Ivan and Phoebe

In the mordant latest from Lutsyshyna (Persephone Blues), a young Ukrainian man gets caught up in the country’s independence movement and later falls into an unhappy marriage. In October 1990, Ivan and his university friends in Kyiv stage a hunger strike, which comes to be known as the Revolution on Granite. Six months after the action, Ivan is interrogated by a KGB officer whose “shapeless, shabby form could only work in a comedy.” Then, after Ukraine gains independence later that year, he’s followed around by another former KGB agent who claims he just wants to be Ivan’s friend, adding to Ivan’s overwhelming fear and driving him to return home to his village (“the tension he felt was inhuman, unbearable”). There, he meets a fiery feminist poet named Phoebe. They become lovers, but Ivan snaps when her family expects them to get married, prompting him to secretly destroy her work. One of her poems, which depicts various family members verbally abusing the poet from her childhood to old age, presages the treatment Ivan doles out after they’re wed. Lutsyshyna conveys themes of disillusion and misogyny with a wicked sense of humor and an unflinching view of the characters’ inner pain. This harrowing anti–love story is a winner. (June)