A review by waxbiplane
My Grandmother's Braid by Alina Bronsky

4.0

I have been enjoying several short, translated novels of late (thanks Asymptote bookclub!), and I have found that they have all been these tiny stories, mostly attempting to work through trauma of one sort or another. This one is no exception, but it is narrated by a child watching his grandparents try (and mostly fail) to sort out their past. The narrator's voice is well-realized as a clueless (pre- and) adolescent, living with his (starting out) cartoonishly cruel grandmother and his mostly silent grandfather. Margarita is one of the most interesting characters I've encountered in while--a ball of contradictions, with every facet getting its moment of clarity. People get broken, the book seems to say, and sometimes, no matter what, there's no way they get repaired, so they just go on doing the best they can, even if that means damaging others all the while, and eventually we have to decide whether we can stand it or not. The narrator's age and voice provide a huge amount of forgiveness to his grandmother, so we understand the push and pull in a way that another adult telling the story would not allow.