Short story collection review

People I Wanted To Be

By Gina Ochsner

Published by Portobello Books

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 an almost 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 from the war in Chechnya to his family and their cramped apartment in southern Russia; traumatised by the death of his friends, he can only motivate himself to fish, unable to respond 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 returns 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 have changed overnight.

Ultimately, these stories work best when they focus on the moving, so-called everyday experiences that affect us all at some point in our lives. Ochsner is very good at describing characters for whom hope and optimism have dispersed, leaving in their wake a numbness that can, nevertheless, be alleviated in the right circumstances.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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