Kurkov in the TLS

Powells reprints a review from the TLS of Andrey Kurkov’s latest novel to be translated into English — The President’s Last Love — which we mentioned briefly a few weeks ago:

However, such a determined sense of the outward emphasizes what is often missing from The President’s Last Love: love, emotional insight. If the surreal is allowed to slip by in understated fashion, so is the real suffering of Bunin, who is often a sadly isolated individual, and a Job like victim of periodic disaster. Having lost three children stillborn, he learns of the death of his remaining family with typical brusque briskness: “waiting at the door of my office that morning had been Colonel Svetlov with the news that my brother and his wife had jumped to their deaths. Details to follow from the embassy”. This is a novel where the details that follow always offer little comfort; when his twins die he receives “a large envelope from the clinic containing Polaroid photographs of our little ones, together with their birth and death certificates, plastic identity wristlets and small cellophane packets with locks of light brown hair”. Here as elsewhere, the writing is deliberately unyielding and affectingly unhuggable; all hard facts with little softening sentimentality.

It’s not an overly positive review, but it does sound like Kurkov, which is good enough for me.