a street-side construction pipe. This same hilarious and breathtakingly painful description of the nakedness of one’s need is keenly described in drawings and thought bubbles by Ulinich.

The second reference is derived from Bernard Malamud’s story, “Magic Barrel,” in which a man, Leo Finkle, asks for help from a matchmaker in finding a mate. Leo Finkle is a rabbinical student doing what was expected of him until one day he realized he had no faith! This set off a depression which led him to a “panicked grasping” of a young woman which he called “love.”

I can’t recommend this novel more highly. Its dark humor and anguished understanding ties into some of the great literature of the 19th and 20th centuries but in a format that is finally coming into its own in the 21st century. The graphic novel format is uniquely suited to Ulinich’s skills. As always when an author manages a breathtaking high-wire act, I wonder if it can be replicated. But no matter, enjoy this one for what it is—an astonishing and absorbing example of high-intensity literature for our time. Many kudos to Ulinich for reminding us of Malamud's delicious little story once again.

In Petropolis, we meet Sasha Goldberg--an awkward, overweight, precocious Jew growing up in poverty in economically depressed Siberia. Wanting more from life, she signs up as a Russian mail order bride, and after landing in America, ditches her new husband and heads in search of the father who abandoned her. As she maneuvers across the US, she meets a plethora of dinged and damaged characters and ultimately, finds her father and herself.

Lively, hysterical, pathetic and gloomy, this bildungsroman is darkly comical. With wit and honest observations, it has moments of poignancy without ever becoming maudlin. Beginning as a malcontent but still cocooned in a juvenile's idealism, Sasha evolves from a lumbering child into a world-wise adult. The stories of her father, his new wife and her mother are woven into the narrative and tells of their own disillusionment and development-reinforcing how our different experiences and cultural mores shape who we are and what we believe.

Always present is the connectedness of the Russian immigrant population and the longing they feel for those who remind them of home. Acclimating isn't easy, and their unique perspectives highlight the absurdities of American and Russian conventions. When culture shock results from these worlds colliding, it's both amusing and meaningful.

This book was more than just the comical account of Sasha's tragic coming of age. With themes such as the immigrant experience, interconnectedness, selfishness, shattered illusions, discrimination, poverty and our own hypocrisy, it was thought-provoking and meaty.

From a fearful height, a wandering light,
but does a star glitter like this, crying?
Transparent star, wandering light
your brother, Petropolis, is dying.

From a fearful height, earthly dreams are alight,
and a green star is crying.
Oh star, if you are the brother of water and light,
your brother, Petropolis, is dying.

A monstrous ship, from a fearful height,
is rushing on, spreading its wings, flying.
Green star, in beautiful poverty,
your brother, Petropolis, is dying.

Transparent spring has broken, above the black Neva’s hiss
the wax of immortality is liquefying.
Oh if you are star – your city, Petropolis,
your brother, Petropolis, is dying.
–Osip Mandelstam

Sasha Goldberg has a hard life in Asbestos 2, a dying town in Siberia. Her father has either disappeared or left his family, her mother is very high-strung and a bit crazy, and her community is almost completely in shambles. After securing a coveted position in a prestigious art school, Sasha, too, leaves it all to become a mail order bride to an American. In America, she learns English, lives in Arizona, Chicago, and New York, and tries to find her father. In doing all this, she is also trying to find herself and come to terms with her past and her homeland.

I could say so much more about the basic plot of the book, but I always hesitate to give away too many spoilers. Sasha was a very unique character, and I enjoyed reading about her and seeing her development from a young girl to a young woman. The imagery in the book was also done very well. The descriptions of the poverty in Asbestos 2 were especially convincing, and there is a scene at the end of the book that I found particularly chilling (but fascinating). In fact, the last few pages of the book impressed me enough to raise my rating from a 4 to a 4.5. I highly recommend this book to those who are interested in Russian history and/or the immigrant experience.½

"Petropolis" beginnt so: "Im Herbst 1992 hatte Ljubow Alexandrowna Goldberg beschlossen, ihrer vierzehnjährigen Tochter ein ausserschulisches Betätigungsfeld zu schaffen. "Kinder der Intelligenzija hocken nicht nachmittags zu Hause und frönen der Idiotie’, erklärte sie. Am liebsten hätte sie Sascha am Klavier gesehen, aber Goldbergs hatten kein Klavier, und in den beiden vollgestopften Zimmern, die Sascha und ihre Mutter bewohnten, war nicht mal genug Platz für den Gedanken an ein Klavier."
In der Folge wird Sascha, die mit ihrer Mutter im sibirischen Gulag-Aussenposten Asbest 2 lebt, ungewollt schwanger, dann als Kunststudentin in Moskau aufgenommen (es geht dabei zwar nicht mit rechten Dingen, doch sehr lebensecht zu und her) und kommt schliesslich als Mailorder-Braut nach Phoenix, Arizona, entflieht ihrem Amerikavisum-Aufenthaltsbeschaffer nach Chicago, wo sie in privilegierten Umständen als Quasi-Sklavin gehalten wird und schliesslich für ein angemessen glückliches Ende der Geschichte in Brooklyn landet, wo sie auch ihren nach Amerika abgehauenen Vater aufstöbert.

2.version:
Sasha Goldberg is the ultimate outsider: she’s a chubby, biracial Jewish girl from the Siberian town of Asbestos 2. Her father takes off for the United States, and leaves Sasha to navigate adolescence in a bleak apartment bloc with her overbearing mother. Sasha falls in love with an art school drop-out who lives inside a concrete pipe in the town dump. Following her heart gets her into trouble at home, so she flees Russia as a mail-order bride and lands in suburban Arizona. Sasha manages to escape her Red Lobster-loving fiancé and embarks on a misadventure-filled journey across America in search of her father.

I love any book that is about post-Communist Russia. Therefore I bought this book from the remainder table as soon as I realized that that was what it was about. We in the west can only imagine what the breakdown of normal life was like after the Soviet Union fell apart. State services were apparently fairly consistently available until 1989, but after that the level of security is quite appalingly bad. The girl who is the main character in this story is an art student. Her existence is quite gloomy.
Living here in my pampered state here in the West, I have no concept of what it is like to live in Russia today. But this book certainly goes a long way towards enlightening me on that topic. I will definitely be watching this author for follow-up books as this was a very fine effort. Very well edited. No longeurs. The sense of dramatic scene construction, irony, and hunour, are all near flawless, as much as I can tell.

This book was disgusting.
What kind of fourteen year old girl pleasures herself on a bus?

This book was terrible. I tried forcing myself to read through the whole thing; but after I read about her having to count the blinds while her husband had sex with her and when he took too long she'd square the number...I was done.

This touching tale of one girl's journey from innocence to mail-order bride tells the story of Sasha Goldberg's quest to find a place for herself in the world. As she travels from Siberia to the United States, Sasha carries a dream of reuniting with her father, a man she has idealized since his departure from Russia years before. Unfortunately, the more time she spends in America, the more Sasha learns about her father and his new life, and the less she is able to maintain that childish vision of him.

I thought this was an excellent look what might drive a young girl to offer herself as a mail-order bride in search of a better life in America. It is definitely a better treatment of this subject than another book I read this year, Moonlight in Odessa. Sasha's situation is never romanticized and the reader definitely feels for her as betrayals build and her disillusionment grows. Well-written and sensitively portrayed, Sasha is a standout protagonist whose moving tale will stick with you long after you finish reading the book. Highly recommended.

Despite falling prey to the first-novel syndrome of trying to do everything at once, I was quite charmed by this book. Strong, not-always-sympathetic characters, wry looks at several different niches in the Russian immigrant culture, and an appropriately dry sense of humor combine to make an endearing story.

The main character is a (partly) black Jewish girl from Siberia, who's overweight and doesn't fit in. It is the story of how she grows up, gets pregnant, leaves Russia as a mail-order bride and makes a new life in the United States. A very entertaining story. I found the main character to be highly likeable.½

A wonderfully realistic picture of Russian immigrants.

Sasha Goldberg's father Victor, leaves her and her mother for America. Their life in Asbestos 2, Siberia is grim. Victor was adopted by an intelletual Jewish couple, the illegitimate child of a Russian and African.
Sasha's 'otherness' makes life complicated in Asbestos 2. When she is 15, she has a baby, and then leaves for America as a mail order bride.
She takes off before her marriage, and goes on a mission to find her father.

I think I lied this book more than I realized after immediately finishing it. Although I wasn't crazy about where the story was heading I always found it enjoyable to read. I think its partly because of the great characters that are so different and well depicted. I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it!

This book was a departure from my regular reading style and I could tell. I was reading it for the Byrant Street Project (NPR) and I tried really I tried. I am not saying that it wasn't well written, it was. I came to the part where she was riding on the bus home from her friends birthday party and was WOW you can do that on a bus!!! I just could not finish it (I will someday). I would look over at it and wince and reprimand myself for not picking it up. I read two other books while trying to finish this one. So I am putting it back up until someone reminds me I should read it again.