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Chekago
This novel, set in Moscow, has as its central character a dustman who meets a rich American woman who asks him to show her the "real" Moscow. Through Sasha, the dustman, the reader is shown the back-streets of Moscow and the novel attempts to convey a sense of Russia as it really is.
384 pages, Paperback
Published February 1, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 7, 2016
This book was published in the last years of the Soviet Union and is set in the 15 months in the early 80s between the death of Brezhnev and the death of his ex-KGB Chief successor Andropov, who promoted reformist cadres like Gorbachev and so unwittingly perhaps began the trend to Perestroika and Glasnost (although Chekago focuses very much on pre-reform Moscow). In a sense then the novel was "outdated" within a couple of years of publication, but as fiction it luckily simply moves from the contemporary to the historical shelf.
I enjoyed the book with its colourful cast of foolish, irrational, human characters and its determination to find the humour, complexity and depth of feeling that are so much part of the Russian lifestyle, without lapsing into the idealistic sentimentality or outright hostility which typified western attitudes to the SU in those days. This isn't a book about moral nobility against a backdrop of grey, crumbling buildings and long queues for meagre household goods. It aims to be about real people in a shared sub-divided flat and their relationships to each other while faced with the challenges of heavy drinking, illness, loneliness, mutual suspicion and arbitrary secret police pressure. That sounds desperately dull but in fact there's a lot of humour here and that is my favourite aspect of the book. It's also a fascinating example of what life was like in the Moscow of those times and certainly worth reading for that alone
It's a very sexual and occasionally violent story. This isn't your normal middle class suburban flat! Personally I found some of the sex a wee bit over-graphic but it's acceptable enough in its development of the story and Sasha's character
There were a few small minuses for me. One is, rather oddly, the writer's love of language and words. Sometimes I was scampering to a dictionary for a definition of a word that was unnecessarily obscure. Linked to this was the sometimes very high flown language used by less "intellectual" characters like Sasha and Valya. It occasionally seemed stilted and unreal - or perhaps as if the dialogue was second-hand, a translation from the original Russian by a non-native English speaker (worthy and impressive but sounding not quite right).
I enjoyed the book with its colourful cast of foolish, irrational, human characters and its determination to find the humour, complexity and depth of feeling that are so much part of the Russian lifestyle, without lapsing into the idealistic sentimentality or outright hostility which typified western attitudes to the SU in those days. This isn't a book about moral nobility against a backdrop of grey, crumbling buildings and long queues for meagre household goods. It aims to be about real people in a shared sub-divided flat and their relationships to each other while faced with the challenges of heavy drinking, illness, loneliness, mutual suspicion and arbitrary secret police pressure. That sounds desperately dull but in fact there's a lot of humour here and that is my favourite aspect of the book. It's also a fascinating example of what life was like in the Moscow of those times and certainly worth reading for that alone
It's a very sexual and occasionally violent story. This isn't your normal middle class suburban flat! Personally I found some of the sex a wee bit over-graphic but it's acceptable enough in its development of the story and Sasha's character
There were a few small minuses for me. One is, rather oddly, the writer's love of language and words. Sometimes I was scampering to a dictionary for a definition of a word that was unnecessarily obscure. Linked to this was the sometimes very high flown language used by less "intellectual" characters like Sasha and Valya. It occasionally seemed stilted and unreal - or perhaps as if the dialogue was second-hand, a translation from the original Russian by a non-native English speaker (worthy and impressive but sounding not quite right).
September 21, 2022
Did not finish. This was shaping up to be an interesting story about the residents of a Moscow apartment block in the dying days of the Soviet empire but it’s an old edition (the 1988 Sphere paperback) with yellowing pages and small, dense text, and in the end, the effort of reading it outweighed the interest of the characters and their stories.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews