Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić

I went through a bit of effort to track down this entry in the Canongate Myth series, and I'm so glad I did. Ugrešić was a Croatian writer who chose the myth of Baba Yaga for her novel.  It's structured as a triptych; the first section opens with a dreamlike section about all the little old ladies moving almost invisibly through the world before settling on one old woman and her daughter as they come to terms with the end of her life. The second takes place at a luxury spa run by a male scientist who is determined to defeat old age; he is no match, however, for the trio of elderly women who unwittingly disrupt his plans for his clients. (One of the clever things about this section is how sidelined and secondary-to-the-lot all the male characters are; it makes for a nice change of pace.) The last section is a disquisition on Baba Yaga and all the elements that have accreted to her myth. Through out it all, repeated images of birds and eggs recur, highlighting both the physical transformation aging bodies go through and the creation of new life. 

 Ugrešić absolutely nails the way old women (or even middle-aged women) are ignored, dismissed, and condescended to, even by loved ones who mean well. She movingly depicts the feeling that the world is moving on without you -- childhood homes are smaller, hometowns become unrecognizable, memories cannot be relied on. It's also a funny, bawdy tale, as befitting the way age forces all of us, sooner or later, to confront the reality of our bodies. Aging is hard and messy and sometimes ugly, but it can't be avoided, no matter what doctors and marketers tell you. And then there's the rage at having to deal with all of this.

The novel ends with a feminist cri de coeur for women to rise up and use all that rage, ugliness, and weirdness to reject patriarchy and find a new/old goddess, the Golden Baba, to worship. This is the weakest part of the narrative; Ugrešić (or perhaps just the academic narrating the last section) relies on outdated archeology and anthropology to posit that Baba Yaga and related figures derive from the goddess of an old, matriarchal culture in Europe. It's a theory that has been taken for granted in popular culture despite the lack of evidence supporting it, so I can't really fault Ugrešić (who was neither an archeologist or anthropologist). It certainly doesn't diminish the power of this novel, or Baba Yaga.