The New Adventures of Helen

October 18, 2021
The tales in Petrushevskaya’s whimsical and allegorical latest (after the memoir The Girl from the Metropol Hotel) turns on themes of love, virtue, and suffering. The title story follows a reborn, “dumb as a doornail” Helen of Troy in her quest to overcome a wizard’s spell and find love without starting a war. In “The Prince with Gold Hair,” a queen accused of infidelity is banished from her kingdom with her infant son, whose gold hair attracts opportunists of all sorts. A witch prophesies teenaged twin sisters will turn against each other because of a man in “Nettle and Raspberry,” the jewel of the bunch, which has a nuance lacking in the other stories as well as fully developed characters rather than the caricatures found elsewhere. “Two Sisters” features a pair of octogenarian women who are each granted a new life after finding a magic ointment. The painter in “The Story of an Artist” finds a magic canvas that can change his future. The lone story without a supernatural element follows the madcap adventures of “Queen Lir,” who is so coddled she can’t get bread out of a bag, and her equally naive great-granddaughter as they try to assert some independence. These imaginative stories entertain, and occasionally they edify as well.