50. The Tsar of Love and Techno
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by: Katy Fassett
Author: Anthony Marra
Genre: Fiction, Anthology, Foreign
332 pages, published October 6, 2015
Reading Format: Book
Summary
This fascinating and very well written collection of stories set in the USSR and modern day Russia contains a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. Several women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners, who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. Great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. With its rich character portraits and a reverberating sense of history, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating book.
Quotes
“You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else’s.”
“The future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.”
“A single whisper can be quite a disturbance when the rest of the audience is silent.”
“There are so many paths to contentment if you’re open to self-delusion.”
“Endurance, I reminded myself, is the true measure of existence.”
“Never forget the first three letters of confidence.”
“If there is an operation, and if that operation is successful, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.”
“You remember how Mom had that embroidered pillow? When she got upset, she’d shout into it and no one would hear her. That’s Facebook.”
“Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.”
“The calcium in collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are.”
“I guess our lives are all dreams – as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else.”
My Take
The Tsar of Love and Techno is a fascinating book form that provides the reader with extensive insight into how the oppression of the USSR translated into modern day Russia. The anthology form, with the same characters carried through multiple stories and intersecting with other characters and narratives, is particularly effective in the hands of Anthony Marra, a talented writer who I will be watching.
