Alla Gorbunova's IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD, MY LOVE (Tr by Elina Alter)

Alla Gorbunova's sort-of novel It's the End of the World, My Love has already earned its purchase price by the time the reader gets to a late chapter entitled "A Scary Story" but would be worth that price for this chapter alone, in which a dead woman interrogates her body parts, expresses her gratitude for how they served her in life, but then decides that her last subject, her own head, did quite the opposite of serving her and deserves banishment.

Weird, huh?

A lot of It's the End of the World, My Love feels at least semi-autobiographical. Our narrator is a young woman coming of age in the 90s, in Boris Yeltsin's and Edward Limonov's and Victor Pelevin's Russia, dodging pimps who want to recruit her, falling in love with pretty rock and roll boys with long hair, getting drunk in that special way that only 13-year-olds can get drunk (and if you've never witnessed/participated in that, well, you're more fortunate than a lot of people), ditching school... and then suddenly discovering that she actually has found one thing that she really cares about and wants to do with her life, and that is poetry. Gorbunova first came to prominence as a poet, for all that she writes here in prose; I want to track down some of her poetry now and see what it's like, because if it's anything like this, well, it's probably a hell of a thing.

After telling *a* life story, if not necessarily *her own* life story up until she decides to start taking her education seriously and become a real poet, Gorbunova treats us to a series of bizarre vignettes, too conventionally structured to be prose-poems but a little too brief and spare to be conventional short stories like the aforementioned "A Scary Story" that blend folk tale elements (a character in a story about a maker of pornographic snuff films feels a little bit like the famous Koschei the Deathless, for instance) and the brutal realism that can only be drawn from a world in which, in Mark "Exile" Ames' memorable phrase "people in the provinces were eating each other out of boredom" to create unforgettable scenes that are both funny and horrible.

The best material, though, appears in its earliest section "Against the Law" which shows our teenaged heroine drinking absurd amounts of alcohol with an impressive series of low-life men (one "forgotten beloved" seems to  have conducted their entire relationship in pissed-in pants, reeking of urine) and bitterly cynical young girls like herself in a thriving outdoor market in the country; several times she informs us that this was the happiest time of her life even though she didn't know it at the time. It's hard not to take this as a bitter indictment of our world and what our societies have done to it, and Gorbunova's narrator does not give us an out even as she acknowledges and shares our stifled laughter.

She waxes much more conventionally lyrical in the book's last third, musing over the accomplishments of her ancestors and especially her abiding love for the grandparents who raised her. These passages occasionally wander into the territory of the surreal but are nonetheless sincere and touching. Our narrator has lived a full and varied life and still has more to offer if we but let her. 

The result is a vivid, uncomfortable but utterly fascinating read. 

And I'm never touching vodka again.