Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic (2011)

Less successful than Deathless, if no less luminous, this volume won the Tiptree award, a choice which with I disagree. I see how the celebration of women and age intersects with the goal of the Tiptree, I don’t see how this work changes our perception of gender.  And for what it’s worth – I am roughly the same age as the author and dealing with a mother much the same as she in the first part, a memoir of sorts – the author’s relationship with her mother as her mother ages . The second is the saga of three old Slavic women who have taken a spa vacation, and the third is a self-conscious, pseudo-scholarly explication of the themes of the first two parts.

I did find some things particularly fascinating – as a westerner seeing eastern Europe as a unified whole, it’s fascinating to recall that it’s actually scored with territories and states. Second is the effect of having lived through a war, as have the characters in the second part.

Like Deathless, the stories are based upon the Slavic folklore of Ugresic’s childhood, but seem far more cramped in scope.  Overall, eminently readable and a beautiful work.