Snowdrops

Aug 10, 2011 Blair rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary, booker-prize, read-on-kindle, overrated

I actually bought this book several months ago; a handful of good reviews combined with the setting, Moscow (I've been fascinated with Russia since my teens, and wrote my university dissertation on the Russian presidency) piqued my interest, but somehow I never got around to reading it. I only remembered it after learning that it's one of the thirteen books on the longlist for this year's Man Booker Prize. Billed as 'an intensely riveting psychological drama', Snowdrops follows about a year in t...more I actually bought this book several months ago; a handful of good reviews combined with the setting, Moscow (I've been fascinated with Russia since my teens, and wrote my university dissertation on the Russian presidency) piqued my interest, but somehow I never got around to reading it. I only remembered it after learning that it's one of the thirteen books on the longlist for this year's Man Booker Prize. Billed as 'an intensely riveting psychological drama', Snowdrops follows about a year in the life of Nicholas Platt, an English lawyer living and working in Moscow. A chance encounter with two young women, sisters Masha and Katya, develops into a friendship and, with Masha, a rather one-sided relationship. Nick agrees to help the girls' ageing aunt with the sale of her flat; at work, meanwhile, he is involved in a business deal with a shady character known only as the Cossack. The reader knows from the beginning that something or other is going to go wrong, as Nick narrates his story from a future perspective, and drops occasional hints that all is not as it seems - particularly with regards to Masha. All in all, I started this book feeling very intrigued about what turns the plot might take, and relishing the Russian setting. However, it turned out to be one of the biggest reading disappointments I've had all year.

The first stumbling block was the main character. Nick is far from likeable - immature, judgmental, sexist and sleazy, a grown man who looks down on his own parents; I think he's meant to represent the corrupting influence of modern Russia on a gullible Westerner, but it seemed more likely to me that he just wasn't a very nice person to begin with. At first, I felt his unpleasant attitude to women and apparent lack of experience with them (we learn he's only ever had one relationship, with a girl from university) were surely down to youth. I assumed he was in his mid-twenties at the very oldest, so it was a significant shock when his age was dropped into the narrative and it turned out he was 38! It's clear his 'love' for Masha is more of an obsession, but she does nothing to justify it - she's portrayed throughout as cold and almost characterless. I would have found her more interesting and perhaps even someone I could sympathise with, except there's no meat on the bones of the character. There's no suspense involved in figuring out that she's deluding Nick - it couldn't be more obvious.

The second issue was the narrative structure. For some unknown reason, perhaps in an an attempt to add an extra layer of intrigue to the plot, the author has chosen to relate Nick's tale in the form of a letter to his present-day fiancée, looking back on his time in Moscow. This is problematic on so many levels. The fiancée character isn't so much one-dimensional as nonexistent - I couldn't get any sense of who she was, and the device was so cursory it felt as though it had been tacked on after the rest of the book was already written. Apart from that, the story doesn't work as a letter - there's too much dialogue and detail, and I refuse to believe any man would be so rigorously committed to telling the truth that he'd fill a letter to his current partner with details of threesomes with strippers, how many times he'd paid for sex, how irresistably sexy he found his ex-girlfriend, how he occasionally fantasised about her sister, and so on. This all happened years before he met the fiancée, so it's not as if there's any need for Nick to 'confess', and it's obvious the author just didn't want to leave the sex out of the story and has used the conceit of Nick's absolute honesty to justify its presence. Furthermore, when the book ends with (view spoiler) it's impossible to understand how on earth he could have ended up becoming engaged to this woman, let alone why he'd bother to sit down and write a lengthy, confessional document to her.

The only thing I really liked about Snowdrops was the setting. The frozen wastes, seedy clubs and shabby flats of Moscow were all evoked well and I enjoyed how the corruption and bribery spawned by Russia's history were shown to have invaded every aspect of the characters' lives. But on the whole, the book isn't particularly well-written (there's a lot of repetition - try counting how many times Nick says 'one of those...' or 'it was, I think, [name of month]') and for a story brimming with degredation and vice, it's somewhat lacking in action. In fact, nothing much happens at all. It can basically be summed up thus: (view spoiler) so the final 'revelations', if they can be called that after the heavy-handed hints dropped throughout the rest of the novel, don't have much impact.

I do generally look upon the Booker as a benchmark of sorts; I've read a number of Booker-nominated novels I haven't liked much, but I have at least generally found them to be high quality, well-crafted and so on. I suppose this must have made it onto the longlist for the same reason Emma Donoghue's horrendously overrated Room was shortlisted last year (though that at least had a bit of media hype and controversial subject matter going for it). I just can't believe the panel would overlook something like Gillespie and I for this! But I suppose that's beside the point. Personally, I wouldn't recommend this book at all, though perhaps other readers with different tastes might get more out of it. It's certainly not the worst thing I've ever read, but even so, I think there's too many other good reads out there for it to be worth the time.(less)

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Apr 23, 2012 K.D. Oliveros rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: 2011 Booker Shortlist

Shelves: booker, mystery, suspense-thriller, guy-lit

This is my first book about Russia post-USSR meltdown. A. D. Miller is a British expat, being The Economist magazine correspondent assigned to work for 3 years in Russia in the early 2000's. His storytelling is straightforward, his sentences are short but full of sense and this story is believable. His use of Russia as a backdrop with its snow is just bewildering that reminded me of those white-everywhere scenes in Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.

I have read a good chunk of Booker-winning and s...more

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Apr 12, 2012 ·Karen· rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: brits

Dear Mr Miller

May I congratulate you on your debut novel, which I have just read and thoroughly enjoyed? It is, indeed, gripping and fairly addictive, precisely as the reviews promise. The plotting is beautifully crafted, those hints of the disaster to come are dropped to devastating effect. Thriller, yes, but a literary one too: you have a wonderfully expressive lick of language that tickles and delights, and the pleasure that your writing affords is more than the hedonistic joy of a rollicking...more Dear Mr Miller

May I congratulate you on your debut novel, which I have just read and thoroughly enjoyed? It is, indeed, gripping and fairly addictive, precisely as the reviews promise. The plotting is beautifully crafted, those hints of the disaster to come are dropped to devastating effect. Thriller, yes, but a literary one too: you have a wonderfully expressive lick of language that tickles and delights, and the pleasure that your writing affords is more than the hedonistic joy of a rollicking ride to the chase. There are also the deeper themes of morality and self-deception and the mystery of erotic attraction.

And although I've never been East of Berlin myself, I'm sure that your portrayal of the Wild East is absolutely authentic. A colleague of yours at The Economist, Edward Lucas, writes on The Browser's feature Five Books: I think the country is really run by what amounts to a gangster syndicate which is ruthless in its pursuit of wealth and power, and distorts the machinery of the state in order to achieve that and to perpetrate crimes against the Russian people. So I think Russia is worse than the slightly sanitised picture we get in the media, not least because of libel laws that mean it’s quite hard to write clearly and bluntly about some of the people involved.
In that piece he recommends It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past, saying that its author David Satter .. feels that the Soviet Union hollowed out both public and private morality and left people without a moral compass when it collapsed. He highlights some of the extraordinary instances of casual, amoral treatment of people by the system and by other people in the book. It’s quite a pessimistic book. He feels Russia has been poisoned by the Soviet past and until that poison is out of the system it is going to be sickened by it. I would imagine that this is a view that you entirely subscribe to, as the Snowdrop symbolism in your book might indicate.

However I'm afraid that this letter is not mere gushing fan mail. I am intrigued by a question that you may be able to help me with: was it some kind of quibbling doubt about the authenticity of your tale that made you embed it in a framework, a framework that claims the whole book was written by Nick Platt as a confession to his fiancee before the Big Day? I'm utterly at a loss to comprehend why you would find it necessary to make such a pretence? I see from your biography that you studied literature, I daresay you know of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's theory that the fictiveness of novels resides not in the mimesis of the world, but in the mimesis of speaking, of telling. "The essential fictiveness of novels is not to be discovered in the unreality of the characters, objects, and events alluded to, but in the unreality of the alludings themselves. In other words, in a novel or tale, it is the act of reporting events, the act of describing persons and referring to places, that is fictive. The novel represents the verbal action of a man reporting, describing and referring."
Now I would say that this is an accepted convention of novels, not since the very early days of Renaissance fiction have authors felt it necessary to authenticate their narrative by claiming that it is a manuscript that has been discovered and 'edited' rather than invented. That may well have been due to a leftover medieval distrust of 'inventio'. Surely nowadays, we appreciate a well-imagined tale and can accept it as such? My feeling was that in drawing attention to the motivation behind writing down this beautifully crafted story in fact, in the end, detracts from it. Whereas I can believe completely and implicitly in the Moscow that you conjure up before my eyes so vividly, I cannot swallow the idea of a man making such an incriminating confession to the woman he hopes to marry. Unless, of course, he actually wants to back out of the commitment. Ah, is that what you mean? Is Nick deliberately scuppering his chances? Because I don't believe that his wedding will go ahead now - not, I might add, because of doubts based on his moral degeneracy, but rather because he reveals his lack of passion for the future Mrs Platt.

But then, the extra layer of intriguing puzzle is precisely what lifts this out of your ornery thriller category. So maybe that was the effect you desired, to get the reader thinking. Chapeau, monsieur!

Yours

Karen(less)

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Jan 29, 2012 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Russian oligarchs

Recommended to Mark by: Well certainly not Vladimir Putin

Shelves: first-person-narration

'I smelled it before I saw it'.

This is the opening line and, apart from his odd use of the word 'smelled' instead of the more usual 'smelt' which grated on me a little, it is a great way to begin this novel which is all about not only the smell that rises off this newly uncovered and, at the beginning of the novel, unknown corpse but also the gradual rise of the stench of corruption not just from the government, officialdom and thugs of 21st Century Moscow but also the way our narrator Nick, an...more

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Feb 21, 2012 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

First off, Miller did himself no favors by bestowing upon this book—and it's a beautiful design, wintry fresh with that inveigling top photo-blend of a miniscule, bundled-up couple traipsing across a walled corner of a desolate and frigid Red Square that is slowly fading to gray—the saccharinely absurd title of Snowdrops. It's the rubric one would give to a tale of candied bunny rabbits and cavity-filled teeth—with perhaps a little meth tossed in to give it some scratch—in a laminated child's ro...more First off, Miller did himself no favors by bestowing upon this book—and it's a beautiful design, wintry fresh with that inveigling top photo-blend of a miniscule, bundled-up couple traipsing across a walled corner of a desolate and frigid Red Square that is slowly fading to gray—the saccharinely absurd title of Snowdrops. It's the rubric one would give to a tale of candied bunny rabbits and cavity-filled teeth—with perhaps a little meth tossed in to give it some scratch—in a laminated child's romp through Santa's Workshop at the North Pole. What Miller has actually constructed here, an expat's confession of sleaze, snow, deception, and reach-arounds in the modern neon-crush and bone-chilling materiality of a Moscow where almost anything goes and what you can't protect is there for the taking, would have worked better with a handle that tasted bitter and aroused images of shadows slipping away, like curdled morals, from an arctic sun. Snowdrops, all prancy and poncy, sets the reader back, tips him off-balance, before the spine has even been creased; so perhaps it's a minor miracle that it actually reached enough people who count to have been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

There seems to be a not inconsiderable number of people who, having read this book, expressed their surprise—in tones of bewilderment, indignation, disbelief and/or bemusement—that it made it that far, that it is a sign of what the Man Booker has stooped to in this electronic era that such a meagre offering was even considered for the award in the first place. There are also those who don't care for the large font size of the work—and peoples, I hear you—what with the simpleton aura it brings to the whole; who find the epistolary conceit of the narrative, a confessionary letter from a rather loquacious groom-to-be to his one-dimensional and ill-formed fiancée, to be a gimmicky tack-on that does little but offer a thin hook upon which to hang the weaselly bastard; who deem the grifts that are at work within, unfolding in multiple directions upon multiple personages, to have been so obvious and telegraphed that, absent a suspension of disbelief that the author neither requests nor warrants, the entirety simply cannot stand as conceived; and, the preeminent complaint in the reviews that I've both read and glossed-over: that the narrator, Nick Platt, an expatriate English lawyer living in Moscow during the early-to-mid years of the first decade of our new millennium—a time when Moscow was transitioning itself from being the living embodiment of Cowboy Capitalism to something dressed in finer clothes, carrying itself in a more worldly manner, demanding for itself a higher level of respect, while remaining just as willing, almost eager, to cut your throat at the slightest sign of weakness—is such a gutless, morally malleable, wishbone pricklet of a man that, unable to garner a shred of sympathy for himself from the reader, his presence leaves the entire affair with an unpleasant odor, a befouling feel, that lingers unsatisfactorily after this grim little workout has been put to rest.

Is all of this a bit harsh? I think so. In one of the review blurbs on the back, the author is pumped-up as being Graham Greene on steroids; and while I don't hold him to be at the level of that great and prolific Catholic Englishman, Miller writes with a simplified elegance and a direct lyrical touch that, while occasionally threatening to descend to the rank of the merely serviceable, never actually does; indeed, it proves to possess itself of a power all of its own, for I motored my way through Snowdrops in two settings and was absorbed the entire time. It produced no starbursts, no flushes of joy, but I was never less than intrigued, and at all points entertained. The story aside, the real star of Snowdrops is Miller's pitch-perfect-in-the-telling depiction of modern Russia: its wild antics and chaotic violence in the clutch-and-grab days of the nineties anarchy after everything had fallen to pieces, and the more upscale, more outwardly charming, more rakishly debonair, but equally ruthless state-of-affairs in the twenty-first century as a country aware of its riches in natural resources and determined to drown in western capital if that's what is required. The wealthy in Moscow revel in obscene prodigality, in hopping via armored SUV from one luxuriously decadent, music-pulsing, and thoroughly energized nightclub to another, each one prized for its unique manner of posing nude young women, while the eminently corruptible police, politicians, and judiciary make it a place of endless possibilities for the rich, one of endless misery and withdrawn chariness for those—the vast majority—who are not. Similar to Greene, Miller excels at painting the life of an expat in convincing colors, in getting to the heart of both what appalls and attracts in a country where so many things are similar, but never quite right; where the allure of the barbaric cannot be separated from that of the forbidden and, in any case, proving almost impossible to resist, begins to abrade whatever served to separate the foreigner from the native—if it was ever more than illusion to begin with.

The story itself is relatively simple: Platt's a lawyer for a corporation that negotiates stipulatory contracts between European banks eager to lend money and the resource-exploiting Russian corporations that are desperate to borrow. Whilst in the midst of arranging a $500 million loan to a ruthlessly charismatic Cossack—a man with criminal airs who heads up a consortium wishing to convert an old supertanker into a floating transfer port for an Arctic oil pipeline—Nick also finds himself falling for the older of a pair of sisters whom he rescued from a purse-snatcher in the Russian Metro. Seeing in Masha a steely sensuality that is irresistibly attractive, Nick finds himself pursuing this tawny Slavic gazelle—whose beautiful and charmingly naïve younger sister, Katya, accompanies her everywhere—even while the two girls retain about them a beguiling distance, a sense of mystery. After Masha's throaty growls and bedroom acrobatics have convinced the approaching-middle-aged professional that he has fallen in love, he is introduced to the girl's aunt, an elderly lady named Tatiana Vladimirovna, a plucky survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and Communist misrule who requires Nick's services to assist her in a move to a Moscow suburb. However, with the brutal cold and crunching ice of the seemingly endless Russian winter serving as temporal marker, Nick's relationship with these lopsidedly-smiling Russian kinswomen, and that of the twinkle-eyed Cossack impatiently awaiting his money, come to reveal themselves in a troublingly sinister light. The game, as they say, is afoot.

I suppose it could have been done better—the evolving attraction between Nick and Masha shown at work upon the page, rather than appearing formed in statements; a better device than the abrasively cynical, stripper-ogling reporter, long exiled to Moscow, crafted to deliver expositions upon the state of modern Russia; but these complaints are fairly tepid, because Miller takes this material—and it's shopworn, folks, been done, more or less, in countless books previously pumped from the press—and makes it work; maximizes his limitations and reveals some pretty impressive strengths. What's more, the final two complaints I etched above—that Nick's gullibility in select areas is unbelievable, and that his character is a grade-A prick—present themselves as no problem at all for such as myself. I've been a spineless worm, failing to do the right thing if an easy, relatively painless way out was made available; I've been blind to what was obvious in a desperate attempt to make something that was false, that had too many pieces that simply didn't fit, out to be something that just might—if the eyes were squeezed shut tightly enough and the fingers kept crossed with a bruising fervor—prove itself true in the end; I've suppressed suspicions, itchy doubts, that threatened to shatter an edifice I'd painstakingly erected to let in some needed light; I've been nearing forty and alone in a crowded city and looking around, wild-eyed, for a taste of those young days when the tank was always full and the air was wet with the promise of what might be. In other words, hell yeah, I've been Nick, stood in his shoes, made his bad choices. That's why, at the end, I felt more sympathy for the man than dislike; and that's a testament to what Miller was able to access and bring to the page in this pleasantly surprising read.(less)

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Chris And I appreciate your saying that, Tim, though what might look effortless on screen really doesn't feel that way to me in the composing.

Not being incl...more
updated Feb 21, 2012 09:01pm

Bennet @ "You get this construct of layered approaches which, peeled away, might reveal a (single?) core concept approached by the original word-worker and s...more
Feb 22, 2012 05:05am

Mar 26, 2013 Shovelmonkey1 rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: booker-prize-nominee, bookcrossing-books, murder-most-horrid, read-in-2013

Snowdrops are the dead, who appear like the eponymous spring flower as the winter snows recede from the winter wonderland of moscow's streets. Except they are not flowers, they're frozen corpses and the difference between blooming and rotting is quite a distinct one that even the most inexperienced botanist or ardent fan of spring watch would be hard pushed to miss.

None of the characters in the book are particularly likeable so you won't spend a lot of time sympathising about their plight or vod...more

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Oct 06, 2011 Melanie Garrett rated it 4 of 5 stars

I first heard about this novel on The Review Show on BBC2 and was intrigued enough by the discussion to break my resolution about not buying any more books until (a) they were available for Sony eReader; and (b) I was ready to read them.

But right from the exquisite jacket design, I was so gripped with this book that I decided a physical copy was in order. I picked up Sunday evening, and would have happily read it in one sitting if only life hadn’t been so tortuously in the way.

As first time nov...more I first heard about this novel on The Review Show on BBC2 and was intrigued enough by the discussion to break my resolution about not buying any more books until (a) they were available for Sony eReader; and (b) I was ready to read them.

But right from the exquisite jacket design, I was so gripped with this book that I decided a physical copy was in order. I picked up Sunday evening, and would have happily read it in one sitting if only life hadn’t been so tortuously in the way.

As first time novels go, this is an enormous achievement. The prose is dazzling and Moscow is evoked in a way that makes this the Gorky Park of the new millennium. The plot is entirely linear, and is essentially the inevitable forward motion of one man’s failure to swerve any of the moral hazards he encounters while working as an expat lawyer in Russia. The narrator is very clear about what a flawed and cowardly creature he is, and yet it is a joy to read on because of the insights he offers into Russian culture and society.

As someone who has lived and worked as an expat in two European countries, I felt this book really nailed that heady sense of possibility that comes with the early stages of living abroad; the feeling that you can be who you want to be, run risks you never would normally take because you’ve stepped out of time for a bit.

To me, this was neatly underlined by the notion that the text was effectively a long, confessional letter from the narrator to his fiancée. During discussion on The Review Show there were those who felt this narrative conceit didn’t quite work, but personally I found it added real resonance to the novel. By quietly reminding us now and then that the narrator did actually want his wife-to-be to have a good opinion of him, and to accept him depraved past and all, we were reminded that the real stakes here are moral jeopardy. Depravity is only interesting if those engaging in it have their doubts, and so find their own behaviour wanting.

All in all, this a novel to thoroughly enjoy and admire, and I would have given this five stars if not for two things which began to grate by the end. Firstly, I’d have been happier if the two parallel strands of the plot had amplified each other more in some way, rather than simply being two different examples of the same character’s moral indifference. Secondly, I found the prose relied a bit too heavily on unwarranted foreshadowing, which then tended not to deliver as big a bang as promised somehow.

But overall, there is no shortage of things for the reader to be gripped by, and to admire. I only hope A.D. Miller is out there somewhere right now putting the finishing touches on his next novel.
(less)

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Sep 07, 2012 Phil rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: mysteries

I wavered between four and five stars but came down on five because of the sheer sang froid of the prose. In the hands of another it might easily become garish or over the top.

My last visit to Moscow was 22 years ago, as Communism was crumbling. I was there for almost a month (March-April) trying to nail down a joint-venture with a publishing company (that was plainly a KGB front), but instead I watched it unravel like a bad sweater, in slow-motion. I was in my mid-40s and I was assigned an inte...more

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Sep 21, 2011 Liz rated it 3 of 5 stars

A.D. Miller's debut novel is about a British corporate lawyer working in Moscow. He is brokering a deal to tap an oil pipeline and the stakes are kind of high, about $500,000,000. Nicholas writes about all the seediness he sees in Moscow and derides the various places he goes and the people he spends time with.

One evening Nick breaks up a mugging on the Metro and winds up with a girlfriend, Masha, and her sister, Katya, along with an aunt, Irina. Their adventures take Nicholas to places we've r...more

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Oct 14, 2011 Cheryl rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, russian

Thank god the font was big and the lines were almost double-spaced.

This story is really about Moscow. The people-characters are just props; the real characters are the city and the weather and the lawless society.
“The characters are flat, stereotypical creatures, but I havent figured out if this is an intended character flaw of the narrator, or if it is the author's intention as an auteur to convey something deeper or so far hidden, or if it just simply represents workmanlike craft, and is what...more Thank god the font was big and the lines were almost double-spaced.

This story is really about Moscow. The people-characters are just props; the real characters are the city and the weather and the lawless society.
“The characters are flat, stereotypical creatures, but I havent figured out if this is an intended character flaw of the narrator, or if it is the author's intention as an auteur to convey something deeper or so far hidden, or if it just simply represents workmanlike craft, and is what it is.” Thats what I wrote about this book after reading the first few pages. I’ve figured out now that there’s nothing complicated here. It’s not even workmanlike craft, it’s more like the craft of an awkward apprentice.
It’s as if the author, A.D. Miller, who lived in Moscow himself for a few years as a correspondent for The Economist, wanted to think of a story, any kind of story, that he could drop into the set of Russia. This is understandable, since he had lived there and likely wanted to share his experiences. Russia the place is the main character -- the most developed and well described, compared with the people characters. The narrative arc wearily stumbles through the Moscow cold, numbing the reader’s interest, perked up only by energetic bursts of descriptions (most often yet another way to describe how cold it was).
The Moscow cold, the Moscow criminals, the Moscow daily life, the Moscow way of doing things. These are clearly the real main interest of the author, but it seems he felt he needed to create a conventional story that would give him license to provide that backdrop. The girls Masha and Katya are set props, dressing.
Why did the narrator Nick, an ex-pat lawyer, fall so hard for Masha? There is nothing in the story, not a smidgin, to explain it, to make it plausible. Did he fall for her because of her exquisite other-world beauty? She has hard red fingernails, dresses like a prostitute. That’s it? Is it because of the incredibly hot sex and the fiery passion she ignites in him? Don’t know, there are just some vague tepid references to a bit of carnal activity, occasionally slightly exhibitionist. There’s certainly no hint of any intellectual vigour, not in Masha or any of the other characters for that matter, including the narrator. There’s no hint of any meeting-of-the-souls kind of chemistry. And without any of that, the story just isn’t plausible.
The book is ostensibly the narrator relating to his fiancee the story of what happened to him in Moscow, but it is a clumsy artificial device. It is employed half-heartedly and sporadically, and so is all the more intrusive and annoying when it does appear.

The book is a decent start for a first novel, but I am absolutely stymied as to how it came even close for consideration to be on the Booker longlist, let alone the shortlist.
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Nov 17, 2011 Darryl rated it 1 of 5 stars

This novel, which was curiously shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize, is set in Moscow during the go-go 1990s, when the Russian economy opened up to foreign investment, and a select few became multi-millionaires. The narrator is a 38 year old British lawyer whose firm has sent him there to negotiate corporate deals and make money for the firm's clients. He sees a robbery taking place on a Moscow Metro station, and prevents a thief from robbing the purse of a young Russian beauty. Naturally, the...more

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Dec 02, 2011 Lorenzo rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: british, aaa-my-library, 2011-readings

It seems like initials rather than first names are a token for success in the English speaking literature. Let's think about J.R.R. Tolkien, P.G. Wodehouse, H.G. Wells, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and, more recently, to J.K. Rowling.

This is probably what A.D. (Andrew Dylan? Annus Domini? Arkady Dandy?) Miller has thought while choosing his nom de plume: "If I do that, if I omit my birth names and replace them with capitol letters, then I have more chances of entering the pantheon of the successful no...more

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Oct 10, 2012 Helen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I wavered between 4 and 5 stars for this one but, as lots of people only use 1 and 5 for extremes, books end up being rated only out of 3 scores which leads to boring results.

So, not quite a 5 but nevertheless I really enjoyed this one. It was so pacy and tightly written that I read it in virtually one sitting. The reader absorbs the menace on every page and guesses early on that the story is not going to end well. It didn't but the ending was not an anti-climax.

The descriptions of Moscow with t...more

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Apr 10, 2012 Rhiannon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I did enjoy this book but my opinion of the narrator, Nicholas, changed as his story continued. When it is revealed very early on that he is telling the woman he is about to marry what happened in Moscow, and he threatens that she might hate him by the end, he seems to genuinely want to tell her what happgened. Even though it's meant to be an honest account, I felt that his confession was, at times, too honest. What did he really want to achieve with this? A few days befor his wedding he tells h...more

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Sep 25, 2011 Jeniwren rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, booker-prize

The setting for this novel is Russia, gloomy dark and covered in snow. The tone is menacing with a heady mix of corruption which begins with our protagonist Nicholas an English lawyer and a chance meeting with two 'predatory' women. This encounter sets in motion shady dealings with Nicholas slowly losing his grip on morality. Told as a confession to his future bride to be and as a means of gaining some insight into his amoral behaviour.

This is a fine debut and I was gripped from beginning to end...more

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May 31, 2013 Garrett rated it 2 of 5 stars

Eh. I read this novel on the recommendations of two friends who don't know each other nor do they have anything to do with each other. Independent recs.
I simply don't see what they were on about. The writing was pretty mediocre at best, and the character was completely unlikable. Not that the character has to be sympathetic, bur it's the matter of course, the assumption in which he presents his story, like 'of course these are the ways of the world for everyone, and of course what I did was ok a...more

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Feb 07, 2013 Pat Wootton rated it 3 of 5 stars

Snowdrops, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, appears - at first glance - to be a love story. Nicholas Platt is a seasoned and somewhat cynical expatriate lawyer, living in Moscow around the millennium. The book is written in the first person - Nick is writing a 'confession' to a future, unnamed fiancee - and appears to detail his affair with Masha, a young Russian girl. However, all is not as it seems and the reader soon begins to realize that there is something strange in this relationship....more

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Jan 14, 2013 Geoff Nolan rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is set in Russia and is a fish-out-of-water story with a slight murder mystery. It says 278 pages, but the spacing was rather generous and each page has 24 lines on it.

I don't quite know what to say about the book. It's based on the author's experience - A.D Miller travelled across Russia for his job. But I found the lead character, Nick, rather all too willing to get mixed up with the wrong people and quite easily led - and we're not talking about a mixed-up teenager here but an adult...more

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Jan 10, 2013 Steph Green rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is not a perfect book. But it is a gripping book. I'm giving it four stars because I enjoyed it very much and devoured it in a day. For the most part, it's fast-paced, well-plotted, and the descriptions of Moscow and the brutal culture of post-Soviet oligarch culture in Russia in the early-2000s is excellent.

However, I did have a few issues with it:

1) You can see the bad thing (no spoilers) coming from a mile away. Around half-way through the book, you realize that the jig is up, and you...more

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Nov 17, 2012 Lance Catedral rated it 4 of 5 stars

RUSSIA IS ONE of the places I'd like to visit someday, if God allows it. I want to photograph the Kremlin, walk around The Red Square, smell the vodka on people's breaths, and freeze myself to death in the cold of winter.

Not knowing what it was about, I randomly picked A. D. Miller's novel, Snowdrops, from the list of unread books I have. Well, guess what: snowdrop is a Moscow slang for a corpse that lies buried or hidden in the winter snows, emerging only in the thaw.

An Englishman, Nick Platt,...more RUSSIA IS ONE of the places I'd like to visit someday, if God allows it. I want to photograph the Kremlin, walk around The Red Square, smell the vodka on people's breaths, and freeze myself to death in the cold of winter.

Not knowing what it was about, I randomly picked A. D. Miller's novel, Snowdrops, from the list of unread books I have. Well, guess what: snowdrop is a Moscow slang for a corpse that lies buried or hidden in the winter snows, emerging only in the thaw.

An Englishman, Nick Platt, is narrating. He's an expat lawyer who has lived in Russia for four years. He's thirty-something, and he works for international banks that lend money to Russian businesses. The oil boom in the world's largest country is making a lot of people rich.

Nick is pretty much a single man. He has lots of money, which sustains his rather decadent lifestyle, but he's lonely. One day, on the train, he meets a young woman named Masha, "wearing tight, tight jeans tucked into knee-high brown leather books, and a white blouse with one more button undone than there needed to be." Even if she's only 23-years old, she becomes the love of his life—and I think, even with all the deception, betrayal, and hurt that came with her, Nick still loved her in the end.

I've read about Russia in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. I'm a fan of Russian writers, by the way. There's too much bleakness and depression in their books, so much so that the real world appears better somehow. Reading Snowdrops isn't any different, only that the Russia being described is the modern-day version: drunk taxi drivers, government corruption, the hard, cold winter that feels like forever. A.D. Miller takes the reader to the subways, the Russian countryside, the bars, and the streets where, true enough, some bodies emerge after the winter ends. I haven't seen snow—a fact that shocked some Russians I met when I visited Leiden—but I could feel it through Nick's narration.

I'm often curious what it feels like to live elsewhere—some place different where no one knows me, where the sun is hardly ever seen, like in Iceland, for example. And it's not even because of the money. Reading about Nick Platt's ordeals and every day experiences has given me a vicarious experience of the expat life, and I truly wish I get to visit Russia someday.(less)

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Oct 19, 2012 David rated it 3 of 5 stars

Told in the first person as a letter to his wife to be, Nicholas comes clean about his time as a lawyer in Moscow, and his involvement with not one but two pieces of corruption. The first is bearable. It's about his firm acting for their banking client in a new oil terminal in Siberia. The other is not. Nick becomes entangled with two girls ("cousins"), particularly the seductive Masha, who are persuading their ancient "aunt" Tatiana to move from her apartment in Moscow to a brand new one on the...more

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Sep 14, 2012 Teresa rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was our library Reading Group’s latest read and an excellent example of how reading groups encourage folk to venture into previously unexplored reading territories. I hadn’t read any blurbs/reviews prior to reading and I must say this probably enhanced my reading experience as I had no preconceived ideas and didn’t even know what genre it was. It’s more of a slow burning psychological drama rather than a swift moving thriller and although it does occasionally veer into a cliched view of con...more

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Aug 22, 2012 Tarbuckle added it · review of another edition

It's perhaps a little surprising to discover that Snowdrops was short-listed for the Booker Prize when perusing the cover material, for its content seemingly proffers but another round of edgy, Anglo-angled mystery, carved out of an exotic environment in order to give it some tang. The locale—the wintry expansiveness of the modern Russian state, a behemoth wherein, from what little details leak out to the West, criminals and politicians are separated only by the pretense of popular elections, pr...more It's perhaps a little surprising to discover that Snowdrops was short-listed for the Booker Prize when perusing the cover material, for its content seemingly proffers but another round of edgy, Anglo-angled mystery, carved out of an exotic environment in order to give it some tang. The locale—the wintry expansiveness of the modern Russian state, a behemoth wherein, from what little details leak out to the West, criminals and politicians are separated only by the pretense of popular elections, pretty much anything goes, and life under untamed capitalism differs only in kind, not in soul-crushing affliction, from its communist predecessor—hold all kinds of promise for a tale of nasty grifts and nubile love, but it would seem to require quite a working through in order for such Euro-Asiatic shadowplay to make it unto the highest literary rung of the Commonwealth. Thus it was that for the first forty or fifty pages I waited, rather expectantly, for Miller to prove his limitations by banal prose or limp characterizations or clichéd maneuvering; and it was only when I'd ingested about a quarter of the story that it dawned upon me that not only was I enjoying the thing, not merely being held wrapt by the stickiness of its text-spun webs, but that the author, in his rookie effort, had stitched the entirety together with a succinct, lyrically-limned voice that proved quite agreeable to the condensed events that it was depicting.

The narrator of Snowdrops, an expatriate English lawyer named Nick Platt whose lack of moral fiber and unyielding backbone announced him as the perfect candidate for a Moscow transfer, has composed this episodical look into a Russian-bound period of his life as a confessional letter to his fiancée; and in uncompromising tones the ugliness of what is to ensue is made clear from the very start. While many of Nick's actions within, as he describes them, might paint him in the light of a rather decent, if self-aware, county shire chap, his expository voice continuously countermands that picture and announces, without halt, that everything touched will—by virtue of his lack of such—eventually turn to shit. Even the central conceit, that of his brief spell of burgeoning love for a lithe Russian lynx, Masha—a mysterious beauty whose equally attractive younger sister, Katya, travels with her like shapely luggage—betrays its doomed state within the rueful pining he evinces for her sensual, but evasive, charms. And the one decent, touching relationship he manages to attain to—with the octogenarian Tatiana Vladimirovna, aunt to the aforementioned girls, survivor of all the myriad horrors of the twentieth-century, a tough but kindly figure who comes to place a considerable amount of trust in the nigh middled-aged expat lawyer—leads to the most devastating, but ultimately forseeable, of careless abandonment. Nick is not a nice man, when you get right down to it, and though he finds himself buffeted by an array of Russians who are even less nice than he, it is difficult, by dint of his many admitted failures, to come to view him in aught but a hard light.

Such shady plot-play has, of course, been done before, but Snowdrops is competently and pleasingly crafted, and all of the touches, though apparently outrageous to a bevy of other reviewers, do in fact support what is being unfolded; indeed, the obliqueness Nick displays to what, by any measure, should have been glaringly obvious can be easily reconciled to the exact character—weak but wishful, desperate for solidity, superficially decent but vacillating and selfish at its core—the author voluntarily and bleakly reveals himself to possess. Miller's knowledge of Russia is impressive and carries the ring of truth, especially the myriad ways he works the nature of the frigidity, the snow, the ice, the perdurability of the Russian winter into the events being described. This is a Russia humming with energy, explosive with potential, and yet making so many wrong choices, allowing all the money and power to be amassed by the wrong people—and forcing desperate citizens, lacking any means otherwise, to engage in particularly cold and brutal schemes in order to ensure some future for themselves and their kin. It's fairly raw, considerably realistic, and, in the end, satisfying in its most unsatisfying of resolutions. Nick has been exposed to much in his relatively brief stay; it is not at all apparent that he has learned anything from it but a more concentrated, more widely-spread cynicism. Perhaps that is what Russia, in its enigmatically anarchic modern constitution, produces best of all.(less)

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Aug 12, 2012 Stephen rated it 2 of 5 stars

I've just been looking at the quotes on the back of the book. The Daily Mail says that Snowdrops 'Reads like Graham Greene on steroids'. I presume that this person hasn't read the book - or doesn't know the effects of steroids.

Snowdrops is a decent enough novel, but it took me quite a while to read it - I always seemed to be finding other things to do. The portrayal of Moscow as some sort of living entity which tries to gain possession of its narrator's mind and soul is the best thing about the...more I've just been looking at the quotes on the back of the book. The Daily Mail says that Snowdrops 'Reads like Graham Greene on steroids'. I presume that this person hasn't read the book - or doesn't know the effects of steroids.

Snowdrops is a decent enough novel, but it took me quite a while to read it - I always seemed to be finding other things to do. The portrayal of Moscow as some sort of living entity which tries to gain possession of its narrator's mind and soul is the best thing about the book. The Russian characters are largely stereotypes, reminding me of Alan Partridge's girlfriend (all of the young women); or poor quality actors playing KGB agents in terrible programmes like The Professionals (all the middle-aged men); or they are scary babooshkas, talking in enigmatic aphorisms and pining for pre-glasnost days.

Miller frames the book in the form of a letter to a never-seen fiancée _ I've no idea why. We never get to 'meet' her or find out the purpose of the framing device.

The story - for what it's worth - involves a British lawyer falling for an out-of-his-league Russian girl and an elaborate plan to assist the young woman's grandmother in a property deal. The reader gets the sense that there's something very dodgy going on very early in the book, and in terms of being carried along with the story, let's just say that it would make a rather glamorous edition of 'Watchdog'.

Miller creates a nice sense of melancholy and I was driven to persevere to the end by narrator Nick's growing sense of inevitable doom.

The book acts as a useful Moscow city guide (Miller was The Economist's Moscow correspondent) and I enjoyed the author's insight into the way the city functioned in a very different manner to most western capital cities. Miller also proposes that Russia is indeed a 'gangster state', and a very dangerous place for the innocent or unwary.

I'm not sure how the book made the 2011 Booker shortlist. Miller's writing has an elegiac quality and I DID enjoy reading it, but as for the Independent's assertion that Snowdrops is "Electrifying; it leaves you stunned and addicted", well...

I'd beg to differ.(less)

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Jul 24, 2012 Scott Rhee rated it 1 of 5 stars

A.D. Miller's "Snowdrops" paints a bleaker-than-bleak portrait of modern Russia, a frigid wasteland populated with criminals, whores, and victims. Criminals, in this case, is a word that encompasses a wide range of individuals, from lowly pickpockets to corrupt building inspectors to powerful politicians. The title, by the way, refers to the Russian slang term given to anonymous bodies found in the snow. Mostly homeless people who succumb to the weather, many of these snowdrops are also victims...more

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Jun 22, 2012 Nigeyb rated it 4 of 5 stars

Despite not having any first hand knowledge of Russia, I felt it evoked powerfully the "Wild East" of post-Glasnost Russia - and this is one of the book's great strengths. The other being that the story is a compelling, well written page turner.

The book is written as if Nicholas, the English expat lawyer protagonist, is writing a confession to his fiancé who is unaware of this particular story - this device was a bit clunky and was one of the few weaknesses of the book.

Nicholas does not start t...more

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Jun 02, 2012 Barbara Elsborg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars. What I loved - the setting, the detail about Moscow and Russia and the people. I like the allegorical nature of the story, the secrets hidden below the surface. I like the title. It worked on lots of levels. I like the narrator though I know he's not a likeable man but he was masterly drawn. I wanted to kick him so many times, shake and tell him to DO something. It was as if he was infected by 'the Moscow disease'. Very clever!
What I didn't like - the idea that this was w...more

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May 06, 2012 Evelyn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Fast, engrossing read about a British lawyer adrift in contemporary Moscow in the early 2000s. The author--who spent time in Russia as a correspondent for the Economist--paints the city as a latter day Sodom and/or Gomorrah, an amoral, decadent sink-hole awash with scams and scammers, where everyone is either predator or prey and where nothing can be taken at face value.

That said, though Miller can definitely write about place, his characters are fairly one-dimensional and lack the beauty, even...more

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Apr 25, 2012 Darrell Delamaide rated it 5 of 5 stars

A.D. Miller's novel of contemporary Russia portrays corruption at every level. Framed as narrator Nick Platt's written confession to his English fiancee, the story is about what happened in his last winter in Moscow, where he had spent three years for his law firm. The title refers to corpses that are buried or left in the snow over the long Russian winter, only to emerge as rotting evidence during the spring thaw, making it difficult to ascertain the causes of death or to pursue any malefactors...more A.D. Miller's novel of contemporary Russia portrays corruption at every level. Framed as narrator Nick Platt's written confession to his English fiancee, the story is about what happened in his last winter in Moscow, where he had spent three years for his law firm. The title refers to corpses that are buried or left in the snow over the long Russian winter, only to emerge as rotting evidence during the spring thaw, making it difficult to ascertain the causes of death or to pursue any malefactors. A friend of Nick's Russian neighbor is one such snowdrop, but it is a metaphor for other types of corruption that take place over this final winter.

The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and is beautifully written, with a lucid economy of language that keeps the narrative moving but makes every page a quiet delight. Take this description of the Cossack, a shady Russian businessman that Nick's firm is helping with project finance: "We passed the document to the Cossack. He turned the first page, turned it back again, pushed the file away, sat back in his chair, and puffed out his cheeks. He looked around as if he was waiting for something else to happen -- a strip show, maybe, or a stabbing. The blue and gold onion domes of the Novospassky Monastery winked at us through the ninth-floor window from across the Moscow River. Then he started making jokes. The Cossack had one of those senses of humour that are really a kind of warfare. Laughing at his jokes made you feel guilty, not laughing at them made you feel endangered. His personal inquiries always felt like the prelude to blackmail."

The main narrative revolves around Nick's encounter with Masha as he helps her and her sister Katya chase off a purse snatcher in the Metro. A bachelor intoxicated in a timid English way with the licentiousness of post-Soviet Moscow, Nick is intrigued by the willowy Masha and her "growelly" voice. Masha and Katya have come from Murmansk to seek their fortunes in Moscow. Nick fears he may not be as rich or powerful as Masha was hoping for but that there might be hope for him anyway.

Somewhat to his surprise, a relationship develops. He goes clubbing with the two girls, Masha ends up in his bed, his dreams come true and they become lovers. He accompanies the two girls to a magical stay in a dacha and a sensual episode in the banya. They introduce him to their aunt, a babuschka who ended up with a large apartment in central Moscow through the privatisation that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. The aunt wants to trade his now-valuable apartment for a smaller flat on the fringes of Moscow, where she has a view of the countryside. The two girls have found a deal for her where she gets the new apartment and $50,000 in exchange for her old apartment, and ask Nick to help draw up the paperwork.

The reader knows from Nick's statements foreshadowing the end that this does not turn out well. Nick comes to suspect that the apartment trade, like the Cossack's oil project in the Arctic, may not be totally on the level. And yet in both cases he is willing to play along. The Cossack's deal is no more shady than most of the transactions his law firm handles. They have all the documents properly stamped and a surveyor has certified the suitability of the site and progress of the work there. On the apartment deal, Nick is able to gather all the appropriate papers for the aunt's side of the transaction.

As Nick readily confesses to his prospective wife, he felt much bigger in Russia than in England. He cuts short a sad trip home for Christmas where he is once again dismayed at the blandness of his parents' existence. In Russia, there was danger, there was excitement, there was an electricity in the air that made the challenges of the cold, the ubiquitous bribery and the borderline sense of lawlessness all worthwhile.

He knows that things are not what they seem, but the lure of Masha's charms on the one hand, and the chance to score a big one for the firm on the other hand, keep him going in the wrong direction, eyes wide open.

Miller's portrayal of wild and woolly Moscow rings true from everything one reads about the post-Soviet gangsterism. Nick cannot escape its corrupting influence -- but not because he is soft and innocent. Rather, Miller's point seems to be, because we all are as corrupt as the Russians at heart, even though we have put a thin veneer of civilization over the raw brutality that reigns in Moscow.

Miller maintains the atmosphere of quiet intensity throughout the narrative. There is suspense, even though the reader has a good idea of how things are going to end. Every once in a while, there is a false note -- a metaphor that is too stretched, a turn of phrase that is too cute -- but it is a debut novel. The reader remains sympathetic to Nick while facing the full extent of his corruption, but his fiancee would be crazy to marry him after reading this confession. It is, one senses by the end of the book, his way of punishing himself.(less)

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Feb 29, 2012 Sarah Edwina Rose rated it 3 of 5 stars

Another Booker shortlisted book, though this one has had quite a lot of press- I've seen it on tube tunnels and billboards.

Snowdrops is set in Moscow amongst slush and state-corruption. The book is a letter of confession to Nick's fiance, revealing things he hasn't told her about his time working in Russia. All the way through he refers to this unknown woman in his present, and with the ultimate question, will she still want to marry him? I'm guessing no.

We have three plot lines; firstly that of...more Another Booker shortlisted book, though this one has had quite a lot of press- I've seen it on tube tunnels and billboards.

Snowdrops is set in Moscow amongst slush and state-corruption. The book is a letter of confession to Nick's fiance, revealing things he hasn't told her about his time working in Russia. All the way through he refers to this unknown woman in his present, and with the ultimate question, will she still want to marry him? I'm guessing no.

We have three plot lines; firstly that of Nick's relationship with beautiful young Russian Masha, then we have his law firm's business deal with 'The Cossack' (some of this was a bit over my head) and finally, his elderly neighbour's friend has mysteriously disappeared in the bitter winter. These threads do not intertwine, and simply seem parallel plots. I expected it all to come together at the end, but disappointing there was no pinnacle. They simply serve to show that all aspects of Nick's life, work, play and home, are all drenched in deception.

The first thread is probably the most interesting. That of Nick's 'relationship' with mini skirt wearing, sharp talking Masha who is very much his junior. Of course, we all smell at rat here, why is a beautiful young woman stepping out with a foreign 40yr old? Nick himself is also aware of an ulterior motive, he is no tragic hero, neither is he an old fool in love. He knows there is a price to pay and the narrative simple expresses his pathetic waiting for this scheme to reveal itself.

The journey to this 'revelation' is not mysterious. We can spot how Masha will sting him many pages prior to the back cover, yet it is written with beautiful extended metaphor and a masterful take-on hindsight. You are transported to Russia, with an authorial flair that could only come from personal experience (A.D Miller himself spent 3 years as a correspondent in Russia). The dialect is spot on, and an effective tool in creating the strong personas and presence of the characters.

The choice to write it as a letter was perplexing at first. Nick expresses intimates of his relationship with Masha that no fiance would want to hear. 'Stupid man!' I wanted to scream that the pages, 'why are you telling her this? Do you even want her to marry you?'. For that reason the ending did not have an impact. I feel as though the final line was supposed to be shocking, but anyone with half a brain could have guessed it.

An immersing read that transports you to another place and time. The plot could have been cleverer but nevertheless, it was something I looked forward to reading on my commute. I have a bone to pick with publishers, in that the text was almost embarrassingly large? Call me a snob, but that instantly changes my opinion of content. Also the stiff spine was a nightmare when trying to hang fast to a Piccadilly line tube pole. Is it correct to include physical aesthetics in a book review? In this case, it really did have a negative impact on my reading experience.
(less)

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Do you need to like the protagonist to like the book?	7	51	Jan 14, 2013 04:07pm
The Book Vipers: Book of the Month - January 2012	11	34	Jan 23, 2012 08:02am
Around the World ...: Snowdrops	13	22	Dec 11, 2011 07:58pm

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