The Pale Cat

What happens to a person when they approach the point of no return? How can you tell the moment when the boundary has already been crossed? And how fragile is what we’ve grown accustomed to считать a stable order of things? In Marina Stepnova’s new book—seven stories, seven lives in which a turning point has occurred. These are tales about those for whom something has gone off track. Or is about to slip. Or has been collapsing for a long time—only they haven’t noticed it yet. Or maybe they’re pretending that everything is fine.

A Voronezh dishwasher, Kulema, who has never once tried pineapple. A mother who has hidden herself and her son from the world behind the apartment door. A couple that has gotten lost and is stuck in a house at the edge of the earth. An accountant carefully measuring her “perfect” life, like a fragile structure. Thick fog that swallows entire cities in one gulp. Loneliness in a foreign land.

Stepnova talks about her heroes without moralizing and without sentimentality—with precise, careful attention and understanding. She goes beyond the chain of both large and small failures and reaches the very core: the people who continue to hold on—not exemplary, not flawless, but with a persistence that is impossible not to be amazed by. Sometimes even that is enough.