Aetherial Worlds: Stories - Tatyana Tolstoya

the tape at crucial moments—What was that friend’s name? What color was my room? Maybe the problem is in trying too hard to conjure picture-book images, or maybe you have to “miss” a certain kind of memory before you can pick out its glow. Proust, for instance, seemed to find the (delicious) trick to overcoming this obstacle. And, in the first story of the Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya’s “Aetherial Worlds,” the narrator reports another return of the repressed: after eye surgery (in 1983, the razor-blade era), she is forced to sit at home in total darkness. Suddenly, she finds herself able to enter her inner world: “I was remembering—no, I was seeing—my childhood.” The best of Tolstaya’s stories trace that intersection of imagination and memory, where the two become something greater by not being merely one or the other. Nowhere is this more on display than in “The Invisible Maiden,” Tolstaya’s beautiful, meticulous vision of her family’s old summer home, where emotion has seeped into every surface: the lifting of shutters at season’s beginning; the kind of clover children ate in the yard; or the pine grove’s small graves for dogs, “which resembled suitcases overgrown with moss.” Tolstaya quotes Kipling: “When your demon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.” The strength of her stories comes from fidelity to that call. Real, imaginary—why worry the difference? Your demon can figure out the rules later. Sometimes the stories of “Aetherial Worlds” race from the true into the absurd, like the bitterly funny “Smoke and Shadow,” a fantasy of a college-town affair with a hapless anthropologist. Quickly the banal is beaten back by inner eyes, a cursed amulet, and a murder plot. My powers of second sight are still a work in progress, but these stories make you worry about—or thrill to—what would happen if you started to see too much."

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