Soooo…. the Diner Review has been absent and perhaps…. unmissed. Perhaps 2016 will be different. Perhaps not. The future with this writer is as always…. sketchy. We are coming up on the year end however and that leads to some reflections, some lists and perhaps even some new year's resolutions. While not getting to the other two as of yet, you should resolve to read “The Tsar of Love and Techno”. This 332 page tome by Anthony Marra is the best thing that I read in 2015 and I am grateful that it will be the last thing I finish for the year. I will bo go back and read his previous novel, “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” because this was just so good. My devotion to the book is evidenced by my continuation of reading it, even after my dog devoured a portion of it.
The book is more than a little fantastic on a number of levels but follows some nine “related” individuals through 80 years from Stalin to modern (post Chechen) Russia. It starts with an artist who has found himself in the job of correcting art and photographs of Mother Russia, post revolution where people were, purged, murdered or sent to Siberia. He erases these individuals images from the state record and does it both quickly and artistically. For reasons known only to him he replaces the images of these individuals with a picture of someone else, always the same person...artfully rendered.
When he is finally “reported” as a traitor and suffers his fate the story moves to the Arctic Circle and a community that produces nickel for the State in a way that is not totally environmentally friendly and we follow the actors, and a painting down through the generations and the Chechen War and love and death and drug dealing and panhandling and failures… and more failures with very little sense of triumph, other than the spirit or lack thereof of his characters and the sense that every life is a noble struggle, even if the face of relentless marginalization imposed by the State and meaningless related once again to the state.
His characters and tone perfect and he writes with seeming first hand knowledge of the Orwellian society imposed by Communism and even more insidiously… in post Communism. The Russian people have never really suffered a day of Democracy and although it certainly is not a cure all one wonders whether a real representative government would have made a difference...or not. The characters are dense and there are a lot of them to follow and with the Russian names and my limited brain plasticity it was sometimes a challenge but in the end… this is a great book and a great read that will take you outside your mind and outside the problems of our own country and maybe to the realization that we continue to be the luckiest people in the world, and yet our lives without all the imposed suffering, might be a little less meaningful.
