Han Ong

The beautiful Natasha didn't waste much time either.

While Boris was in hiding, she found herself a completely normal engineer with whom she had a daughter of that same breed that Boris Ivanovich had once so admired.

Maria Nikolaevna watched over her granddaughter and cooked their meager meals.

The new son-in-law was all right, a decent man, but had nothing on Boris Ivanovich.

All the old women in Danilovi Gorki died long ago.

Everything is fine.

I think among the reasons why the story is so wonderful is because though it does in fact detail a lot of what you talk about, the privations of Russian life of that era, the tone is so ebullient.

And the ebullience doesn't come, to me at least, does not come at the cost of the grimness.

I don't know if I'm making a wrong generalization in saying that this might be typically Russian.

It also is in some odd ways kind of Chinese in that both are large swaths of people who have undergone great suffering.

And yet in both literatures, there is a tradition of if you don't laugh, you'll cry kind of tone of writing.

And I always love that paradoxical sort of balancing act of comedy layered on top of, I wouldn't say outright tragedy, but sort of grimness and grayness.

Yeah, I would say that there are locutions there that put me in mind of a tale as opposed to a story.

Although once the story does get going, it is in fact a proper story.

But there are locutions there.

For example, the way the story ends, you know, all the old women in Danilo Vigorki died long ago.

Everything is fine.

You know, that is a kind of tale locution or construct and it comes at the tail end of the story.

There are those kinds of phrasings all throughout the story and all throughout, in my experience, Ulitskaya's writings in the novel from which…

This has been excerpted in The Big Green Tent.