(August 2013)
Odd little book, this. It’s a roman a clef,
as far as I can tell, about Russian émigrés in Vienna towards the end of the
cold war. As is now traditional for books by writers of Russian origin the
prose is beautifully fluid, but the plotting is very clearly secondary.
Narrative points of view and timescales jump all over the place and each new
section demands considerable patience before you realize who is being referred
to, and when. This is, possibly, a fairly accurate representation of the
dislocation felt by an immigrant child and teenager, but it’s not all that
engaging for the reader. Not a bad book, for sure, but if it were much longer
I’m not sure I would have found the effort justified by the reward.
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