| Dmitry Bakin. Reasons for Living.
by Joanna Howard Trans. Andrew Bromfield. Granta, 2002. 143 pp. Paper: $14.95. Winner of the 1996 Anti-Booker prize, Dmitry Bakin's first collection, Reasons for Living, presents a melange of fabulism and estranged realism. In the grim, postwar folktale "Leaves" an orphan attaches himself to a blighted village where relationships among family, companions, and lovers offer him tenuous, makeshift shelter from the damaged landscape. This story, perhaps the finest in the collection, moves us through the orphan's life. The detached child forms attachments, but as a man he struggles with the confusion and pain of these bonds until in the final moments of the story he seems to be consumed in a leaf fire. "Hare's Eye" is about a soldier and his plaguing dislike of another member of his company. Ultimately he finds himself having to decide whether or not to give up his life to save his adversary. Though more conversational and less dreamlike than "Leaves," in its ending "Hare's Eye" picks up some of the same surreal qualities as the narrator fades in and out of consciousness. "On Going to Hell" oscillates between events on a mysterious train journey and the future lives of the men on that train. Switching between past tense and future tense, with the present moment elided, the story implies an infinite gap between what has been and what will be. Generally these stories evoke a nearly overwhelming sense of despair, yet somehow Bakin manages to convey a remarkable, and remarkably human, resilience nonetheless. Wonderfully bleak, Bakin's prose is complex and densely metaphorical; though the stories display many of the trappings of Russian modernism, his structural gestures, use of undecidability, and refusal to define the parameters of the world he creates clearly places him in a contemporary space. Incredibly original, Reasons for Living supplies a valuable and fresh addition for English-speaking readers. -1- | 
