The Ship of Widows

Moving, even haunting at times, The Ship of Widows follows the lives of five disparate Soviet women who are brought together by WW II. Sharing a shabby Moscow apartment, they endure a lack of privacy as each one struggles to survive in an increasingly bureaucratic system. Told from the shifting narrative perspective of two of the women, Olga Ivanovna and Anfisa Gromova, the story works best when it explores the quotidian: the arduous quests for food, work, adequate medical care, dignity. The author, a Russian mathematician, is skillful at conveying in unadorned yet effective prose the tensions between these women, which arise from class and cultural differences. Olga is ``a bit of an intellectual,'' Anfisa and the fitter Panka are working class; Kapa, a religious peasant; and Ada, a former operetta singer despised for her ``parasitism.'' Grekova, though, is not much given to insight, and her characters, who veer dangerously close to stereotype and melodrama, remain static throughout. The men in particular, like Anfisa's husband and son, are alternately indifferent and brutish; unfortunately the petulant son dominates the last half of the story and turns it into a tale of redemption. Readers will better appreciate this ably translated novel as a historical document that sheds light onto an underrepresented facet of Soviet society--the average woman. (May)