The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra (Hogarth Press, 2015)
★★★★☆
A collection of interconnected stories, all set in Russia and Chechnya over the last century, examining family, legacy, and love against a backdrop of war and oppression.
A strong, well-researched “mixtape” that weaves compelling individual stories into a larger emotional arc. I enjoyed Marra’s writing style and felt invested in the characters, and the interrelated structure was deftly done. Favorites: the opening story, “The Leopard,” concerning a government artist/censor who, after informing on his brother, attempts to atone for his guilt by painting him into the photographs he retouches; and “Wolf of White Forest,” one of several entries about the lengths to which parents will go to provide better futures for their children.
I’m docking a star for the titular intermission story, “The Tsar of Love and Techno,” a first-person narrative that bounces between the past and present of a character named Alexei. Something about the voice in this story really grated, impairing my enjoyment of the book. The first line that made me blink:
I set the canvas on the shelf between the two pickle jars holding my parents’ ashes. Rather ghoulish, but family reunions usually are.
I didn’t have enough information about Alexei to know why he would say something like this, but I rolled with it. Afterwards, however, I began to notice other lines that seemed more like injections of the author than things Alexei would actually say:
My chilled breath grew and vanished like a unicorn’s horn continually poached from my face.
The sledgehammer of epiphany swung cranium-ward.
My trust in the author further eroded when I encountered this clumsy line from a different character, the purpose of which (beyond establishing the conversation’s point in time) I fail to see:
“A picture’s worth what, a thousand words? More than that, if you’re to judge by the reams of shoddy copy on Lindsay Lohan’s crotch shot.”
I was thus primed to balk at language like “Kolya spoke to a ladder of a man” and “I centimetered past”—phrases that I might never have noticed in stories with more distant perspectives, but that here, for their misalignment with what I knew of the narrator, seemed like the author being overclever. It might be a stylistic preference: a resistance to the substitution of one noun/verb for another without strong character/narrative justification. And of course, it might simply be that it’s the character who’s overclever here, and it’s the character’s overcleverness that I hate. Whatever it is, it did not work for me.
Aside from that one overanalyzed issue, though, I highly enjoyed this collection and would read the author’s other work.