In the world of Katya Apekina’s hallucinatory new novel, Mother Doll, a soul is not discrete — it’s porous and fragmentary. When traumatized, a soul will lodge itself into the soul of the next generation like a yolk inside an egg, or one Matryoshka doll inside another. People, this zany and moving book suggests, are made of multiple spirits.
More than one hundred years ago, Irina Petrovna’s own soul split. A Russian revolutionary wanted by the Soviets, she left her four-year-old daughter in an orphanage and fled to America to begin a new life. Well, half of her began a new life. The other half stayed where it was, frozen by this unthinkable choice. Now that Irina’s dead, her young self floats around the afterlife, waiting for forgiveness. Enter Paul Zelmont, a psychic who stumbles into Irina in the spirit world while looking for a client’s dead Pomeranian. Sensing a sellable book, he connects her with her great-granddaughter Zhenia, in the hope that she will hear Irina’s story and grant her absolution. Zhenia, pregnant, underemployed, and romantically lost, needs a project, even if she resents Irina deeply for betraying her beloved babushka. Thus, a dialogue begins, across the bounds of this mortal plane.
The book tells two stories in parallel: Irina’s historical tale of the communist underground and Zhenia’s contemporary search for love and purpose. It’s a testament to Apekina’s taut writing that Irina’s stories of fomenting revolution don’t drown out Zhenia’s more prosaic concerns about her job and failing marriage. Both women — the hard, tormented Irina, and the spacey, dithering Zhenia — feel fully realized. Neither is particularly likable, and yet each is easy to love.
The book is casual about its paranormal elements, and spends very little time questioning them. Is Irina actually communicating with Zhenia via a pet psychic, or is she a mere manifestation of Zhenia’s inherited trauma? It doesn’t matter — a fragment of Irina lives, regardless of her form.
Despite the horrors of war that Apekina depicts, Mother Doll is a funny book, full of strange and delightful characters. There are insurgents and intellectuals, aristocrats and actors. Rasputin makes a memorable appearance. It’s wonderfully sexy, too, and not just in the present day. For all the suffering the world has inflicted on this matrilineal line, love and care continue to endure. The women find their way. It may be possible, in the end, to make a whole from the sum of our parts.
Chloe Cheimets has an MFA in fiction from The New School.