I knew when I read The Winter Queen that Boris Akunin was an author of rare talent. I raved about his ability to transport the reader to the Russia of the Czars in a wonderfully florid style. The Winter Queen was the first of the Erast Fandorin series of mysteries. Akunin has decided that there...
What a treat! This was the second book by Boris Akunin I have read; a year or two ago I read The Winter Queen and enjoyed that as well.What made this book so fun for me was the voice and setting. We're in Czarist Russia, in the provinces. The plot revolves around an attempted power-grab by a repr...
Boris Akunin's prose doesn't tell you that The Winter Queen is set in 1876 Tsarist Russia, it takes you there. It slows you down to an era before telephones, when steel nibs were replacing goose quill pens; an era when the potential of electricity was being explored and advertisements for Lord By...
It is the year 1882, and Erast Petrovich Fandorin, detective and diplomat in Tsarist Russia, has returned to Moscow after six years of foreign adventures, ready to commence a new role assigned to the Governor General of Moscow. Hardly has he settled into his new environment that the news spreads ...
"Gambit", literally "tricking somebody" is usually applied to military operations or chess strategies. In order to achieve the ultimate win some losses have to be accepted along the way. Both contexts fit here beautifully. Boris Akunin, Russian pen name of Georgian writer Grigory Chkhartisvili, h...
In between the time I purchased Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra and the time I started reading it, I skimmed an article somewhere that claimed Pelevin was inspired by and indebted to Mikhail Bulgakov. This was not good news. The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov is one of my most hated novels of all time...
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, a collection of short stories, exhibits both the joys and the challenges of reading someone as brilliantly absurd as Russia's Victor Pelevin. The caliber of these stories ranges from surreal to simply impenetrable. At times, Pelevin addresses universal themes...