Concise Childhood Vignettes

"The Girl from the Metropol Hotel" is a quick, very well-written memoir. The book is a series of vignettes, starting with Petrushevskaya's earliest memories, ending with her first work assignments as a journalist.

As a child, Petrushevskaya was somewhere between an urchin and a rascal. Because of her family's aristocratic lineage, many of her relatives were the targets of political campaigns, forcing her family into poverty. When we meet Petrushevskaya, she and her mother have just been forced to leave their Moscow apartment in the Metropol Hotel. While her mother studies, Petrushevskaya bounces from one relative to another, often sleeping rough and getting tangled up with neighborhood children. She lives in a world of poverty where there are few rules, which seems to contradict the idea of an all-knowing communist state. There are many painful and lovely memories but the author dwells on none of them. Instead, she presents a very straight-forward and unobtrusive narrative.

However, throughout that narrative, there are many obvious truths and revelations about human nature. They appear quickly, such as her remarks about karma when she loses her first doll while taking it home. These comments hit hard and stay, although Petrushevskaya moves on with the memoir without dwelling.

Anna Summers' translation is excellent. It is uncluttered and nimble, surely like the original Russian. ( )

This felt so very disjointed. The "chapters" felt like stories she wanted to tell about her life, but they didn't seem connected to each other at all - and I usually like that style. Perhaps talking about herself in the first person in some chapters and using third person in others contributed to the feeling that they had little to do with another.
I was hoping for more about life in the Metropol Hotel itself (after reading A Gentleman in Moscow), but I did learn a lot about life in Russia during and after WW2. I can't imagine going through the trash of the other family in a communal apartment in order to make a soup from potato skins and fish bones.

I'm curious about her fairy tales and may hunt them down, but I'm not in a hurry to do so. ( )

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 at the Metropol Hotel into a family of intellectuals. She did not live there long; some of her family were arrested and some executed as enemies of the people. This book is her coming of age memoir. It is told in a series of vignettes, showing her childhood of deprivation--eating from garbage cans, going without shoes in the winter, living outside in the summer. She tells her life as a child, through a child's eyes--very matter-of-fact, since it's the only life she knows, and thus it must be the norm. As a child's story, it is also not political.

Recommended.

3 stars ( )

It was okay. I couldn't always follow her timeline. She talks about sleeping together with her mother for years but then is always off to various schools. The book really was pieced together at times like vague childhood memories. Granted this was a difficult childhood and it's great that she grew up to become an accomplished author. ( )

Left with her grandmother while her mother went to Moscow to finish her education, a very young Ludmilla, was sent to go through neighbors garbage. Potato peels meant food, cabbage leaves maybe a soup. She and other feral children would climb in the bread man's wagon while he
Was making a delivery and lick breadcrumbs from the wagon floor. She could not attend school as she had no shoes, and in summer she ran wild, sleeping where she could. She would not have her own bed, and this a cot, until she was seventeen.

This was life for her family in Stalin's Russia. Yet, this young woman, from this disadvantaged family would become one of Russia's more successful authors. This is her story, how she lived, what she did. The prose is relatively simple, without sentiment, occasional references to fairytales, or quotes from them. It always amazes me how someone rises to success after woeful beginnings and how some sink instead under the weight. Dwells little on Soviet political policies, it is rather a view of how many ordinary Russians lived under his dictatorship.

A powerful story, one that cries to be heard, effective because of the narrow scope and poignant
In the difficulties and hardships it presented. Photos are included. An admirable woman who not only survived but in later years thrived.

ARC from publisher. ( )