The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories

Excellent and authentic writing about several different eras in Russia/Soviet Union. Written by a very gifted young author. The title story seems a little too worked over. The cynicism of some of the characters' is wearisome at times.

An amazing collection of intertwined short stories
Truly unusual and very well done. Just so well written! The characters are full and the dialogue is crisp. I learned a lot and was thoroughly engrossed.

Having thoroughly enjoyed Marra's The Vital Phenomena I engaged this new effort. Sadly it was considerably less convincing. The characters modestly engaging. Their experience and the interweaving of lives less interesting and terrifying.

Marra is a 'magician'. I was overwhelmd after reading " A Constellation... ". "The Tsar..." Did it again. He lives and breathes his ' people' so we the reader 'are there' with their ever changing and interconnecting lives. Magician!!!

This is an ideal book for a budding Russophobe. For those who want to get re-confirmed in their vision of Russia as the land of endless murders, execution and violence. For those who want to savor thousand ways Russians die or kill each other. Needless to say, the drudgery of this gratuitous and implausible violence nearly killed me, but I guess I am one of those readers who expects human sympathy and emotional maturity from the author.

Here is a typical example of the book's style ... and substance: "we looked at the photographs of our teenage boyfriends killed in Chechnya or at home, by land mines or gunshots, by drug overdoses or alcohol poisoning, by mining accidents or maniacal drivers, by tuberculosis or HIV."

One should also give credit to Mr. Marra's imagination, which rarely moves beyond sophomoric. Here is a line that would make blush even a frat boy writing his first story: " the murderers turned and stopped over the coat sleeves. What had been a skull was now a leaky bowl of borscht."
You would also learn that Russian corpses are rarely buried: they either disappear, or are devoured by wolves, or are kept as ashes in one-shot vodka bottles -- that's what one of the Russian mafiosi does--before disappearing in his own turn. The search for his grave occupies most of the characters of the book, by the way. And, who would ever doubt that "the line between crime and business is as slender as an orphan's forearm." Maybe as slender as the author's literary and emotional maturity?
Before all these rather unsavory characters kill, betray, or denounce each other, they manage to develop some dreams of aspirations, some blots of humanity that can make them recognizable for a western reader. So if you want to learn that the murderers, and slave captors, and women who marry corrupt oligarchs also have feelings --that's the book for you.
Of course, any third rate Russian novel can do exactly that, with much greater verisimilitude, but these novels usually don't come accompanied by the blurbs with glowing quotations from the New York Time reviewers, so if it is these reviewers are the ones that you trust, go ahead. Make Mr. Marra's day.

I normally find it difficult to complete even half of a short story collection, except on the rare occasion the stories are intertwined by characters and events. I'll read 1 or 2 but eventually go back to the traditional arc of Freytag's Pyramid, invest myself in it, and then forget about the collection of nice, but not compelling, stories.

Comparatively, THE TSAR OF LOVE AND TECHNO instantly enthralled me because the first story is both chilling and compelling and these stories had me eager to discover the interlacing threads and see the completed whole. That is to say, the reader learns through each story which characters are primary, and discovers that character has returned in a later story in some other context. The stories so complement the others that, aside from the 1st, 3d and 4th stories, I'm not sure the others would have nearly the impact they do had any one of them stood on its own outside the context of the collection. I enjoyed the entire collection excepting the second story. Should you get annoyed by the shrews, stick with the book; while irritating in itself, the second story adds pieces to the whole. In hindsight, the structure seems hard to have pulled off, but I couldn't tell at the time because of the seeming simplicity of each story (which was done brilliantly).

These stirring stories center on an uncle and nephews, a pair of brothers, a couple, a mother (and daughter), a girl (and grandmother) and a painting, and occur variously at three locales of the former Soviet Union (Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Kirovsk [in Siberia to the east of China] and within Chechnya). The first story is set in 1937 during the Stalin purge [“In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer," said the Soviet censor of paintings and photos.] The remaining tales occur primarily between the mid-1990s and 2013. They hit on a wide array of subjects like censorship, Russian art, the breakup of the Soviet Union, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Russians in Chechnya, mine fields, the nuclear age and outer space, and art (in life and capturing life in art). IMAGES - mix tapes, leopard bikini bottoms, a ballerina, a painting of an empty Chechen field in the afternoon, a wolf.

This magnificent collection had me reflecting how circumstances can change people so that basically good people have the capacity to do evil, but how, in all but the most aberrant among us, there's a reservoir of basic goodness in the face of evil. It made me consider the fleeting nature of life, what impression do we really and truly make on a planet we visit so shortly, how small each of us is in relation to time and space, and how Art, above most else, can transcend life.

Anthony Marra is a master at evoking sympathy for characters so foreign to a reader in the U.S., and in his ability to simultaneously create both sympathy and contempt for a character. Even in short stories, knots of complexity surround the six major characters, making them so human, their sentiments so real.

In my opinion, this book is even better than Mr. Marra's debut novel "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena." I believe he has the potential to write a novel for the ages. No exaggerating.

On a side note, I think Marra made up for his debut's hard-to-recall title and its washed out cover with his new Hip title and even Hipper cover.

Michael Marra is a talented writer. Yet this book left me unsatisfied. Talent in writing cuts several ways. At its best it draws out the true essence of humanity and the soul of its subject. At its worst it cleverly simulates essence and soul. Writing can be a con trick, and this book cons readers into thinking they have been brought into contact with the vast, dark and profound truth of Russia.

There is a reason for the admonition to new writers (this is Marra's second novel) to "write what you know". It makes for authenticity and allows the text to become one with its subject. Writing what you do not know can elevate craft over content.

The Iowa Writers Workshop doubtless taught the author to find his "voice". Having found it, he uses it overmuch. The voice is so loud that it interferes with the enjoyment of reading. We are mostly distanced from characters by Marra's spicy turns of phrase and witty garnishes. His characters are smothered by language, like good cooking marred by too much sauce. I found myself at times profoundly keen to move onto the next little dish.

Finishing the book is like having eaten a five course meal at an expensive Michelin-starred restaurant, whose chef concocts tiny marvels of culinary science. We leave such meals impressed, but not fulfilled, and forgetful of quite what we ate. Critics are desperate nowadays to find "original" authors to whom Michelin Stars can be awarded. Readers, having seen the Stars, savor the chef's confections without pausing to think whether they have come for a satisfying and memorable meal or a brief, fashionable, and self-indulgent sensual experience. We do not relax and expatiate on the meaning of life and suffering among Michelin stars. We focus on the moment, take shots of the food on our smartphone, and Tweet about flavors.

It is evident that Marra knows too little about Russia to write such a book. He admitted after publication of his first book (about Chechnya) that he had not visited the country before writing about it, but after having been there on a brief tourist trip, he "found that his knowledge of Chechnya, gleaned mostly from books, held up". Would his American readers be happy with a "deep" novel about Iowa whose author had only read about Iowa in books, then, after a brief tour of the state, felt he had correctly judged the place from outside? I doubt it.

Marra fails to situate Russia within a broader historical narrative. His characters have been shaped only by the Soviet Union, not by a continuity of eight hundred years. Yet if experience since the break-up of the Soviet Union has taught us anything, it is that those seven decades were part of a much longer narrative. Thus a censor in Stalin's Russia would have been aware that he was continuing a tradition dating back into the mists of Tsarist history.

Reading the book we get selfies and snapshots of characters for a superficial age of 140-character profundities. We do not receive the artful pictures that Russians paint of themselves or the wonder of an outsider confronted with a strange and unique culture. At times the triviality and inaccuracy of portraits in this book is almost insulting. A naive and idiotic father sits and wonders at his son's entrepreneurial swindling, a caricature of the instinctively self-mocking and sad Russian character. A gaggle of young women delightedly watch their friend succeed. Does the writer not know that Russians are as jealous and vindictive towards those who betray comradeship through success as they are supportive and compassionate towards those who share their misery? A middle-aged woman calmly colludes with young criminals, betraying resignation rather than seething outrage at her fate - yet for such people spiritual morality is the driving force of their whole life. Russians’ brilliant technical eccentricity, with their endlessly smart ways of making do, is caricatured through a mad museum of imagined technological achievements. A beautiful young woman is not too scarred by being nouveau riche to return calmly to her previous life of grimy poverty. A troubled young man with a soul suddenly turns soulless at the one moment it really counts - anonymous violence is transformed into personal violence with barely a blink of the superego.

And why, when Moscow is Moscow, and Grozny is Grozny, is Norilsk not Norilsk but "Kirovsk"? A casual reader would be forgiven for believing that "Kirovsk" is a real place. The author has cheated us by denying us the knowledge that we have glimpsed an extraordinary city.

I am unlikely to visit restaurant Marra again, despite its Michelin stars. But critics must already be salivating at the thought of the next meal of morsels from the hands of the master chef.

This very ambitious book requires concentration, and is well worth the effort. It's a labyrinth of interrelated short stories, set in Russia between the 1930's and the present. The action takes place in St. Petersburg, a mining town above the Arctic Circle, and Chechnya, with characters (and their offspring) weaving in and out of the plot.

I learned so much about Russia and its history through reading this book. The mood is austere, gray, foreboding and unsettling, making me not want to visit the country. That said, the book gave me a profound respect for the Russian people even surviving such a dreary, hopeless culture. The mining city, for instance, is the second most polluted place on earth, where the snow changes color depending on what is currently being mined. Citizens turn to crime as the only alternative to the army, or mutilate themselves to avoid conscription. Family members inform on one another (sometimes unwittingly), which impacts generations that follow.

The writing is so brilliant that I often stopped and just marveled at the sentences I'd just read. A few samples follow.

On the mining city: "We measured prosperity by the spread of rashes on our exposed skin. Even those who had never lit a cigarette had a smoker's cough. But the mining combine took care of us: vacations at mineral spas, citywide festivals on International Workers' Day, and the highest municipal wager of any city in the six time zones. When our fathers fell ill, the combine provided hospital beds. When they died, the combine provided coffins."

On the efforts of a man appointed to run the Chechen tourist bureau with zero experience: "I designed a brochure. The central question was how to trick tourists into coming to Grozny voluntarily. For inspiration, I studied pamphlets from the tourist bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston. From them I learned to be lavishly adjectival, to treat prospective tourists as semiliterate gluttons, and to impute reports of kidnapping, slavery and terrorism to the slander of foreign provocateurs... Upon seeing the empty space where an apartment block once stood, I wrote 'wide and unobstructed skies!' I watched jubilantly as a pack of feral dogs chased a man, and wrote 'unexpected encounters with natural wildlife!'"

On a museum attendant: "Behind the ticket counter stood a man as skinny as a soaked poodle. He sported a shirt of swatch-sized plaid and a blond ponytail that, unless destined for a chemotherapy patient, should've been immediately chopped off, buried in an unmarked grave, and never spoken of again. Hipsterdom's a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger."

As you can see, biting sarcasm that borders on the hilarious. "Noses in their glory days between rhinoplasty and cocaine collapse, nymphs dressed in diamonds large enough to fund Third World civil wars..." Where did the author come up with observations like these? Also, how did an American learn so much about such diverse aspects of Russian history and society?

The ending, where all of the loose ends are most elegantly tied together, is a marvel.

A set of nine interlinked chapters about Soviet and post-Soviet days.

The first is about Roman Markin, an artist whose job it is to doctor paintings and photographs in the NKVD archives: to airbrush out people who have fallen foul of the regime, to insert apparatchiks into scenes in which they had not in fact been present, or to touch up, for example, photos showing the pitted skin of Stalin. He has to show his loyalty to the Party by eliminating images of his own brother who has been executed. He does that, but atones for it by inserting images of his brother into innumerable crowd scenes where he would not be noticed. And indeed it is not those insertions that are discovered, but a particular deliberately incomplete obliteration (leaving just a hand) of a ballerina who had been sent to Siberia that is the cause for his arrest and to the pressure to confess (as a good communist – à la Koestler’s Darkness at Noon) that this was part of a plot against the Party. There are touches of surrealism in this chapter.

The next chapter, recounted by unnamed narrators during the Putin era, starts in a Siberian labour camp in Kirovsk to which the ballerina had been exiled. (I cannot find Kirovsk on any map of Siberia, though there is a town of that name, famous for its pollution from nickel mines, in the Kola Peninsula on the Finnish border.) The camp specialized on extracting nickel from the mines, and everyone lives in a highly polluted atmosphere. Under Soviet rule, the labourers were at least cared for in hospitals when they were ill. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the labour camps were closed, but the miners still slaved for the oligarchs who bought up the mines for a song – and took no responsibility for looking after the people when they fell sick. When machines take over much of the metal extractions, there was no even work for many of them, and Kirovsk became a centre of drug-dealers and extortionists of every kind. The oligarchs are powerful enough to order the murder of anyone who spoke out about this. Most of this chapter is about Galina, the grand-daughter of the ballet dancer who had been exiled to Kirovsk. Galina, too, becomes a ballet-dancer and marries Oleg Voronov, one of these oligarchs who makes sure she is elected Miss Siberia and gets roles in ballets, films etc. When the Chechnya wars break out, the oligarch goes there to make a second fortune in the Chechen oil fields, and this is the link to the third chapter.

This begins in 2003, with a description of the utter devastation of Grozny after the Second Chechen War. The narrator is one Ruslan Dokurov, formerly a deputy director of the Grozny Museum of Regional Art, has been given the unenviable task of heading the Grozny Tourist Bureau, and what his brochure makes of the scenery of Grozny is grimly hilarious. He has a moving relationship with Nadya, his restoration artist, who has been blinded and severely disfigured when the Grozny Museum had been shelled. In this chapter we meet Voronov, Galina, and one of the paintings which had been doctored by Roman Markin.

So far, so good. If I were to rate it on the first three chapters, I would give it four stars. But I couldn’t see the point of the fourth chapter, and the long fifth one seemed to me so rambling, disconnected and inconsequential that I gave up on the book – something I very rarely do. I am sorry I cannot perceive the qualities that have earned the book so many five-star reviews.

Anthony Marra is one of our best writers. He’s so good, I like to read his sentences over again for their cleverness. He proved that with A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA and proves that again with THE TSAR OF LOVE AND TECHNO. Even so, TSAR is not another CONSTELLATION.

CONSTELLATION is an excellent novel in every way. TSAR isn’t a novel; it is a collection of short stories, which I usually avoid because they necessarily lack character development. Also, while short stories may be interesting, they are not able to grab me, pull me in so the book becomes unputdownable like a novel can.

TSAR’s short stories seem to try to have these qualities of a novel. The stories are interconnected; the book has a cast of characters who may appear in more than one story, and the places and certain objects remain the same. Therefore, some character development happens, but it’s not enough and left me disappointed.

So TSAR bored me. But I’m hoping that this book is just something Marra put out there to tide his readers over until he has the time to give us another great novel.

In the case with both of his masterpieces, "The Constellation of Vital Phenomena," & "The Tsar of Love & Techno," I listened to these books DESPITE the awful readers, who didn't seem to know what they were reading. Anthony Marra is an incredible writer & deserves better.

Welcome to Absurdistan! Long before Gary Shteyngart took the name for his 2006 novel, commentators in the former Soviet Union had been using it to describe a state of political life becoming increasingly like the Theater of the Absurd. And the absurdity begins with Soviet Russia itself; what else can you call a system that kills, imprisons, or terrorizes most of its subjects to preserve a vision of Socialist Utopia some time in the future? As one of the characters in Marra's collection of connected stories remarks (in an official confession, no less), "the future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present."

The 72-page title story is placed as an interlude between "Side A" and "Side B" of the book; the whole thing is conceived as an audio cassette, which is also one of the many objects connecting different stories. In one part of it, two boys spy on two gangsters about to execute a third in a litter-strewn forest made of disintegrating fake trees. The pistol fails to operate, and the gunmen have to ask their victim to tell them how to load it. Later, one of the boys remarks: "I'd never imagined that something as solemn and final as death could be this idiotic. It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life's madness: the institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano." It is as good a summary of this book as any other, and if it intrigues you, you may well enjoy it. For me, however, the quality of the absurd soon began to wear thin. I prefer to have some solid ground under my feet, so that I may rejoice in love, lament over death, and see relationships between human beings as based on honesty and trust. Black comedy, I find, works best in stable environments that are not a comedy in themselves.

That said, there is a lot of invention in these stories, and Marra is very clever in how he connects them up. Although most of them are set in the former Soviet Union after the breakup, the opening story, "The Leopard," is set in 1937 at the height of the Stalinist purges. Its protagonist is a painter employed in doctoring pictures to remove people who could not of course have been there, since they have been declared non-persons, and occasionally painting in people whose achievements should surely have been recognized but unaccountably were not. So he paints out the figure of a once-celebrated ballerina since executed as a spy, and paints the figure of a regional apparatchik into an otherwise empty meadow in a 19th-century landscape near Grozny. Both ballerina and landscape will figure in the next story, "Granddaughters." This will add more objects and figures that will in turn be referenced in several of the seven stories that follow, sometimes with strikingly ironic results. It is as though a network of fictional coincidences is the only thing that can make sense of the absurdity of life. An excellent point, if so, and it puts Marra very much in the Russian satirical tradition. But I tend to have the same problems with Russian writers also -- which I suppose is a compliment in its way.

Anthony Marra’s second book, The Tsar of Love and Techno, purports to be a collection of interwoven short stories. Set out like tracks on a mixtape, they create a sense of place so vivid that it felt as though the remote, frozen and apocalyptic town of Kirovsk, and a quiet hillside in Chechnya, felt like characters in their own right. Armed with a basic knowledge of Russian history from 1930 to 1990, I thought I was prepared for the bleak desolation and indiscriminate destruction of the Cold War, Stalin’s purges and the Chechen war. However, experiencing the lives of those who were affected by them, as they struggle for love, acceptance and the conflict between loyalty to kin versus loyalty to the state, was far more upsetting than I ever imagined.

Consisting of 9 stories divided into two sides with a long intermission, the book spans several generations of people who are connected through locations, actions and a pastoral painting of a hillside in Chechnya. A Soviet censor inserts his brother’s face into the spaces left by those he erases. Two mercenaries are imprisoned in a Chechen well. The granddaughter of a prima ballerina enters the first Miss Siberia pageant. A drug-addict becomes a war veteran’s assistant. The elderly go swimming in a heavily polluted lake. Two little boys plan their solution to the pending nuclear war, by building a rocket from scrap junk. With motifs of war, destruction, love, betrayal and a continuing theme of art’s powers of redemption, Marra creates a complex and vivid picture of the spirit of ordinary Russians.

Marra is a master storyteller. He weaves aphorisms together with witty one-liners, giving a strong sense of Russian flavor to what might otherwise be a book too bleak to endure. Steeped in tragedy, the points of light (frequently created through irony, surrealism and the blatant hypocrisy of Soviet bureaucracy) made the book an entertaining read. As I kept turning the pages, however, I became more and more invested in these rather despicable characters. Perhaps the biggest shift in my feelings for a character was for Kolya; mercenary, murderer, gangster and creep, I found myself inextricably ensnared in his story, rooting for him and distraught at every obstacle he faced.

The descriptions make this books extraordinary, conveying a complex morality that arises out of the betrayal of the all-powerful state’s failure to live up to its promises. Left with nothing to believe in, merely trying to survive a life in which one in two will die of lung cancer from the pollution of the factories that arose out of the gulags, the people scrape out a living in sulphur-laden, icy tundra. The portrayal of different characters is vivid. I feel like I know these people intimately, and that they are thoroughly real; I ache with their pain. This book made me cry great ugly sobs of grief.

The book begs re-reading as every loose end is neatly tied off, every subplot resolved, every apparently unimportant detail becomes pivotal. Characters who initially were minor and barely mentioned became the most affecting, while the “main” characters faded into oblivion, with the echoes of their actions branching out into every other character’s life. The complexity of this book in structure and in style is incredibly detailed, and I found myself googling places to see if such apocalyptic hell-holes could really exist – and they do. You can even listen to a mix tape playlist that accompanies the book. This book is a significant artistic achievement and I am giving it a well-deserved spot amongst the best books I’ve ever read.

I haven’t read a book this good in a long time. I feel that five stars are not enough; a rating out of five doesn’t do it justice. This is an absolute must-read. It’s a perfect 10. Stop what you are doing and read it right now. Make sure you have some tissues handy.

Read more of my reviews on Literogo.com

Although The Tsar of Love and Techno is, superficially, a collection of "interwoven" stories, I quickly realized that the stories were so closely linked that I couldn't rate each story individually, as I would ordinarily do with a collection of short stories. Rather, The Tsar of Love and Techno is an immersive experience, with such a strong sense of time and place that it must be appreciated and reviewed as a whole.

So many other reviewers have synopsized the various interlocking narratives and have rhapsodized over Marra's exquisite writing that I will not repeat those efforts here. Instead, I want to comment on two things which stood out for me. First was Marra's telling of "Granddaughters" in the first person plural (i.e., from the point of view of "we"). The "we" are a group of six women who are reflecting on their lost seventh member Lydia and the beauty they both admired and envied from afar, Galina. Of course, what they say is actually more a commentary on, and defense of, their own life choices. Marra has captured perfectly the voice of a group of girls, the tone of mingled jealousy of the one who got away and self-satisfaction at the fallen one forced to return.

The second element I particularly enjoyed was how Marra tied his cast of characters together, not only through the bonds of friendship and family, but also with their connections to a particular landscape painting. Like the comic book in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven , this painting moves from hand to hand, valued by some simply as an artistic object but by others because of what really happened on the hill depicted in it. As much as I admired Station Eleven, though, Marra's use of this device is so much more nuanced and organic. His writing in this regard is masterful.

I did not particularly care for the book's cover, which, I am ashamed to admit, is why The Tsar of Love and Techno languished for so long on my to be read list. I should know better than to judge a book by its cover.

I received a free copy of The Tsar of Love and Techno through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a series of interconnecting short stories which take place in Russia, spanning the years of 1937 to 2013, even including a story entitled “Outer Space, Year Unknown”. The first four stories comprise “Side A”, with “The Tsar of Love and Techno” being the Intermission story, with the next four stories being “Side B”. The stories are tied together through the characters and a Russian painting of a house and pasture where much of this book takes place.

As with any book of short stories, there will be those you enjoy more than others. My favorite in this collection is the first one, “The Leopard”, which tells about a censor working for the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation in 1937. His job is to paint over enemies of the people from official images and artwork as if he could erase their entire existence from history. There are two scenes in this story that were heart breaking – the first is when he is commanded to paint over the image of his own deceased brother and the second when he works on the painting of a disgraced ballerina.

The author’s world is one that reads like a dystopian novel. The fact that this world actually existed makes it all the more harrowing. It’s a world where daughters turn in their mothers as traitors, a world where one wrong act or a whisper in the wrong ear can bring about accusation and execution. It’s a frightening world but also a world that shows startling beautiful moments of love. It’s a very moving book, though not an easy, quick read. There were times I’d get somewhat confused as to which character the story was about due to the many characters and locations and jumping around in time but I usually got back into it fairly quickly. It’s well worth the read and now I’m looking forward even more to reading the author’s first book “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena”. Recommended.

This book was given to me by Blogging for Books in return for an honest review.

In 2013, I had the pleasurable task of reviewing Anthony Marra's first novel, A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA. Set in Chechnya during the wars that ravaged the country in the waning years of the 20th century, I described it as "gorgeous and gut-wrenching." From his new collection of linked stories, some of which share that setting, it's clear that Marra has far from exhausted his interest in that devastated land and its people. But in THE TSAR OF LOVE AND TECHNO, he's broadened his field of vision to take in Russia after the fall of Communism. It's a tour de force that only confirms the sound judgment of the National Book Critics Circle in awarding Marra's novel its inaugural John Leonard Prize for the best first work of the year.

"The Leopard," the story that opens the collection, introduces some of the book's central themes and, most notably, an object that appears in several other stories: a painting by the 19th-century Russian artist Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets with the bland title of "Empty Pasture in Afternoon." The painting of an empty hillside near Grozny, Chechnya, is the object of the protagonist's work as a "correction artist," as he airbrushes disgraced figures from photographs and works of art during the Stalin era of the 1930s. In "A Prisoner of the Caucasus," Zakharov's pasture becomes the setting for the captivity of two Russian soldiers (one of them a recurring character) in 2000, and the scene of a devastating event in the life of the narrator of "The Grozny Tourist Bureau," while the actual painting is pursued avidly by characters in two other stories.

If that description makes it sound at all like Marra's linking is nothing more than a clever literary parlor trick, that would be an erroneous conclusion. One could read this collection several times without sacrificing the pleasure of teasing out all the threads of connection he has so delicately stitched. They emerge gently and organically in these stories, giving the book a novelistic feel, as when the full force of the correction artist's work finally resonates in the life of another character in "A Temporary Exhibition" nearly seven decades later.

Russian or Chechen, Marra's characters struggle to come to terms with life in the post-Soviet era. "They longed for the old days, not because their lives had been better, but because there had been an equality of misery back then," he writes in describing this state of mind. An aging, impoverished woman similarly wonders "how do you trade your gods so late in life?" Like most of her fellow citizens, she faces a grim future, made more desperate by straitened economic prospects. Whatever their circumstances, and along with murderers, drug dealers and people who betray family members to the authorities, Marra portrays his characters with deep empathy, no matter the gravity of their damaging, often inexcusable, choices.

Marra demonstrates his narrative skill by choosing to place all or portions of several stories in the singularly unattractive Siberian town of Kirovsk. It's a former labor camp that's been transformed into a "poisoned post-apocalyptic hellscape," whose nickel smelters, dubbed the Twelve Apostles, ring a massively polluted body of water dubbed Lake Mercury and where stands of metal birch trees with plastic leaves, ironically called the White Forest, substitute for the vegetation that can't grow in the contaminated air.

Out of this dismal backdrop come two of the collection's more memorable characters: Kolya, a young man whose limited prospects transform him into a Russian conscript in Chechnya and a drug-dealing thug when he returns home, and Galina, Kolya's high school girlfriend, who parlays a win in the Miss Siberia Beauty Pageant into marriage to Russia's 14th richest man and movie stardom. Their divergent paths illustrate what seem to be the arbitrariness and extremes of life in modern Russia.

Whether one calls it black or bleak, Marra specializes in a kind of humor that's as revealing of character as it is downright funny. The ex-convict father in "A Temporary Exhibition" swells with pride at the computer prowess of his son, who employs that skill to prey on the finances of elderly Americans. In "The Grozny Tourist Bureau," Ruslan Dokurov, the former deputy director of the art museum, is recruited by the Chechen Interior Minister to boost tourism, now that the fighting has waned. He spends weeks designing a brochure, wrestling with the dilemma of how to "trick tourists coming to Grozny voluntarily." When asked by the translator for a group of Chinese oilmen he's chauffeuring around the city to identify a "small mountain range of rubble bulldozed just over the city limits," he replies, "Suburbs."

Marra concludes THE TSAR OF LOVE AND TECHNO with "The End," set in "Outer Space, Year Unknown." It's the lovely, if mysterious, vision of Kolya breaking free of the shackles that contain him and many of the other subjects of these stories. Like a contemporary Chekhov, one would be content if Marra continued to mine the subject matter that has engaged him so strikingly in these unforgettable tales. Whether he does, or moves on to other material, he'll assuredly remain one of our most distinctive and talented young writers.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

I loved Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena when it was published in 2013 and when I discovered that his newest novel, The Tsar of Love and Techno was coming out this fall, I requested through Net Galley a galley copy of it and was pleased that the publisher, Hogarth, granted my request. And as I “turned” the pages on my Kindle, I was again transported back to not just Chechnya, but also Leningrad (St Petersburg), and Siberia across eight decades of Soviet life as seen through an unforgettable cast of people who lived through the golden age of Communism and/or the age of Glasnost connected together by both a common history and art. The result is a collection of stories which connects both a historical past and a personal past through censored photographs and a censored painting that is retouched as it makes its way across the former Soviet Union.

While Tsar is a moving piece of fiction which highlights both pathos and joy in living in and through difficult conditions, it is also a demanding read. But in keeping close attention as you read, you will encounter many many serendipitous moments and connections that will cause you to pause and consider what I consider a thematic strength of this novel – the power of art to both shape and influence life long after the creator has passed on. For in the fact that the photographs, inked out are also altered in a fashion for an aging man to again remember his father, nearly eight decades later, is one illustration of art’s power in this novel.

And then are some great lines that will cause you to stop and think about life, growing up, and the culture you live in… (and even chuckle at times…)

“Wealth announces itself with what’s easy to break and impossible to clean.”

“The modernists ruined reality for laypeople.”

“Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.”

“There are so many paths to contentment if you’re open to self-delusion.”

The Tsar of Love and Tech is a gallery of paintings and snapshots about faith, hope, and love across the kilometers, the tundra, the history of repression and then a widening openness that takes time to digest. About faith – in people, in freedom (artistic and otherwise); about hope in the future and in the ability to remember; and about love – being in love, falling out of love, loving when reality dims and when the past returns in the staring back of your father in another medium from another time and place.

I loved this book. I rate it an “outstanding” read.

Note: I received a Kindle epub copy of this book in exchange for review from the publisher via Net Galley. I was not required to write a positive review.

I had been looking forward to reading this collection for a long time. I can certainly say that I will be adding this to my favorites shelf, and will read it again. I’ve always thought to myself that there’s a fine line between fact and fiction. In reality, it’s not. To create imagery with stories such as these, answers the questions that few people seem to understand. There is always truth in fiction. It’s up to the reader to grasp that truth, and then make the effort to connect with the characters. Only then will you enjoy what you are reading.

The Tsar of Love and Techno is a collection of stories, that are woven together to make one story that spans almost seven decades. Even after reading the first story, I was so lost inside this book that I completely lost track of time and was late for work. This is about sacrifices, hardships, censorship, and most importantly – love. 1937 Russia was all about repression and censorship. What I love about this collection is the way Marra whips up the stories to let the reader discern the subtle liberalism that arcs through time. The stories are raw and thick, and will leave you with a sense of awareness.

One thing I know about character makeup – you can’t judge one by first impression. When one appears to be terrible, you soon learn otherwise as you read on. The painting that connects the dots makes it all clear in the end. I just wish there were more stories to read! I didn’t want it to end, and if this is the way that Marra constructs all of his work, I can’t wait to read more. I really love this book, and of you are a fan of short stories – or anything to do with Russian history – then you will not put this book down. The writing is amazing and the characters emotions jump out at you. I highly recommend this book!
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Having read and enjoyed A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, I was eager to read his next book The Tsar of Love and Techno. I appreciate Marra’s beautiful yet spare style and am fascinated by his exploration of the Russian-Chechen war.

This collection of interconnected short stories treads the same war-ravaged ground, with a foray into a Siberia and its post-gulag life including surreal details like a faux forest littered with the dead and a chemical lake holiday.

Much of what I enjoy about Marra’s writing is on display in these stories. His ability to redeem tragedy (though he is not adverse to steal away some of that slim hope) through the lyrical use of language, to give it beauty, is on display in the first few stories. In particular, the story of the censor was exquisite.

However, the stories in the middle of the book were very gritty. The language itself lost some the beauty it had possessed earlier. And while this is likely the author’s intention as much of this section takes place during the Chechen war with all its attendant absurdities and horrors, it was very difficult to read as it felt like a descent into a nihilism.

While I think that the author achieved the lofty literary goals he set for himself in this book, it’s not the type of book I would chose to read again. Still, I would recommend this collection to those with a strong love of literary fiction and an understanding of its goals and ideals.

N.B. I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.