If I did not admire Sana Krasikov so much I would be extremely jealous of her. She has an enviable early career, with her first print short story published in The New Yorker, her second in The Atlantic Monthly. With an O. Henry Award and a Fulbright Scholarship behind her, she was named one of the National Book Foundation's Top 5 Under 35 in 2008. It is no wonder, then, that her first volume of short stories, One More Year, was almost a guaranteed success.
I approached the collection cautiously, wondering if the first few successes were lucky flukes and the hype precipitate rather than deserved. I read the stories twice, first absorbing the plot, then the tone, trying to put my finger on the element that ensured One More Year such success. By the end of the second round I had a pretty good idea.
Krasikov was born in the Ukraine and grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, moving to the United States at age nine. Though one could say hers are stories of immigrants, in the most significant sense they are human stories, superficially united by the common nationality of the characters, but actually driven by common sensibilities of love lost, gained, and sustained through familiar and unfamiliar circumstances. They are stories of emotions any one of us will experience even if we've never left our hometown.
All of Krasikov's stories explore the same motifs: the desire to connect with others, the yearning for a place and identity, the pain of loneliness. Three of the eight stories chronicle the end of a marriage, yet far from a belaboring a theme, she treats it from three completely different angles.
"The Repatriates" is perhaps the most complex and dramatic sample though it follows a basic plot – the last days of a thirty year marriage - "...a story fashioned out of commonplace warnings." The one-sided heartache of the adoring and simple Lera is profound in its utter simplicity. Leaving New York to follow her husband back to Georgia she finds herself a double expatriate as estranged at home as she was abroad. Her husband's every moment is focused on establishing a Georgian housing financing organization. With remarkable foresight for a story written at the height of worldwide economic optimism, Krasikov points out the looming political and economic pitfalls of such an organization, a prophecy fulfilled in the collapse of America's own housing industry that would take place six months after the story is published. Lera's story is comparatively more crisis-driven than many in the collection though no less understandable ending in divorce, heartbreak, a career change, and a move around the world.
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