The Riddler

The twenty linked stories in Mikhail Iossel’s Love like Water, Love like Fire are very funny. They range over time and place, although most centre on life in Soviet Russia between the 1950s and ’80s. Some tales are only a page or two long and have the pithiness and pace of a well-told joke. In “Why? Why?? Why???,” a customs official quizzes the anonymous narrator — who appears throughout the collection — as he crosses the border from Canada to the United States. Like an insistent four-year-old, the official repeatedly asks “Why?” until the narrator throws up his hands in exasperation. In “Sad,” a cab driver in Montreal explains that he has just called off his wedding (the cabbie refused to let his fiancée’s friend come to the reception, which provoked a showdown between the couple). Several stories are deliberately virtuosic, like “Sentence,” which runs continuously across four pages, or the hilarious, verbless list of wars, family news, and...