Moscow Stations by Venedikt Erofeev

[Diane]

Rating: 3.5 stars


This book is a darkly humorous novel about a drunk (with the same name as the author) who is riding a train in Russia. He has just been fired from his job as a cable fitter and is quite inebriated. He rambles on about alcohol, politics, and more alcohol.

I firmly believe you learn at least one new thing from every book you read. This time, I learned how to distill varnish. You never know when that will come in handy...

[Amanda]

My version was called "Moscow Stations", but was the same book. Overall I liked it and gave it 3 stars. I thought the structure conveyed the sense of a train ride in a neat and novel way, and it was funny and interesting, even though it didn't resonate with me on a super deep level.

One thing in the book I thought was especially cool was the "graphs" he makes for different characters, which don't portray data pointts at all, but rather the personality of the individual he made them for (his line isn't straight because he is drunk, for example, and a komsomol member's line looks like the Kremilin wall).

[Patrick]

***1/2

I read the very first French translation (1976) of this book that we might have never known, were it not circulating at great risk on the samizdat clandestine circuit in the late 60s. Like all stories that travelled this anti-Soviet underground, it is populated with frequent thinly veiled jibes at conditions in the USSR; but these become too obscure sometimes. An interesting ethylic joyride through a train that still exists (most of the stations are still there, some with different names nowadays). If you still have a liver at the end of this book, please do not try any of the drinks recipes listed in that book!