Women's Wind

At the center of this sometimes shocking, sharp, painful book is a Woman. The heroine—once, in her youth, a parachutist and a hot-air balloon pilot—after surviving a personal tragedy is forced to take up an entirely different job in another country, one could say, through the looking glass: she is a cosmetologist and lives and works in New York.

A whole procession of strange characters passes before her eyes, because by the nature of her present profession, the heroine encounters fantastic—at least as of now—“gender reversals” that have become almost commonplace, along with disheartening, and sometimes even repelling images of life in society. And, oddly enough, from that garland of “defects,” as the heroine puts it, there grows a grotesque, tragic, insignificant yet lofty image of modern love.