Shazia Hafiz Ramji Reviews Maria Reva's Good Citizens Need Not Fear

Maria Reva. Good Citizens Need Not Fear. Knopf Canada. 214 pp., ISBN: 9780735278424

Maria Reva’s Good Citizens Need Not Fear is a debut collection of short stories that imagines the inhabitants of an apartment building: 1933 Ivansk Street, Kirovka, Ukraine, USSR. Because of a bureaucratic glitch, 1933 Ivansk is made non-existent in the city’s official records. 

In the opening story, “Novostroïka,” a resident of 1933 Ivansk named Daniil Petrovich Blinov discovers his apartment building does not exist when he visits the town council hall to rectify a heating problem. Heat is subsidized by the government and available to all, but when his building is not found by the clerk, he is sent from queue to queue on a bureaucratic obstacle course, recalling “K” or “Land Surveyor,” the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Castle, who also journeys through corrupt and negligent officialdom. 

Daniil’s life is steeped in tenderness and joy, despite the drudgery of his goal. When he first arrives at the apartment, he lays on the floor with his legs squeezed between the stove and table: “Home is where one could lie in peace, on any surface.” Soon after, his grandmother arrives with a cage full of hens and takes up residence in the apartment, which is eventually filled with fourteen family members. The family’s antics and quirks all make space for joy, even when the narrator tells us, “Daniil would die just like this, stuffed and brined with the others, their single coffin stuck in someone else’s bedroom.” Because the third-person narrator is close to Daniil, the glimpse of his death doesn’t read like a fateful verdict. Instead, it is a porous and empathetic portrayal of his persistent but anxiety-ridden mind, which endears us to him deeply.

All the characters in Good Citizens Need Not Fear are resourceful misfits who find ways to navigate an unfair and bureaucratic world. The most memorable character is Zaya, who is left at an orphanage and whose cleft lip and shaved head make her the ultimate badass-hero. In “Little Rabbit,” four-year-old Zaya’s journey begins with illness. In a fever, she gravitates toward a crack in the floor and pulls up each plank to go underground, where she finds a mummy buried within the walls of the orphanage. She dubs the mummy a saint and follows its pull towards the outer edges of the orphanage, freeing both of them into the forest beyond. Zaya’s escape is made possible by a deeply psychic liminal space that rests on the threshold of reality; Reva is masterful at this border where realism briefly intersects with magic and surrealism, but never fully gives in to either at the moment of greatest tension. 

Good Citizens Need Not Fear is a bewitching collection of stories that keeps us rapt throughout as characters disappear and reappear from each other’s lives in both halves of the book: before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

In the wet and haunting realm of “Letter of Apology,” a reclusive poet and his wife receive a visit from a government official sent to extort a potentially dissenting joke the poet made. The story shifts point of view partway through with a seamless dip into the erotic, recalling the sensuous and tense, marshy landscapes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. 

Reva is a writer who can cast a spell and transport us across time in a few pages, only to bring us back to earth with a subtle but searing warmth, guiding us to resilience, endurance, and a dogged love of life.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2019, THIS magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2018, and is forthcoming in EVENT, and Maisonneuve, and Gutter: the magazine of new Scottish and international writing. Her poetry and prose have been nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prizes by Poetry Northwest and carte blanche, respectively. Shazia was named as a “writer to watch” by the CBC. She is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is a columnist for Open Book and is at work on a novel.