People I Wanted To Be

Ochsner's stories of love, loss, death and redemption were inspired by her travels around Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. Despair pervades the lives of her struggling protagonists, but she is generous enough to allow some of them a mythical spirituality, suggesting that beneath or alongside our sorrows lies a strata of potential redemption.

The stagnatory effect of long-term sadness is explored with compassion in these stories. A troubled soldier returns to southern Russia from the war in Chechnya to his family and their cramped apartment; traumatised by the death of his friends, he can motivate himself only to fish, unable to his wife's alternatively plaintive and angry cry 'I can't live like this forever.' A Russian couple is haunted by the ghosts of children they have been unable to conceive. Imogene, a chain-smoking, lonely alcoholic, is drafted in to deputise for her former teacher, the strict and angry Sister Clement, who has fallen - or been pushed - down the stairs.

Death is ever-present in the pages of People I Wanted To Be. Sister Clement furiously yet impotently drifts towards it; a teenager, trained in the family business of undertaking, finds herself incapable of preparing her sister's body for burial; the soldier's friend steps on a mine; a murder victim watches with interest as her autopsy is conducted by two sad and lonely scientists.

Ochsner leavens this potentially depressing recipe with a light dusting of gentle comedy and a tablespoonful of the supernatural. In her stories, events occur for which there is no rational explanation, and Ochsner seems content to leave it this way: a couple return home to find an old-fashioned tape reel playing the reminiscences of an unknown old man; an advertising executive is alarmed to discover that his preparatory sketches change overnight.

Ultimately, her stories work best when they focus on the moving, so-called everyday experiences that affect, or will come to affect, us all at some point in our lives. She is very good at drawing characters for whom hope and optimism have dissipated, leaving behind a numbness that can, nevertheless, be lifted in the right circumstances.