Category Archives: 2011 Eastern European Challenge

Review: Purge by Sofi Oksanen

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Aliide is an elderly widow living in an isolated house in a half-deserted Estonian village in the early 1990′s. One day she finds a young girl collapsed outside her house and, against her better judgement (who might be watching and who will they tell?), she brings the “dishrag of a girl” into her home where she, warily and sparingly, provides some nourishment and general aid. About all we know for sure for some time is that the girl’s name is Zara and she is from Vladivostok. Over the course of the novel we travel backwards and forwards in time to learn the histories of the women who have both had traumatic experiences which have left deep physical and psychological scars.

Purge isn’t only a story of violence and abuse perpetrated against its two protagonists but is testament to the ease with which such behaviour has always been, and is still, accepted as the natural way of things in many cultures. Its sadness lies not only in the stories of two women but in the fact that these stories are shared by so many (we did, after all, just observe the international day for the elimination of violence against women). However the strength of the novel lies in the clever and engaging way Oksanen teases out the stories and compels the reader to discover how the two women ended up where they were. Aliide’s story in particular also plays out against the backdrop of some momentous events in the region’s history, including the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and there is a very credible depiction of the impact of these events on the day-to-day lives of the average person. This aspect of the novel made me realise how little I know about these events from recent history when compared with events in western Europe or America.

The two central characters are very strong though not, perhaps contrary to expectations, entirely likeable. Aliide is an especially prickly character and while some of this is explained by the horrific traumas she has experienced there are other things which cannot be so easily justified. I liked the fact she was portrayed in this way as it made her far more believable than I think she would have been without these very human flaws. The secondary characters, including the various people who torment the two women are also well-drawn and all too credible.

The story itself was well told and relatively easy to follow despite its somewhat choppy nature though I have to admit I thought the ending somewhat awkward and rushed. I’ve read quite a few reviews of this book and they all seem to take a different message or theme from their reading which is the sign of a really great book. For myself I thought it spoke beautifully about the dangers of longing for something (or someone) you can’t have, the lengths humans will go to for self-preservation and I enjoyed reflecting on the various implications of the novel’s title. It is, in parts, a harrowing read but a highly rewarding one.

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Purge has been reviewed at Petrona and The Black Sheep Dances and I am counting it towards my Eastern European Reading Challenge

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My rating 4/5
Translator Lola Rogers
Publisher Atlantic Books [2011]
ISBN 9780857890528
Length 402 pages
Format eBook (kindle)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it

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Review: Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland

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I have struggled to find books that appeal to me for the Eastern European Challenge (we shall speak no more of the DNF pile) so I allowed myself a small ‘cheat’ by reading a book set in Russia though written by an outsider (in fact Sam Eastland is a pseudonym used by a grandson of a London detective who served in the 1940′s).

As the book opens we meet a man who has, barely, survived 10 years in a Siberian gulag following the Russian revolution of 1917. We learn that he was once a great detective and so close to Tsar Nicholas II that it was inevitable he would be treated harshly by the Tsar’s opponents. His rescue comes at the hands of none other than Joseph Stalin who wants the man, known only as Pekkala, to discover once and for all whether or not the Tsar and his family are dead and, more importantly, to find the treasure the Tsar was believed to have hidden. Pekkala is ‘assisted’ in his investigations by his estranged brother and a young Commissar called Kirov.

I like an alternate history as much as the next reader but, for me anyway, there are limits it’s best not to go beyond and this book went a good way past them. Tsar Nicholoas II is portrayed as a kind-of ‘everyone’s kindly old uncle’ character, dispensing sage advice and home-spun philosophy alongside his boundless affection for man and beast. In this version of the man there is not even a hint of the autocratic, anti-semitic, mass murderer that real history has recorded. Apart from making me cringe at its unsavouriness, this cleaning up of the Tsar’s character also made it impossible for me to be fully drawn into the novel because the Tsar’s personality was the hook upon which everything else hung and I didn’t for a moment swallow it.

Even if I had been able to put that aspect of the novel aside I can’t imagine I would have ever been fully engaged by the rest of it. The character of Pekkala, who carries almost all of the action, wasn’t much more credible than the Tsar and I thought Eastland went too far in trying to make him sympathetic. He is totally brilliant (of course) and has a zen-like capacity to forgive the various injustices committed against him (which by the end of the novel stack up quite high) and is just too perfect to be really interesting. His two companions in investigation are not drawn in enough detail to provide much interest either, especially when most of their contribution seems to be moaning about the cold, the lack of food and whatever else they can find to whine about (Pekkala of course accepts all of this with grace and wisdom).

The story is told from Pekkala’s perspective and oscillates between the present and his flashbacks to various points in his past including his childhood, his time as a detective and his years in the gulag. I did enjoy this structure as it provided a good sense of the historical placement of the present events. The mystery itself was also decently plotted, especially as Eastland didn’t take the expected path when depicting his version of what happened to the Romanovs and their treasures. I did find the inclusion at the end of the novel a timeline of what actually happened to the Romanovs odd though, as if the author was wanting to shout “I made all that other stuff up you know” in case we hadn’t worked that out for ourselves.

I know I probably shouldn’t be so harsh about a novel simply because I couldn’t buy into the author’s world but I think that’s one of the risks of using prominent real people about whom much is known as significant characters in a novel. If I ignore the characters all together Eye of the Red Tsar is an entertaining enough yarn, especially as read by the always brilliant Stephen Pacey, but for me to be really engaged by a novel I need characters I can believe and they were sadly lacking here.

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There are loads of people who think this is a much better book than I did including those who review at Euro Crime and It’s A Crime…Or A Mystery

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My rating 2.5/5
Narrator Stephen Pacey
Publisher AudioGO [2010]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 9 hours 47 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #1 in the inspector Pekkala series
Source I bought it

Review: Pelagia & the White Bulldog by Boris Akunin

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After an abandoned attempt to read Death in Breslau I borrowed a second book from the local library to kick off this year’s Eastern Europe Challenge.

Pelagia & the White Bulldog is the first novel of a series set in late 19th century Russia and introduces Sister Pelagia: “a fidgety, curious woman, undignified in her movements and not cut out to be a nun.” She is tasked by the Bishop of Zavolzhie to investigate a situation which is vexing his Aunt who claims that someone has tried to poison the last remaining examples of the the white bulldogs with brown ears that her husband had especially bred before his death. That is really all I can tell you about the plot without delving into action that does not take place until the half-way point of the novel. Although I suppose it is not spoiling things too much to add that there is a second (eventually intertwined) storyline relating to the appointment of Vladimir Lvovich Bubenstov as a representative of the Orthodox Church’s Holy Synod to investigate religious improprieties in the town.

I have to admit to struggling with this book and in some ways I shouldn’t have been surprised. One of the reasons I stopped a formal study of literature during my University days was that I couldn’t face reading what I came to think of as ‘another bloody Russian’ that the syllabus seemed to be full of. I don’t know if it is the original writing or the way the language is translated into English but the one thing the Russian fiction of my acquaintance has in common is an unwillingness to use 10 words when 200 (or 2000) are available. I found the flowery, long-winded prose of Tolstoy and Dostoyesvky dread-inducing all those years ago but I thought perhaps a less ‘worthy’, more recent title might be different. Alas I did not find it so. Amidst the interminably lengthy descriptions of nothing much at all there is a story, of sorts, here but not one that kept me particularly engaged (and not one that couldn’t have been told in one-third the word count). I teased out some interesting observations about the politics of the day but as a mystery the book left a lot to be desired in that the culprit for the crimes that were eventually described was obvious almost from the outset and the way in which Pelagia deduced the answer bordered on the inane.

I didn’t find the characters particularly enjoyable either. I thought I would like Pelagia’s quirkiness but she soon turned into a kind of reject from a Carry On movie what with knocking over fruit bowls and spilling tea in men’s crotches and whatnot. Slapstick has never been my humour of choice. The rest of the characters were all pretty formulaic for the intimate melodrama the book turned into, though the way Bubenstov hid is evilness was the most entertaining thing about the book for me.

I know there are readers who don’t share my admiration for brevity and conciseness and more who simply enjoy the kind of writing that Akunin has produced here. I am probably the poorer for not being able to appreciate this particular style but it can’t be helped. For me the hints of wry humour and mildly interesting plot were lost in the flowery, tangent-riddled prose that made me want to poke my own eyes out with one of the knitting needles that Pelagia carried everywhere.

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I couldn’t find much in the way of online reviewing of this book but did come across a 2006 review in the UK paper The Independent that describes a similar reaction to mine. However in the interests of fairness you might want to check Amazon for some more positive reviews.

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My rating 2/5 (yes it probably is a little low, but it’s my opinion after all, as all the reviews here are, I’m not making any claims to objectivity)
Author website http://www.boris-akunin.com/
Translator Andrew Bromfield
Publisher Weidenfield & Nicolson [this translation 2006, original edition 2000]
ISBN 0297852507
Length 295 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #1 in the Sister Pelagia series
Source borrowed from the library

The 2011 Eastern European Reading Challenge

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What I think will be my final challenge for next year is the Eastern European Reading Challenge being hosted by Amy of The Black Sheep Dances who was responsible for this year’s highly successful Scandinavian Reading Challenge.

Given that I only have one book in my TBR that qualifies for this challenge and I am trying not to add too much to that pile I am only going to aim for the tourist level of the challenge. This requires me to read 4 books set in one of these countries: Croatia, Ukraine, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Hungary, Belarus, Estonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, Czech Rep., Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Romania, Moldova, or Kosovo.

I’ve got Entanglement by Zygmunt Miłoszewski to read which is set in Poland and I’ll need to find three other books over the course of the year. Any suggestions of translated crime fiction from these countries would be most welcome.