“…Somehow even the name of the book gives a vision of its author, of his outrageous iconoclasm to which all responded with enthusiasm.” — Francis Greene
A philandering husband’s guilty conscience after his latest love affair prompts him to take his wife and children to Paris in a final attempt to save his marriage. A precocious teenager with a passion for theatre discoveries a mysterious book in a secondhand bookshop and makes it his mission to find out more about it. 1917, a theatre director flees from the Bolsheviks abandoning his wife and daughter but returns, using all his ingenuity to survive the Party and the terrible hardships and privations that ensued.
Levitin’s eccentric writing is distinguished by its strong element of the absurd, in the spirit of the absurdist writers of the 1920s. For him the absurd is a view of life from its seamier side, where so-called normal people appear insane and eccentricity is a way of preserving one’s sanity.
“I was lucky to have my play staged by Mikhail Levitin. What I saw was the work of a true master, a magical spectacle.” — Kurt Vonnegut
Author’s previous novel Total Indecency was short listed for the Russian Booker Prize.
A philandering husband’s guilty conscience after his latest love affair prompts him to take his wife and children to Paris in a final attempt to save his marriage. A precocious teenager with a passion for theatre discoveries a mysterious book in a secondhand bookshop and makes it his mission to find out more about it. 1917, a theatre director flees from the Bolsheviks abandoning his wife and daughter but returns, using all his ingenuity to survive the Party and the terrible hardships and privations that ensued.
Levitin’s eccentric writing is distinguished by its strong element of the absurd, in the spirit of the absurdist writers of the 1920s. For him the absurd is a view of life from its seamier side, where so-called normal people appear insane and eccentricity is a way of preserving one’s sanity.
“I was lucky to have my play staged by Mikhail Levitin. What I saw was the work of a true master, a magical spectacle.” — Kurt Vonnegut
Author’s previous novel Total Indecency was short listed for the Russian Booker Prize.