Han Ong

sort of slows down.

It's a kind of pastoral in a very odd way.

But it's a pastoral that is marked by flight from hounding governmental powers.

But it feels so, I don't want to say that it feels so stakes free.

But part of the reason why I love the story is, again, that paradox of a frightful story or a story that in another writer's hands could be frightful, could be

nerves scraping.

But in her hands, a sort of lightweight, it becomes an opportunity for Boris Ivanovich to sort of get a second bead on life, as it were, to slow down and to be sheltered by good people.

It's so strange that coming from where she has come from, Ulitskaya, that her stories are also full of perfidy and malefactors.

But in this instance, in this particular story, it's full of good people.

Good-humored people, stalwart people, you know, it would be a cliche to characterize them as good country folk.

But in a way, they do fall into that.

And, you know, she's a robust kind of old-fashioned writer who takes, as I said, takes into her sweep all of human life as she sees it.

But the characters in this story in particular illustrate her oddly optimistic view of

of human nature.

Though in fact, yes, I agree with you that it becomes a different story.

It continues to sort of expand on that comic vein introduced earlier by Captain Popov's bumbling.

Well, the way I look at it, I'm partial to stories where the hero is intrepid and he is so intrepid and so is his mother-in-law.

You know, they're both seemingly well-practiced in the art of, as I called it earlier, skullduggery.

You know, I love stories of capable people.

I just thrill to that, you know, as opposed to, you know, bumbling folk or people prone to mishaps.