Anthony Marra

A Granta Best Young American Novelist 1930s Leningrad: a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting. The mystery behind this painting threads together each of the stories that follow, where we meet a Siberian beauty queen, a young soldier in the battlefields of Chechnya, the Head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau, a ballerina performing for the camp director of a gulag and many others.

The Tsar of Love and Techno

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena--dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art. This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.

Stories

Moth

I was already a fan of Anthony Marra first book, 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena', which is one of my favourite books to this day. So when I saw that he had written a series of short stories, I knew that I wanted to read them.

The characters are real and interesting, in a time of Russian history that is dark and not exactly easy to live through. It spans from Communist times to 2013. Not only does it span years, each story and character interconnect. It spans families, towns, and countries. 

Not only this, but you learn that not all the characters are all what they seem. They may seem like horrible people from one point of view, only to learn their stories and the truth behind them. The stories teach you that in a time when suspicion between people can paint them in untrue light until you see it all through their eyes. Not all stories are true and not all narrators are reliable. 

I found the writing really well done and it reminded me of Marra's other story in a good way. I admit, I was sent into a reading slump after reading this book because I wasn't ready to leave his stories and his characters behind. He tends to have a way of capturing my mind so easily, it's hard to go back to other books. He brings the history of a country I know only bits about to life in a really captivating way.

Jeff James

The Tsar of Love and Techno is a hilarious and affecting novel masquerading as a short story collection. It has a lot in common with David Mitchell’s genre-hopping patchwork masterpieces, but here the linked stories don’t feel so much like a stylistic exercise (and I say that as a huge fan of Mitchell’s work).

Instead, Marra uses a fairly consistent style throughout, and the shifts in perspective serve more to reframe familiar characters and situations in a new light. The only real stylistic flourish is the collective narrator in “Granddaughters”, but the conceit is never distracting.

It definitely helps that The Tsar of Love and Techno has a great title and an eye-catching cover, because the summary sounds a lot like an Important Novel About Sad Europeans. Luckily, it’s actually laugh-out-loud funny and full of sharply drawn characters who are simultaneously comical, ruthless, tragic and sympathetic.

The first story takes place in 1937 and focuses on a government censor who modifies photos and paintings to remove dissidents and insert party officials. One of the paintings he modifies – an unremarkable hillside somewhere in Chechnya – becomes far more significant with each story, eventually serving as the through-line that ties the book together.

One of my most favorite parts of this book is the way that Marra parcels out revelations and undermines expectations. The truth is mutable, and memory is suspect, but with the benefit of a novel’s roving eye, we discover the sympathetic hearts hidden in villains and the histories thought lost to time.

The book feels so authentic that I had to check the author’s Wikipedia page to find out if he was born in the region. It turns out that he’s actually an American obsessed with Chechnya. It makes me wonder if people in Chechnya read his books and if Marra even has a publisher in the region.

In any case, I loved this book, and I can’t recommend it enough. The Tsar of Love and Techno was an absolute revelation, and I’m glad I decided to pick it up.

Chiyeung lau

One of my favorite short story collections. The first story had me in tears by the end.

Dana Kraft

This reads as much like a novel as a collection of short stories. I really enjoyed the subjects, characters and writing style. It made me think about memories and how/why we keep them, use them and pass them on. Some great, funny lines in here, too. A few of my favorites are:

After noticing several bronze Buddha statues on the shelf in a penthouse apartment..."I was wondering if artsy-fartsy types in Tibet fetishize crucifixes..."

"Hipsterdom's a tightrope strung across a canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger."

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

Cindy Lieberman

Painful and beautifully wrought interlinked stories of harsh life in and around Chechnya and Siberia. What people do to survive, to succeed, to redeem themselves...but mostly to survive. Especially difficult to read during the holiday season -- a time of abundance and mass consumerism in America. Poignant but not quite a masterwork at the level of Constellation of Vital Phenom.

Skye

The Tsar of Love and Techno is a collection of people's stories that are all intertwined by one plot of land depicted in a picture. The connections are interesting and devastatingly heartbreaking. Honestly, I couldn't wait to finish this book. It left me feeling sad and lonely each time I'd put it down. With that begin said, I think there is a cold beauty to be identified. The author did an excellent job at portraying the horrors of communist USSR and the repercussions that bang through the generations.

priya

I’m officially an Anthony Marra stan. I know I’ve only read two of his books, but they’re enough to convert me. Any review that I write about The Tsar of Love and Techno would honestly just detract from Marra’s work and that’s not what I want to do. 

Read the quotes and, more importantly, read the book!

 “I fear I’m among the last of the Leningrad correction artists who attended the Imperial Academy of Arts before the Revolution. The new breed, philistines like Maxim, have grown up in schools where children finger-paint watery ash over the faces of political enemies.”

“But of every animal we saw that afternoon, I remember none more clearly than the leopard. Loose-limbed and lanky. Nostrils spouting narrow triangles of steam. Claws clicking coded messages across the concrete floor. Eyes all pupil. Each step unfurling through the spine. An inconceivable creature at which Vaska and I first marveled, then threw bread crumbs.”

“He sighs and mutters, as if this charade pollutes his dignity alone.”

“It takes nothing less than the whole might of the state to erase a person, but only the error of one individual—if that is what memory is now called—to preserve her.”

“Galina’s grandmother was the only woman for thousands of kilometers who wasn’t one hundred percent repulsed at the sight of the camp director. Perhaps he mistook her lack of utter contempt for infatuation?”

“Our parents called the music capitalist pollution, as if the cancerous masses on the X-rays had been caused by a song recorded on the other side of the world, rather than by the pollution that flowed from the smokestacks just outside our windows, free for us all.”

“We constantly became people we would later regret having been.”

“Through it all, Galina disappointed our expectations faster than we could lower them.”

“He was forever leaning, slanting, sidling, his existence italicized down to his crooked hat.”

“Sugary champagne chilled in the refrigerator, vodka warmed in our glasses, and we drank and shushed each other as the orchestra began “The Patriot’s Song.” We hummed along, but didn’t sing. Our country was three years old and the lyrics to the national anthem weren’t yet composed.”

“The host introduced her and consulted a set of green index cards with a long downward stare that drew out the suspense of the moment and made him appear illiterate.”

“Photoflashes detonated. White tulle swathed her waist. Her head rested between the parentheses of her raised arms, and rising to her toes, noosed in spotlight, she began.”

“But guilt, like nickel, is a finite resource divided and parsed in so many ways, with Kolya and the hoodlums who pulled the trigger taking the largest share, then the crime boss who passed down the verdict taking the second largest share, then Vera who went into business with these gangsters, then the police chief who conspired with these gangsters, then Lydia herself who should have never trusted us with such good gossip. We are somewhere far down the list, accepting only a fragment of guilt, and that fragment itself is divided by six, so no single one of us will ever feel personally responsible for spreading the rumors that led to the murder of Lydia, who had once made us seven.”

“The United Nations has named Grozny the most devastated city on earth,” the minister explained between bites of moist trout.
I wasn’t sure of the proper response, so I gave him my lukewarm congratulations.
“Yes, well, always nice to receive recognition, I suppose. But as you might imagine, we have an image problem.”

“If there is an operation, and if that operation is successful, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.”

“Danilo moves back behind the wheel. He coaxes the ignition, pumps the gas. The starter motor gags. Danilo gives Kolya a slow shake of his head. “It won’t start.”
“Because you shot it,” Kolya says.
“Your point?”
“No point,” Kolya sighs. Sometimes his expired faith in rational logic revives itself long enough to believe in points. It’s as comforting as believing in Ded Moroz, but in the end he always ends up feeling like an asshole for thinking any of the pain he either inflicts or endures has meaning beyond the senseless fact of its existence. “No point at all.”

“The past few months have been the most serene of his adult life. The megalopolis in his mind has quieted to a country road. He does his work, he eats his bread, and he sleeps with the knowledge that today hasn’t added to the sum of human misery. For now at least it’s peace of a kind he hadn’t imagined himself worthy of receiving. “We don’t have to shoot people here,” he says simply.”

“The old man nods with apparent admiration. “You are not one hundred percent idiot,” he says. Kolya takes it as an expression of great respect.”

“He told you?”
“Of course. I’m his favorite son.”

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

“I should’ve gone to class, but I hadn’t gone once this term and didn’t want to confuse the professor by showing up.”

“The commissar, of course, knew such a story was sheer lunacy, but he’d ascended to the rank of commissar by welcoming the lunacy the world so graciously handed him.”

“Say what you will about Southern California, but the place had color. Cacti of army-grade green alongside irrigated lawns. The incandescent signage of bodegas and check-cash swindlers. From the air above LAX, bungalow blocks formed interlocking periodic tables of pastels. In New York, she’d said good-bye to green. In London, red. By the time she’d reached Kirovsk, the palette had been scraped of all but the grays and yellows that painted the clouds, streets, snow, and even the vitamin-deficient pallor peeking from her mother’s coat collar.”

“The winter still had months of life left. The gas bill was due. The cupboard was nearly empty. It was late in the day, late in the century.”

“We wanted to become gangsters, but who could we look up to? Where were our heroes? Our fathers drove gypsy cabs, washed dishes, and pumped gas, their blood so timid a guillotine couldn’t make them bleed. They longed for the old days, not because their lives had been better, but because there had been an equality of misery back then. We were their sons and we wanted more.”

“The late afternoon sun burned before them, inking them into silhouettes, framed in the pinewood of the kitchen window, the unknowing subject of a work of art only she could see.
She admired the scene for a moment, then walked out the back door to become part of it.”

“When Ruslan asked how he’d come across the painting, he shook his head and smiled, as if to say life is well suited for nearly everything but explanation.”

Laura

Damn, I loved this collection of short stories more than I can say. I honestly believe that Anthony Marra is the absolute best new author I discovered this year, and has quickly become one of my favorite authors. This book hit me hard, and right in my sensitive spot. Each short story has its own way of connecting into an elaborate web, sometimes in multiple ways. My favorite character out of the overall amazing cast was probably Alexei (fun fact: Alexei also happens to be my favorite boy’s name), with Koyla being a close second. But the reason I liked Alexei so much probably had to do with him reading like a Zusak character (which is some of the highest praise I can give a character). I got an Ed Kennedy kinda vibe from him; he was just fantastic. While all the stories were magnificent, my favorite ones are probably Leopards, The Grozny Tourist Bureau, The Tsar of Love and Techno, and The End. Of course, I do have a least favorite story (singular actually, shocking), because they all can’t be winners, and that is Palace of the People. I’m not sure why, I think because it has kind of a YA feel for me, and I’m not crazy about Sergei (who is possibly my least favorite character) or his dad or the army vet. But the first story, Leopards, now that was fantastic. And The Grozny Tourist Bureau had me crying with laughter. The titular story reminded me of a Zusak novel, as I’ve mentioned early (mostly I Am the Messenger, with a bit of Underdogs thrown in, you know, with the main male character kind of a daydreamer with a very distinctive inner voice). Needless to say, I loved that too. But everything paled in comparison to The End. I was all set to give this book a 4 star, due to my not being as thrilled with Side B as I was with Side A (it still was great, though, don’t get me wrong- just not as good). But then I read The End and I almost started crying. The way this book ended was so perfect, and the gorgeous way that Marra wrote made me think he really pulled out all his writing chops for this one, beautiful story. Highly recommended.

Read more like this review on my blog, http://www.bookwormbasics.blogspot.com

The Tsar of Love and Techno

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