Alexei NikitinCritiques

3.6 stars, rounded up because the book somehow won me over despite being structurally messy. Then again, Nikitin's setting--Ukraine in the perestroika era--is a messy place. Nikitin makes the most of that, with plot threads including the Afghan War, the drug trade, law and order, history... and so on.

(There's more on my blog, here blog post.)

Seduced by this book from the new fiction section at the library. Melville House books are never a hard sell.

At times, bewildering, but I loved it from the outset. What is real in a totalitarian state, when everything is politics and games of power? And how could even a game ever be simply a game, when it could be a conspiracy and backstabbing and cynical political moves.

And what to do when the intrigues of your past suddenly pop up to haunt you?

Bizarre sequence of events and intentions play havoc with the lives of the protagonist and his four friends as the story jumps from 1984 to 2004 (back and forth) in Kiev, Ukraine. The random mental game (what the KGB suspiciously called "the game with political implications" that "quantitatively simulated the partition of the Soviet Union") that the four friends invented and played while students in Kiev University, resulted in serious consequences. This is the plot. But for me, the plot didn't take me in as much as the glimpses into the snippets of reality as Ukraine transitioned from perestroika/glasnost to a completely new existence as a separate country. In the second part of the book, as the main character roams about Kiev streets, the matter-of-fact tone becomes more lyrical and contemplative, which makes him pronounce: "Come what may, the force of life has always been abundant in Kiev hills".... I think the translator Anne Marie Jackson did a very good job - for it's not that easy to translate Russian authors when one is not a native Russian speaker.½