“You don’t get it. I don’t need to know the ins and outs. I’m a pirate like those Africans who hijack tankers. They don’t know a dog’s turd about oil. They’re just a few black bastards with machine guns, but when they hijack a tanker they hold all the cards. Companies pay millions to get their ships back. The hijackers aren’t going to war; they’re just fucking up the system. Tankers are their targets of opportunity and that’s what you are, my target of opportunity. All I’m asking is ten thousand dollars for a notebook. I’m not greedy.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JAN 17, 2014)

Each chapter heading in Martin Cruz Smith’s brilliant novel, Tatiana, is printed on a slant, providing fair warning that not everything in this story is “on the level.” The author manipulates us by withholding facts and feeding us misinformation. Why does Smith lead us astray? He may be informing the uninitiated that his hero, Arkady Kyrilovich Renko, Senior Investigator for Very Important Cases, lives in a society that is off-kilter, warped, and perverse. To survive in today’s Russia, Renko, and others like him, must always be on their guard. Arkady’s cynical colleague, Detective Sergeant Victor Orlov, is tired of wasting his time trying to get the goods on influential miscreants. He insists, “The point is, you can’t win. We’re just playing it out.” He would rather spend his days passed out in his apartment after drinking himself into a stupor.

The prologue begins with two wonderful sentences: “It was the sort of day that didn’t give a damn. Summer was over, the sky was low and drained of color, and dead leaves hung like crepe along the road.” Even nature is in tune with the fact that callous and avaricious men, whose power and wealth shield them from the law, routinely target anyone who stands in their way. Tatiana Petrovna, the title character, is one such victim, a fearless investigative journalist and troublemaker who dares to expose her country’s rampant corruption. She was furious at “lawmakers who were sucking the state treasury dry” and “billionaires who had their arms around the nation’s timber and natural gas.” When she falls off the balcony of her apartment, the authorities refuse to consider that someone murdered Tatiana to keep her from telling the world what she knew. They rule her death a suicide; there will be no inquest and no autopsy.

Moscow-based detective Arkady Renko is himself a crusader of sorts. He has not risen in the ranks because he refuses to look the other way when his superiors order him to do so. Renko and his sometime lover, Anya Rudenko, make the acquaintance of Alexi, the son of dead billionaire mob boss Grisha Grigorenko. Among other activities, Grisha “had his thumb in drugs, arms, and prostitution.” Alexi wants to grab control of his father’s empire and plans to eliminate anyone who tries to stop him.

Arkady uses his powers of deduction and finely honed instincts to solve difficult puzzles. His inquiry into Tatiana’s death takes him to Kaliningrad, formerly called Königsberg, a seaport city on the Baltic coast that is famous for its rich supplies of amber. Arkady’s friend, a seventeen-year-old chess prodigy named Zhenya, stumbles into Renko’s case with unintended consequences. Chaos ensues, bullets fly, and Arkady takes a courageous stand that could cost him his life. Smith creates a rich tapestry of sights and sounds and introduces us to a variety of off-beat characters, including a dissipated poet; various crime bosses (such as Abdul Khan, a Chechen rebel turned automobile smuggler turned hip-hop artist) and their hangers-on; and a beautiful young girl who can actually beat the brilliant Zhenya at chess. All of this, in addition to Smith’s elegant writing and caustic humor, makes Tatiana an involving and entertaining thriller that is also a biting critique of those who habitually line their pockets at the expense of honest, ordinary citizens.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 219 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (November 12, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Martin Cruz Smith
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Three Stations Stalin’s Ghost Wolves Eat Dogs Rose

Bibliography:

• The Indians Won (1970)
• Gypsy in Amber (1971)
• Canto for a Gypsy (1972)
• Nightwing (1977)
• Analog Bullet (1981)
• Stallion Gate (1986)
• Rose (1996)
• December 6 (2002) (Called Tokyo Station in UK)

Arkady Renko series:

• Gorky Park (1981)
• Polar Star (1989)
• Red Square (1992)
• Havana Bay (1999)
• Wolves Eat Dogs (2004)
• Stalins’ Ghost (2006)
• Three Stations (2010)
• Tatiana (November 2013)

“Dancers must remember everything.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (APR 25, 2011)

Daphne Kalotay imbues the crowd-pleasing qualities of commercial fiction with a soft and sensuous literary touch in this novel of exile and family, love and betrayal. From the Stalinist aggression of Russia to the peaceful, snowy streets of Boston, the reader is taken on a page-turning journey of professional ballet, fancy jewels, and ethereal poetry. This is an historical romance written by a scholar to appeal to readers seeking a satisfying escape.

As the novel opens in contemporary Boston, Drew Brooks, an associate director at an esteemed auction house, is preparing for a daring, intrepid auction. The jewels of Soviet-defected and Russian ballerina Nina Revskaya are soon to be bid on, with proceeds going to the Boston Ballet. The now eighty-year-old former danseur is in possession of a most elegant collection, including part of an amber set with the once-popular and now priceless insect inclusions. As Drew and Nina size each other up, a thrill goes down the reader’s spine. Nina has secrets she isn’t sharing.

Russian professor, poetry scholar, and widower Grigori Solodin teaches in Boston. Grigori is in possession of an exquisite amber necklace, and he believes it is a key to his past. He carries a great sorrow, and an unrelieved burden that is about to unload in some penetrating and provocative ways. The mournful professor, now fifty, has not reconciled his past, and he feels he has no future to look forward to beyond academia.

Cut to fifty years ago, in post World War II Russia, as Nina Revskaya matures from new recruit to prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Ballet House in Moscow. Her best friend and fellow ballerina, Vera, has equal but opposite qualities, and they complement each other as confidants and cohorts. Nina is a short, classic beauty with jewel-green eyes, while Vera is tall, willowy, and soulful-eyed. Vera lost her parents to the penal labor camps, but found a maternal comfort with Nina’s mother. Nina fell in love with poet Viktor Elsin, while Vera’s more complicated affair with Viktor’s comrade, Jewish composer Gersh, is fraught with problems of safety and security.

To be paranoid in Soviet Russia is to be smart and sensible. Anything you say or whisper could be twisted and held against you. An equivocal or questionable comment against communist Russia has serious penalties. Many comrades were recruited by the Committee to secretly write reports on people close to them. Citizens often capitulated in order to be protected. Gersh is not a good communist, and thus is targeted as someone to be watched.

As the story moves back and forth from modern-day Boston to the oppression in Russia, the tension builds to a sweeping but predictable climax. Despite the red herrings and complex web of clues, I guessed the outcome early in the book. However, the joy of reading the novel resides in Kalotay’s prose, polished as a smooth stone and as variegated as fine agate. Her landscape scenes are cinematic and spectacular, from the white snowbanks of Moscow to the blizzards of Boston.

When you attend a performance of Swan Lake, you know how it evolves and how it ends. You listen for the mastery of Tchaikovsky’s music, you gaze at the stunning sets and costumes, and you feel the visceral, emotional thrill of the dazzling dance. Kalotay’s book stole me away from my everyday life with its balletic achievement of scenic beauty, lyrical writing, and universal themes. Wrap up in a warm blanket in the dead of winter and curl up by a window seat in the middle of the day, and get carried away for the rest of the night.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 66 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Daphne Kalotay
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Doctor and the Diva by Adrienne McDonnell Dancer by Colum McCann

Bibliography:

• Calamity and Other Stories (2006)
• Russian Winter (September 2010)

“He turned his head from side to side, trying to shake the idea away. ‘What on earth is the matter with you? With us?’

Bridge laughed. ‘Nothing. This is just living.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 30, 2011)

Just living isn’t the easiest thing in the kingdoms of Valerie Laken. In her psychologically engrossing short story collection, there is always that gaping divide: between countries, cultures, or lovers, or even that schism within ourselves.

In one of the most engrossing of the stories, “Family Planning,” a gay couple – Meg and Josie – travel to Russia to adopt a baby, and are suddenly faced with a choice: the little boy they had expected to bring home or an unknown baby girl. And Josie realizes in a flash, “Someone had to give sooner or later. That was how families and lovers everywhere functioned. It was not just a business thing, it was a kindness people gave to those they loved.”

In another story, “Remedies,” Nick “slips under for a second” and gets involved in a car accident as a result of losing small spells of time. “I’ll be going along like a regular person and then poof. It’s like the world has jumped ahead of me by a couple of minutes.” The future, the past, a vision of the flattest, basest reality all merge for him.

And then there’s “Before Long,” another story in which a twelve year old blind boy named Anton briefly leaves his orderly and idyllic village life to visit a new American dentist and discovers, “There was no one anywhere, not even the foreigners, who could fix this.”

Perhaps, though, the most inventive of the stories is the titled story, where a family strives to communicate after Colt – the father – loses his thumbs and his livelihood after he sabotages a machine at work. Ms. Lakin relies on a gimmick: a two-column, split-screen format to show the father’s viewpoint…and his young son Jack’s thoughts. ;While disconcerting at first, the conceit actually works: the reader can visually see the schism caused by lack of communication and connection and the deep divide that ensues. Colt has confined himself to a “reject room;” his son, Jack, is yearning for connection, at least with his classmates. As Colt is confronted by his former boss (on one side of the screen), Jack is drowning out the sounds with his drum-playing (Guh Duh Guh Guh Duh.) And, as Colt cries out, “I am not one of you!” at the retreating back of the lawyer, Jack is indeed trying to be “one of you” by taping his thumbs back to experience what his father is going through. It is indeed visually and emotively powerful.

Ultimately, Valerie Laken – a Pushcart Prize-winning author – focuses her attention on the connections we need to make us whole by reaching out beyond our self-imposed borders. It’s a laudable achievement.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Perennial; Original edition (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Valerie Laken
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More short stories collections: The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle

Bibliography:

• Dream House (2009)
• Separate Kingdoms (March 2011)

“Standing there, I remember, I experienced the blissful sense of well-being that expats sometimes enjoy. I was a long way from things and people that I didn’t want to think about – including myself, my old self, the so-what lawyer with the so-what life I’d left behind in London. The me that you know now. I was in a place where today, every day, almost anything might happen.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (FEB 23, 2011)

A.D. Miller’s noir thriller is nearly impossible to put down once started. Moscow, “that city of neon lust and frenetic sin” is skillfully painted in all its contradictions and juxtapositions. It is “a strange country, Russia, with its talented sinners and occasional saint, bona fide saints that only a place of such accomplished cruelty could produce, a crazy mix of filth and glory.”  Nothing is as it seems in this book and ethics are continually stretched to the limit.

The book is written in the format of attorney Nick Platt’s recollection of his time in Moscow as he shares it with his fiancee. Now residing in London, where he is from originally, he recalls the few years he spent as a lawyer in Moscow and how they affected his life. Can his fiancée still accept him and will she still want to marry him once she hears what happened during his time in Moscow? Will she be able to understand his part in the events that unfolded and forgive him? Is he able to forgive himself or is that even important?

Nick is in Moscow during Russia’s high-flying times, where makers and shakers easily spend two hundred dollars on a massage, where everyone has a scam and you’re part of it in some way, where banks loan millions of dollars to companies on a wish and a dream. It’s a strange time in a strange country. “The Russians will do the impossible thing – the thing you think they can’t do, the thing you haven’t thought of. They will set fire to Moscow when the French are coming or poison each other in foreign cities. They will do it, and afterwards they will behave as if nothing has happened at all. And if you stay in Russia long enough, so will you.” This is Nick’s predicament. He is caught up in several complex and laborious scams and he searches within himself to see when he first turned the other way. Or did he not see anything coming and get run over by a Mack truck.

The novel begins with Nick rescuing two sisters on the metro – Masha and Katya. They are young, long-legged beauties. Nick is close to forty, feeling his age and seeing his middle expand. Masha is 24 and Katya is 20, just old enough for Nick to enjoy without feeling any guilt. He is especially fond of Masha and together they hit the night life of Moscow and begin a passionate affair; at least it is passionate for Nick. At times, Masha appears to be play-acting and going through the motions but that’s okay with Nick who daydreams about a life with her. One day, out of the blue, Masha and Katya ask Nick to help with the legal work entailed in finding their aunt Tatiana a new apartment. Nick agrees and continues with the process even when he finds out that he has been fed a lot of lies.

Nick is also involved in the legal aspects of attaining a huge loan for an oil rigging company. In order for the loan to go through, the company must have its construction completed on time, a certain amount of capital needs to be generated in the future, and of course, there is that unending stack of Russian paperwork and workers that need to be bribed. There’s a little problem when the surveyor for the project disappears for a few days and then comes back with a report that everything is clean as a whistle. Then he disappears again. Who can say that this means anything at all? Who can say that it doesn’t?

Nick finds himself in a conundrum everywhere he turns. He tries on different realities for size and stretches his ethics like a rubber band. He enters a world where the lure of sin is almost impossible to resist. In Russia, do as the Russians do – but he is not Russian and there is a little voice in his head that tells him “Maybe I should look at this a little differently.”

This is the best kind of literary thriller and page-turner – one that is intelligent, complex and rewarding. There is no deus ex machina at the end and all the pieces work marvelously as they bring the reader to a thrilling conclusion, one that is heart-stopping and heart-breaking.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (February 22, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	A.D. Miller
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More crime novels set in Russia:  Three Stations by Martin Cruz Smith Moscow Noir edited by Natalia Smirnova and Julia Goumen The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith

Bibliography:

• Snowdrops (February 2011)

“Hunger and revenge are not desires that human beings usually experience at the same time, but these primordial drives appeared to merge in the mind and body of this tiger such that one evolved almost seamlessly into the other. The killing and consumption of Markov may have accidentally satisfied two unrelated impulses: the neutralizing of a threat and competitor and an easy meal. But tigers are quick studies and they are, in their way, analytical: there is no doubt that they absorb and remember relevant data and learn from their experiences, accidental or otherwise. If they produce successful results, the tiger will seek to re-recreate those circumstances as closely as possible. Humans, this tiger had discovered (or perhaps had always known), were as easy as dogs to locate and kill. If the wind was wrong and the tiger couldn’t smell them, he could still hear them, and that sound carried a compelling new message. Now, a person stepping outside to split a few sticks of kindling might as well be ringing a dinner bell.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (DEC 10, 2010)

John Vaillant, author of The Golden Spruce, has written another exciting, page-turning book. For those of you not familiar with The Golden Spruce, it is about a tree worshipped by the Haida Indians in British Columbia. A mutant golden color, this tree had religious and spiritual significance for the Haida people. A renegade man with super physical abilities decided, in his disturbed thinking, that this tree must come down. How the townspeople and Haida Indians dealt with this loss, along with the history of this man’s life, is the subject of this book. Mr. Vaillant also examines the socio-cultural, economic, and history of British Columbia as it pertains to the felling of this tree.

In The Tiger, Mr. Vaillant’s latest book, he tells the story of a rogue tiger in southeast Russia that, in 1997, turns to man-eating. He also relates the stories of the men the tiger kills and those who hunt the tiger down. In the background of the tiger adventure, is the story of the socio-cultural milieu of Russia before and following Perestroika. Because Primorye, the area in Russia where tigers are found, is so close to China and Korea, we get to learn a lot about the interactions of these countries and their roles in poaching, hunting, and conservation efforts.

The story is a compelling, adventurous page-turner. It starts off with a tiger who is hunting a man named Markov. Markov is one of a few hundred settlers in this very rural Taiga area whose central town is Sobolonye. Once a thriving settlement based on coal production, the coal production is now shut down. Most people resettled to other areas of Russia but a few, mostly hunters, end-of-the-roaders, poachers, and those who loved the land, remained. Markov is a bit of all of these. He is known for his large presence, sense of humor, and charisma. He lived in Sobolonye but kept a cabin deep in the Taiga where he hunted and poached. One day, as Markov and his dog were approaching his cabin, he was attacked by an Amur tiger and killed. He managed to get off one shot, injuring the tiger’s paw. The only parts of Markov left were a “hand without an arm and a head without a face.”

To give you a bit of background information, Primorye, the name for the Taiga area, gets to forty-five degrees below zero in the winter. “In Primorye, the seasons collide with equal intensity: winter can bring blizzards and paralyzing cold, and summers will retaliate with typhoons and monsoon rains; three quarters of the region’s rainfall occur during the summer. This tendency toward extremes allows for unlikely juxtapositions and may explain why there is no satisfactory name for the region’s peculiar ecosystem – one that happens to coincide with the northern limit of the tiger’s pan-hemispheric range.” The Amur tiger is the only one of its species that is able to exist in these arctic conditions. Thousands of species abound here, including the leopard, but the Amur tiger reigns supreme.

The Amur tiger is so big that some want to reclassify it as a completely different species than tiger. It also is able to thrive in areas and conditions that would kill most other tigers. Some Amur tigers grow to nine hundred pounds and are as long as sixteen feet. They are wanderers, looking for sustenance and food wherever it can be found. Because of its size, “Amur tigers must occupy far larger territories than other subspecies in order to meet their need for prey.”

It is not unusual for animal attacks to occur in Primorye. However, these attacks are usually impulsive, when for instance a hunter and a tiger accidentally cross paths. The difference with Markov’s killing is that the tiger was lying in wait for him at his cabin and when Markov returned, instead of running away which would have been the natural thing for the tiger to do, it attacked him. According to the legends of the indigenous people in the area, Markov must have done something to alienate this tiger. Even the Russian people had never heard of an attack like this and believed that Markov had done something specific to harm this tiger or its offspring. Because of the ferocity of the attack, and its conditions, the Inspection Tiger team was called in.

Russia has a special team of men called Inspection Tiger.  They are used to investigate, and if necessary, hunt rogue tigers that are man-eaters. A man named Trush is the head of the inspection team that was called to Primorye after Markov’s killing. He determined that the tiger had acted in an organized way and that this was not an impulse killing. It was the Inspection Tiger ’s duty to find this tiger and kill it. This is one angry and vindictive tiger.

During the course of their hunt, this particular tiger kills two more victims. In one instance it brutalizes the cabin of the victim, ruining all his possessions and dragging a mattress fifty feet in the snow to lie on and await the man’s return. The tiger lays on the torn mattress three days waiting for the man’s return. There is no chance for the man to even get a shot off. The tiger leaps in the air and tears the man to pieces. All that is left of him is his clothing. The town of Sobolonye is now in a state of terror and its residents are instructed not to leave their homes.

This book carefully details the hunt, the hunters and the victims. It reads like a novel with lots of thrilling adventure and wonderful characterizations. In some ways, it is reminiscent of Krakauer’s books. However, Vaillant does a lot with the surrounding issues that relate to the adventure at hand. We learn, for instance, that the Inspection Tiger  team is funded by conservation groups in the United States. We are told about the medicinal needs that China has for all parts of the tiger, thus encouraging poaching. They will pay $20,000 U.S. for one tiger. In an area where people live a subsistence lifestyle, this is a windfall. “The brandname Viagra is derived from vyaaghra, the Sanskrit word for tiger.” All in all, this is a book for the adventurer in all of us.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 70 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (August 24, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Vaillant
EXTRAS:	Excerpt The New Yorker interview with John Vaillant
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More non-fiction: Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakaurer Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes by Daniel L. Everett

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

• The Golden Spruce (May 2006)
• The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (August 2010)

“For most people, Siberia is not the place itself but a figure of speech. In fashionable restaurants in New York and Los Angeles, Siberia is the section of less-desirable tables given to customers whom the maitre d’ does not especially like.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (NOV 10, 2010)

Hints of travel writer Ian Frazier’s latest project showed up in a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine, when an excerpt from Travels in Siberia was published. Having evocatively captured the spirit of a Native American reservation and the American Great Plains in earlier work, Frazier set his sights on a much grander level—he decided to travel across Siberia. A self-confessed lover of all things Russian, Frazier travels across Siberia despite warnings to the contrary.

The writing that makes up Frazier’s new book, Travels in Siberia, is based not just on one trip but many. He details paying preliminary visits to figure out a plan and later after an exhausting road trip that interestingly enough, ends on Sept. 11, 2001, he returns to revisit more historically significant places.

The reader can tell that Frazier has done exhaustive research and knows a lot about the place. The book is packed with historical facts including those about the Decembrists and later, about Stalin’s gulag. Frazier’s descriptions of the gulag along the Topolinskaya highway are extremely unsettling because they are pitch perfect.

Despite the pith that many historical facts add to the volume as a whole, sometimes these additions feel like overkill—it’s almost as if Frazier is trying to cram a little too much information into the pages. There are also entire sections devoted to the beauty of Siberian women, the writings of Russian authors, the fierce mosquitoes in the Siberian swamp, and more. After a while it feels like the book could have used some more editing.

At the same time, Travels in Siberia is full of funny and unusual situations. His companions on the first road trip across, Sergei and Volodya, set up an unreliable van for the journey, which breaks down at the most inconvenient times. Frazier’s details about waiting hours on end for a train connection at the Chernyshevsk station, is priceless. So too are the descriptions of the city of Veliki Ustyug and the steppe of Novosibirsk. Frazier’s beautiful ink drawings complement his narrative well. The sparse drawings effectively emphasize the starkness of the Siberian landscape.

The most hilarious episode in the book is a steam bath (banya) that Frazier is subjected to. His companions first “loosen” Frazier up by striking him with cut birch branches. Then big handfuls of raw honey (complete with bee legs and pieces in it) are applied. “I sat, honeyed and steaming for some time,” Frazier recalls about the banya. Sergei and Volodya then make him dive into a pool of ice-cold water. Frazier remembers seeing a slick of honey on the surface.

Not all is fun and lightness though. For instance, there’s plenty of environmental degradation around, a case made especially strongly in the city of Achinsk—where a lot of cement is made. “The thick, dusty air of Achinsk coats grass blades to death and desertifies everything in a wide radius around the city,” Frazier writes.

At one point in the trip, Frazier meets a university professor of mathematics who promises that Frazier’s journey is only going to get worse as it progresses. “Conditions will get even more stochastic than you have encountered so far,” the professor forecasts. And they do. There is plenty of excitement everywhere including in the diet—Frazier and his companions consume plenty of tvorog (cottage cheese) drenched with smetana (sour cream).

However the excitement is tempered by more-of-the-same in this travelogue. During his first pass across Siberia, especially since Sergei is not particularly interested in revisiting history or checking out the cities, every day and night seem to pass like the one previous. The trio comes across yet another town, settles down on the outskirts to camp and moves on.

So sprinkled among the humorous accounts and storytelling is plenty of monotony as well. This could be attributed to the landscape too. In a recent interview, Frazier pointed out what an old writer once said: “Monotony is the divinity of Russia.” In other words, all that endless solitude in wide-open land leads to its own kind of spirituality. Point taken.

As Frazier’s new work points out, Siberia is a land of endless surprises. There can be monotonous more-of-the-same for mile after mile and yet suddenly you can have a herd of cows attack your tent and supplies (this actually happens). Siberia has plenty of “stochastic” variables to be worked around. That might explain why it has an organization called the Ministry of Extraordinary Situations.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (October 12, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Ian Frazier
EXTRAS:	Excerpt The New Yorker page on Ian Frazier’s writing
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Some fiction set in Siberia: Sashenka by Simon Montefiore Petropolis by Anya Ulinich Far North by Marcel Theroux

Bibliography:

• Dating Your Mom (1986)
• Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody (1987)
• Great Plains (1989)
• Family (1994)
• Coyote v. Acme (1996)
• On the Rez (2000)
• The Fish’s Eye: Essays about Angling and the Outdoors (2002)
• Gone to New York: Adventures in the City (2005)
• Lamentations of the Father (2008)
• Travels in Siberia (October 2010)

“During the day Three Stations was in constant motion, a Circus Maximus with cars…. Drunks were everywhere, but hard to see because they were as gray as the pavement they sprawled on. They were bandaged or bloody or on crutches like casualties of war…. At Three Stations the crippled, outcast and usually hidden member of society gathered like the Court of Miracles only without the miracles.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (AUG 23, 2010)

In Martin Cruz Smith’s Three Stations, Arkady Kyrilovich Renko, Senior Investigator of Important Cases, may be nearing the end of his career. He has a bitter enemy in Prosecutor Zurin, who detests Renko’s tendency to “disregard orders and overstep [his] authority.” Zurin “exemplified the modest ambition of a cork…. He floated and survived.” When Renko and his perennially inebriated buddy, Sergeant Victor Orlov (“the smell of vodka came off him like heat from a stove”) look into the suspicious death of a beautiful young woman, they are ordered to declare the case a drug overdose and drop the matter. Ever the maverick, Renko decides to find the killer and worry about the consequences later.

The novel also features Maya Ivanova Pospelova, a fifteen-year-old prostitute who adores her beautiful newborn infant, Katya. Maya is “a stick figure in torn jeans and a bomber jacket the texture of cardboard, her hair dyed a fiery red.” She runs away from the club where she works, taking the baby with her. A pair of vicious thugs will surely kill Maya if they catch up with her. Sadly, when she reaches Moscow, Maya awakens from a deep sleep to discover that her baby has been taken from her. On the run with no resources, the desperate girl turns to Zhenya, Arkady’s friend, who is also fifteen and a chess hustler. Zhenya feels protective towards Maya, and he risks his own safety to do what he can to keep her alive.

The strength of Three Stations lies in its vivid characterizations, sharp and darkly humorous dialogue, and magnificent descriptive writing. Smith depicts a Moscow that resembles a fading lady of the evening. She appears attractive until you take a closer look. Then, her pitted skin, heavy-lidded eyes, and sagging body reveal the rot and decadence that lie beneath the surface. Moscow’s flashy exterior is a thin veil covering a multitude of horrors–drug use, rampant alcoholism, poverty, homelessness, and untreated mental illness. Oligarchs and ruthless politicians amass wealth and power, caring for no one but themselves. Corruption is everywhere; to have integrity is to be a fool.

Although the plot is a bit too hectic and far-fetched, readers will root for the spunky and determined Maya, the compassionate and honest Renko, and the good-hearted Zhenya. Smith’s cynicism about the ability of Muscovites to survive in a society gone mad is offset by his depiction of stalwart people like Arkady Renko. Although it would be easier for Renko to turn in his credentials and spend time reading novels and smelling the roses, he stubbornly persists in taking on the system and helping those who are in no position to help themselves.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 157 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (August 17, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Martin Cruz Smith
EXTRAS:	Audio Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Tatiana Stalin’s Ghost Wolves Eat Dogs Rose

Bibliography:

• The Indians Won (1970)
• Gypsy in Amber (1971)
• Canto for a Gypsy (1972)
• Nightwing (1977)
• Analog Bullet (1981)
• Stallion Gate (1986)
• Rose (1996)
• December 6 (2002) (Called Tokyo Station in UK)

Arkady Renko series:

• Gorky Park (1981)
• Polar Star (1989)
• Red Square (1992)
• Havana Bay (1999)
• Wolves Eat Dogs (2004)
• Stalins’ Ghost (2006)
• Three Stations (2010)
• Tatiana (November 2013)

“I had thought I lived in one of the best neighborhoods in Moscow. Right next to the Sokol railway station and the large triangle of Bratsky Park, with its stately old lime trees. The park ends right at a lane of chestnuts, straight as an arrow, bordering an elegant square. That lane runs up to the famous Birch Grove Park, as big as a small forest. To live in a place surrounded by trees and green parks—what more could you wish for? Well, for one thing, that there weren’t sexual predators roaming around in them.”

–from “The Coat that Smelled Like Earth” by Dimitri Kosyrev (Master Chen).

Book Review:

Review by Sudheer Apte (JUN 1, 2010)

Akashic Books has become the Starbucks of noir, with new locations in their Noir Series franchise opening every day. Moscow Noir is a story collection set in Moscow. Each story is set in a particular location in the city, and there is a small, hand-drawn map at the beginning showing where these neighborhoods are. These particular stories are originally in Russian, each translated into English for the collection.

Apart from their beat, what is common to all these stories is their dark and menacing subject matter. Thomas Hobbes wrote in the seventeenth century Leviathan that, in the natural state of mankind, a man’s life is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” These adjectives would all apply to these stories set in today’s Russian Federation. Sordid crimes, gangsters and other underworld characters, sometimes supernatural themes, and a hefty body count characterize most of them.

Russia, and Moscow in particular, has a multi-layered and long history of suffering, offering up a rich mine of trauma, oppression, and unresolved conflict. It also has a long literary tradition. The best stories in the collection have some reverberations of a hoary past on the everyday life of a neighborhood. My favorite is “The Coat that Smelled Like Earth,” by Dimitri Kosyrev (Master Chen), where a Sherlock Holmes-like protagonist, a psychiatrist who is an amateur sleuth, tries to dig into a series of sexual assaults near his home, and unearths strange connections to Soviet-era buildings and bomb shelters under an abandoned military airport.

The book’s two editors together run an agency in Saint Petersburg for Russian writers worldwide, and their selections reflect a wide range. Among the fourteen stories, no author is represented twice. Some stories are set on a large-scale epic canvas, evoking the old deprivations of the two World Wars, when entire populations were displaced by hunger and war. Others are more intimate: in “Daddy Loves Me” by Maxim Maximov, a schoolteacher who lives in her old father’s apartment poisons him. In true Russian fashion, the poison does not work as promised by her underworld contacts, and she has to take matters into her own hands.

It is hard to over-emphasize the power of the locations described in some of these stories. The city of Moscow is itself quite a character in real life. The particular neighborhood described in the Kosyrev story, on the northern segment of the Zamoskvoretskaya metro line, is a typical mixed-use neighborhood. Small wooden stalls selling flowers, vegetables, and money changing services jostle for space with big retail stores along the four-lane divided highway called Leningradskiy Prospekt. Leafy but crowded residential apartment blocks sit right next to them, sharing dusty streets with huge, ugly buildings of an aeronautical part maunfacturer, while the subway rumbles underneath. The anonymity of a big, twenty-first century city here lives uneasily with a past, not long ago, when these same buildings were part of a military-industrial complex close to an airport.

The young gum-chewing women and men descending the giant escalators into Sokol metro station today probably never think about that past. These stories might force them to.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Akashic Books (June 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Sudheer Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Natalia Smirnova and Julia Goumen
EXTRAS:	Publisher Page on Moscow Noir
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Philadelphia Noir San Francisco Noir 2 New Orleans Noir Mexico City Noir Boston Noir

Bibliography:

Books in the Akashic Noir Series (Alphabetical Order):

• Baltimore Noir edited by Laura Lippman (May 2006)
• Boston Noir edited by Dennis Lehane (Nivember 2009)
• Bronx Noir edited by by S.J. Rozan (August 2007)
• Brooklyn Noir edited by Tim McLoughlin (June 2004)
• Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics edited by Tim McLoughlin (June 2005)
• Chicago Noir edited by Neal Pollack (2005)
• D.C. Noir edited by George Pelecanos (February 2006)
• D.C. Noir 2: The Classics edited by George Pelecanos (February 2006)
• Delhi Noir by Hirsh Sawhney (August 2009)
• Detroit Noir edited by E.J. Olsen and John C. Hocking (November 2007)
• Dublin Noir : The Celtic Tiger vs. The Ugly American edited by Ken Bruen (March 2006)
• Haiti Noir edited by Edwidge Danticat (January 2011)
• Havana Noir edited by Achy Obejas (October 2007)
• Indian Country Noir edited by Sarah Cortez and Liz Martinez (June 2010)
• Istanbul Noir edted by Mustafa Ziyalan and Amy Spangler (November 2008)
• Las Vegas Noir edited by Jarret Keene and Todd James Pierce (May 2008)
• London Noir edited by Cathi Unsworth (August 2006)
• Lone Star Noir edited by Bobby Byrd and Johnny Byrd (October 2010)
• Los Angeles Noir edited by Jarret Keene and Todd James Pierce (May 2008)
• Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics edited by Denise Hamilton (April 2010)
• Manhattan Noir edited by Lawrence Block (April 2006)
• Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics edited by Lawrence Block (September 2008)
• Mexico City Noir edited by Paco Ignacio Taibo II (February 2010)
• Miami Noir edited by Les Standiford (November 2006)
• Moscow Noir edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen (June 2010)
• New Orleans Noir edited by Julie Smith (April 2007)
• Orange County Noir edited by Gary Phillips (April 2010)
• Paris Noir edited by Aurélien Masson (November 2008)
• Philadelphia edited by Carlin Romano (November 2010)
• Phoenix Noir edited by Patrick Milikin (November 2009)
• Portland Noir edited by Kevin Sampsell (June 2009)
• Richmond Noir edited by Andrew Blossom, Briand Castleberry & Tom De Haven (March 2010)
• Rome Noir edited by Chiara Stangalino and Maxim Jakubowski (February 2009)
• Queens Noir edited by Robert Knightly (January 2008)
• San Francisco Noir (October 2005)
• San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics (February 2009)
• Seattle Noir edited by Curt Colbert (June 2009)
• Toronto Noir edited by Janine Armin and Nathaniel G. Moore (May 2008)
• Trinidad Noir edited by by Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jeanne Mason (August 2008)
• Twin Cities Noir edited by Julie Schaper and Steven Horwitz (June 2006)
• Wall Street Noir edited by Peter Spiegelman (June 2007)

“It is agonizing. Life here at Yasnaya Polyana is completely poisoned.  Wherever I turn, it is shame and suffering…”
Diary entry, 3 July 1880, Leo Tolstoy

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (APR 25, 2010)

Leo Tolstoy famously opened Anna Karenina with the observation that, “All happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He was 45 when he wrote that. Thirty-seven years later, at age 82, he would die at the remote Astapovo train station, not far from his home, after fleeing, in the middle of the night, his estranged wife of 48 years, abandoning his family, his wealth, and setting out to live the life of a wandering ascetic. Ironically, he fulfilled the observation that his family was, indeed, singularly unhappy. A.N. Wilson described marriage between Leo and Sofya as the most unhappy in all literary history. The Last Station is the fascinating fictional construction of what transpired in the life and household of Tolstoy’s last year.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born into a family of landed aristocracy. He inherited the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, along with 700 serfs, after serving in the Crimean War in the 1850s. Prior to that, to settling down and writing two of the greatest works of world literature, War and Peace and Anne Karenina, he lead a life of, as he later reflected, “vulgar licentiousness”–or whoring around, to use his wife’s phrase. He fathered thirteen children by Sofya and was grandfather to at least twenty-five. He cared for his serfs and established a school for their education. He attempted to bring about emancipation for all serfs, thus labeling him a threat to the state, albeit a world-famous one. In the 1870s he underwent a spiritual crisis. He renounced his former beliefs and literary works. He embraced and expanded upon a primitive Christianity, developing a simple theology based on love and asceticism. He took vows of chastity–ironically–and vegetarianism. His influence was so far-reaching that Gandhi cited Tolstoy, or more properly Tolstoyism, as his major influence in the development of non-violent social reform.

Against this background, The Last Station, picks up in 1910, Tolstoy’s last year. The Tolstoy household is a buzzing hornet’s nest of intrigue, pent-up anger, fear and distrust. Sycophants and toadies fill the hallways, along with family members, disciples and admirers. To some the great man is a Christ-like figure, to others, particularly his wife and the very few of her supporters, he is deemed a selfish eccentric. Tolstoy had been developing his Christianity against a backdrop of luxury and affluence. He had a family to support and a wife who accustomed to her lifestyle. He was a torn man. He was viewed by the world as a mystic and original Christian thinker, yet he saw himself as a hypocrite. The reader can’t help but tune into his personal tension. But the experience does not stop with Tolstoy. One also feels for Sofya. She bore him all those children, transcribed War and Peace by hand, three times–she put up with him. “Only I could read Lyovochka’s [Tolstoy} handwriting,” she writes in her diary. “His crablike hieroglyphs filled the margins of his proof sheets, driving the printers wild…Even he could not make out what he had written much of the time. But I could.” And she withstood his eccentricities until she could no longer.

The author, Jay Parini writes in an afterward to his book, “The Last Station is fiction, though it bears some of the trappings and affects of literary scholarship.” He continues to describe how fifty years ago in a used book store he stumbled upon the diary a Tolstoy house member, Valentin Bulgakov. Bulgakov was there for the last year, observing and taking notes. From there Parini collected and read other diaries and memoirs of family members, visitors and students. “Reading them in succession was like looking at a constant image through a kaleidoscope. I soon fell in love with the continually changing symmetrical forms of life that came into view.” He tells us that the quotes attributed to Tolstoy in the book are, indeed, his; too, that he drew from major and minor sources, biographies and letters, in fleshing out the chronology of the book.

There is an approach to the popular “historical novel” that is often foot-loose and fancy-free. My sense here is that of an extremely well-employed and detailed accuracy. (I have read the major works, but am no Tolstoy authority.) Reading The Last Station was akin to reading the best biography. Only better. There is the opportunity to get lost in a period, a life and follow it through the ups and downs, the history and intrigue.

Parini employs multiple voices in the telling of this tale, bringing into focus multiple perspectives and view points. There is, of course, Tolstoy, as revealed by his voice, his writings and his diary entries. And his wife, Sofya Andreyevna, is a major presence, as one would expect. But too, we hear the voice of the doctors, adult children and onlookers. (Daughter Sasha: “Mama does not understand my father’s goals. He is a spiritual creature, while her chief concerns are material.”) Each voice speaks in first person, their chapters weaving one through another, to form the kaleidoscope Parini refers to. One voice, in particular, that of the young new hire, Valentin Bulgakov, acts as a touch stone of reason and balanced observation throughout.

Bulgakov has been hired by Vladimir Grigorevich Chertkov, Tolstoy confidante and threat to the status quo, to act as literary secretary and quotation-gatherer for Tolstoy. Bulgakov gets thrown into the household when all contrasting forces are at fever pitch. Sofya is afraid that Leo is re-writing his will and leaving his copy-writes to Chertkov for distribution to the public domain. She fears that Chertkov is plotting to undermine her and further the rift between she and her husband. (“Since Chertkov came to live here again, the situation has grown even less tolerable,” she writes in her diary.) Her fears are well founded. But she takes them to hysterical pitch and drives the great man mad, sending him fleeing into the winter Russian night. The children take sides, fearing on one hand destitution once their father dies and, on the other, immense pride at being a child of such an individual. Coming and going throughout is a mix of personalities whose allegiance and trust is never fully established.

The Last Station reads much like life: there is no omniscient narrator, only participants functioning from their individual perspective. It is a wonderful and immensely interesting method. The knowledge that it was created with a scholarly approach to accuracy only makes the reading experience so much the richer. Tolstoy had a profound influence on the creative literary tradition. That he renounced all of that and set out to follow an idiosyncratic voice pulling him in an opposite direction is fascinating. Parini renders the experience in a remarkably entertaining fashion. This is a wonderful book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; Mti edition (January 12, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jay Parini
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel on Leo Tolstoy’s last day: The Commissariat of Enlightenment by Ken Kalfus

Selected Bibliography:

• The Love Run (1980)
• The Patch Boys (1986)
• The Last Station (1990)
• Bay of Arrows (1992)
• Benjamin’s Crossing (1996)
• The Passages of H. M.: A Novel of Herman Melville (November 2010)

Nonfiction:

• John Steinbeck: A Biography (1995)
• Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Literature and Politics (1997)
• Robert Frost: A Life (1999)
• The Apprentice Lover (2002) (with A. Kenneth Ciongoli)
• One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (2004)
• The Art of Teaching (2005)
• Why Poetry Matters (2008)
• Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America (2008)

Movies from books:

• The Last Station (2010)

“You don’t see them at first. Then suddenly a random detail snags your attention like a stray mouse: an old lady’s handbag, a stocking slipping down a leg, bunching up on a bulging ankle, crocheted gloves on the hands, a little old-fashioned hat perched on the head, sparse grey hair with a blue sheen.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (FEB 3, 2010)

Baba Yaga is a star player in Eastern European myths. The Russian version involves a crackly old witch ready to spark terror in children’s hearts. Croatian author Dubravka Ugresic, in her wonderful book, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, lays out modern-day interpretations of this age-old myth.

These “witches,” Ugresic tells us, are all around us—old women limbs curling from arthritis, shuffling along, waiting, pondering the end of their lives. The book is laid out in three sections—each a different take on the myth.

The first one touchingly details the relationship between an old woman and her daughter (the narrator). Living in exile in Zagreb, the old lady spends each of her days with fixed routines—a treat at the local pastry shop, a glance at the newspaper, dusting perhaps. Ugresic does such a brilliant job detailing this woman’s every action and gesture as she waits slowly for death to come, that the book is worth reading for this alone. “She uttered her truisms with special weight,” the narrator writes of her mother, “Truisms gave her the feeling, I suppose, that everything was fine, that the world was precisely where it should be, that she was in control and had the power to decide.”

Plagued by dementia partly from old age and partly from cancer that has spread to the brain and is barely contained, her one regret is not being able to see the city of her youth ever again. “She had snapped shut almost all of her emotional files. One of them was slightly open: it was Varna, the city of her childhood and youth.” Since she is not capable of travel, Mom sets the daughter off to find and record the city of her youth.

Some background information about the author would be relevant here. Dubravka Ugresic now lives in Amsterdam with a Dutch passport. When war broke out in Croatia in the early 90’s she took a stand against the nationalistic government for which she was forced out of the country as part of a “witch hunt.” An exile herself, you can detect the emotional weight of Ugresic’s own experiences here. In the story, when the narrator returns to her mother with pictures of her hometown now irrevocably changed, the mother can no longer recognize it. It’s a haunting and moving portrait not just of old age, but also of exile’s deep loneliness.

The second interpretation looks at three old women—Beba, Pupa and Kukla—who visit a newly founded spa retreat as part of their joint vacation together. The friends kick it up and have a good time even as the story individually zooms in on each woman’s life regrets.

To each of these women, love doesn’t (or hasn’t) come easy. The “egg” in the title too is based on a Russian folktale and it stands for love—one that is nearly inaccessible. “Love is on the distant shore of a wide sea,” goes the legend. “A large oak tree stands there, and in the tree there is a box, in the box a rabbit, in the rabbit a duck, and in the duck an egg. And the egg in order to get the emotional mechanism going, had to be eaten.”

So even if “Baba Yaga” has laid an egg, will it get eaten and by whom? In here Ugresic also does a wonderful job of showing up the beauty industry and all its attempts at keeping old age at bay.

The final interpretation is an essay laid out by a folklorist, Aba Bagay, who offers the general discourse and ideas behind the Baba Yaga myth. In a final fantastic touch, she slowly morphs into that crackling, bird-like creature a part of “Hags International.”

It is important to note here that writing about old age and women is not easy. This is the sort of material that can easily slip into gushy sentimentality. But Ugresic is a far better writer than that. Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is funny, touching and even illuminating—but never, ever sappy. It’s going on my list for top reads for the year. Her interpretations of the original myth are searing and inventive. “They shuffle around the world like armies of elderly angels,” Ugresic writes of these sweet old ladies. In other words, Baba Yaga is only as scary (or as endearing) as the old ladies we all know. That ought to reassure the young ones, shouldn’t it?

In her wild, fun and imaginative book, Dubravka Ugresic turns the myth of Baba Yaga on its head. While doing so, she validates what Bette Davis once said (and what one of Ugresic’s characters also acknowledges): “Old age is no place for sissies.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Canongate U.S.; Tra edition (February 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dubravka Ugresic
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Europe in Sepia And of another interesting book: The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony

Bibliography:

• In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories (1992)
• Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1993)
• The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998)
• Lend Me Your Character (2004)
• The Ministry of Pain (2005)
• Nobody’s Home (2007)
• Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2009)

Non-fiction:

• Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream (1994)
• The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (1998)
• Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia (2003)
• Karaoke Culture (2011)
• Europe in Sepia (February 2014)