‘Wonderful fabulations’
One Thousand and A Night as Told by Larissa, Construction Shock Worker
by Marina Sonkina
Gananoque: Guernica Editions, 2025
$25.00 / 9781771839662
Reviewed by Ryan Frawley
*
Quick question: before the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, how much did you know about Ukraine?
For me, it wasn’t much. Even though Ukraine is Europe’s biggest country. Even though, as part of the Soviet Union, it shaped the narrative of world history for most of the twentieth century. Even though I worked for a couple of years with a Ukrainian, hauling six hundred pound stainless steel appliances up the insane grade of North Vancouver driveways for eight dollars per delivery.
But Vitaly identified as Russian, not Ukrainian. This matters.
It matters, too, to Lyalaya, the title character of Marina Sonkina’s novel One Thousand And A Night. The novel, as is pointed out in a foreword, was written prior to the 2022 invasion. But the glowering presence of Putin hangs over everything, beginning with the icons in the taxi the unnamed narrator takes to meet her aunt in Montenegro, a country Russian citizens like Lyalaya can visit without a visa. On the rear view mirror, “with every jolt of the car, Putin swooped down on the saint, then retreated.”
The book is about Lyalaya, the childhood name of the narrator’s aunt. Larissa Semyonovna Samsonova is her official name, a name adopted to disguise her Jewish ancestry, to drop the Sternberg last name and even the Solomonovna patronymic she was born with. But the past never leaves us alone. Not in Russia or Ukraine, not in this book, and not anywhere else, either.
The inescapable power of the past is one of the themes of Sonkina’s novel. But what past, exactly? Lyalya—say it aloud, it’s gorgeous—spent much of her life in Ukraine, but travels on a Russian passport and draws a Russian pension and has opinions on Ukraine that are sometimes less than positive.
“What can he do, this comedian?” Lyalya says of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “How can this nice Jewish boy rule a country like that?”
Nor is she a big fan of Putin. But she does think his “strong hand” is good for Russia. She hopes he takes Ukraine and makes it part of Russia again. That stance comes just a few pages after Lyalya, an undeniably strong woman who worked as a construction supervisor and architect in mid-twentieth century Soviet Russia, confesses the occasional fantasy of hiding from the world in a man’s chest, or even being a tiny creature in a strong man’s pocket.
Contradictions? Maybe. But that’s what a fully realized character looks like. A book like One Thousand and a Night stands or falls on the portrayal of its main character, and Lyalya passes every test. She is strong and forthright, brave and opinionated, resilient and optimistic, and it’s hard not to feel just a little in awe of her, just the way her niece does.
Lyalya is, at heart, a storyteller. And the novel unfolds in an episodic style, clearly based on Thousand and One Nights, which the title references. Anecdotes are allowed to stand on their own, to not necessarily connect neatly to others. Above all, it is the tale of a woman’s life in turbulent times, with all the compromises, dead ends, diversions, and unexpected beauty that entails.
The thing about storytellers is that they can’t be trusted.
By the time the narrator and her aunt meet in Kotor Bay—a scene that mimics the glittering blue fjord between the two Vancouvers, though with far more sunshine—Lyalya is eighty. That’s a long life on the cutting edge of European history, and a thousand stories waiting to be told.
Lyalya tells us of her friend Seraphima, an Armenian Gypsy from a culture where women make a living by telling stories. When Lyalya tells a tall tale about one of Seraphima’s affairs gone wrong, with a betrayed wife hiding in a closet to witness the act, the narrator pushes back—
“Who would ever do such a thing in real life?”
“You think I’m making it up? Seraphima herself told me!”
“And you believed her? Didn’t you tell me that gypsies, the Boshas, earn a living by making up stories?”
Lyalya pursed her lips. Be these wonderful fabulations Seraphima’s or her own, to buy into them meant to turn a grey deep-frozen filet of the quotidian into a living sparkling fish.
Fish; strawberries; the sun-blasted mountains and glittering blue water of Kotor Bay. These are the background details to the story of Lyalya’s life as she enfolds it, one episode after another, to her niece.
The story is about Lyalya, but is told through the perceptions of our narrator, a Russian now living in Canada and devoted to her work as the owner of a quilt studio—a job her aunt does not take seriously. She has no children, never having met the right person to have them with, and she says herself, “the pleasures of domesticity have eluded me, nor have I known great love or great passion in my life but I learned to find contentment in the way my life have [sic] unfolded.”
Still, we get glimpses into the narrator’s Russian childhood and Canadian present. Early on, we hear the story of the live carp her mother bought from the store and that the narrator kept in the bathtub as a pet, only for the fish to die the next day: “Later still, the water was poured out, the algae thrown away, and the glass parallelepipeds remained empty, dimly reflecting the light of the shop lamps.” There is, at times, a jangling rhythm to the prose, a facility with melancholy detail that is almost Nabokovian.
Lyalya knows her Russian authors, and quotes them liberally, though not always precisely. She mixes up Churchill and Chaplin, not worrying about the details as long as they serve her overall theme. The narrator remarks (with a rare use of her aunt’s official name that she normally refuses to employ), “Larissa’s life never gave her a chance to put to use the acting talent that she undoubtedly possessed. But the artistry in her nature broke out in storytelling.” And, shortly after: “Were her stories about Soviet life true?… Did it matter?”
Maybe it doesn’t. This is, after all, a novel, not a history book. This is Lyalya’s story, and it carries both humour and horror, moments of warmth juxtaposed with the terrors of life under multiple dictatorships, both Soviet and fascist. Lyalya’s digressions and exaggerations and fabrications are perhaps excusable for someone who lived through times that are almost impossible to believe, even for those who experienced them.
In Lyalya, Vancouver-based Sonkina (Ukrainian Portraits: Diaries from the Border) has created an indelible presence who lingers long after the final page of the book is closed. Ultimately, how you feel about One Thousand and a Night will come down to your taste for the picaresque. This is a novel told in episodes and digressions, built around a hero who is as roguish as she is appealing.
Not everything in the novel drives the story forward. Much of it is scarcely believable. But these are the fictions that make up our lives, that determine our relation to the world and to each other. Lyalya is as unreliable as they come, but in the end, that’s part of her larger-than-life charm. If you are willing to enjoy the thousand micro stories of this episodic novel for what they are, you’ll enjoy every moment spent in her company.
[Editor’s note: Marina Sonkina previously contributed an essay, “Putin’s Potemkin Village,” to BCR.]
*
Ryan Frawley is a novelist and essayist whose short fiction has won numerous awards in BC and across Canada. He is the author of a novel, Scar, and a travel writing collection, Towers Temples Palaces: Essays from Europe. He also writes essays on medium.com and can be contacted at ryanfrawley.com. [Editor’s note: Ryan previously reviewed Dennis E. Bolen, Don McLellan, Vijay Khurana, and Cynthia LeBrun in BCR.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster