Available:
Library | Call Number | Material Type | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... State Library of Oregon | 813.54 HoytH | In-Library Use Only (Not For Loan) | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... State Library of Oregon | 813.54 HoytH | 4-Week Loan | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
Witty suspense novel set in Moscow, slave-labor camps, a secret anticancer experiment hospital, Lenin's Tomb, and on the Trans-Siberian Express, all of which settings show Hoyt in his best form since his first tongue-in-cheek thriller, The Manna Enzyme (1982). Isaak Ginsburg is a Jewish poet in Russia who wants to go to Israel, but when he unwittingly gives a straight answer to an official inquiry, he's sent not to Israel but to a slave-labor camp at Ziml. On the way someone hears him muttering a new poem to himself and reports him. The monster in charge of Ziml explains to Ginsburg that at the end of his two-year sentence he will be given a modest piece of surgery and that, meanwhile, he should not write or even think poetry. Indeed the prospect of the knife drives poetry straight out of Ginsburg. When the time comes, he's sedated and later presented with his testicles by the camp commander--only it's all been a grisly joke, and they aren't his, they're a dead man's. But Ginsburg hasn't been writing any of his seditious poetry for two years, has he, ha ha! Two years of unremitting fear have taught him his lesson. Then, sent to Novosibirsk to start his new life as a citizen, Ginsburg assiduously masters the current crop of party poets (whose uplifting party poems ""are like spreading warm manure over moldy bread""), praises them to heaven, is reluctantly persuaded to read some of his own verses to the writers' union in Novosibirsk--and stuns them with his heartfelt trash, which is pure quality Leninism (Ginsburg is working on becoming the showpiece Communist Jewish poet). Hoyt's parody of unparodyably parodic Soviet poets and their verse in his novel's high point. All the while the reader is slowly falling in love with Ginsburg, a most likable hero. At a medical experiment hospital, filled with cancer victims who are about to be deprived of their life-sustaining drug, he meets a grudge-filled dying Estonian who persuades him that it would be possible to steal Lenin's head from the well-guarded tomb, bring the state to its knees and in return for its precious relic, allow one free year of emigration to Jews and others to the country of their choice. . . Much of this novel is like a Preston Sturgess version of the vast spiritual depression of present-day Russia and of rampant toadyism among the state's fear-ridden citizens. Despite its satire (which often seems too real for satire), the seriocomic figure of Ginsburg has far more weight and dignity than is common to a thriller. Madcap Marxist suspense. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Combining elements from Alexander Solzhenitsyn and John Le Carre, Hoyt has fashioned a swiftly moving thriller that immerses the reader in the Russia of the 1980s. Isaak Ginsburg, an unknown Russian poet, is sent to a Siberian labor camp. After his release he pretends to be a model citizen and rises to become the state's most celebrated poet. Enlisting the aid of dissident Estonians, the beautiful wife of a Russian diplomat, residents of a cancer clinic, and a coolly unconventional CIA agent, Ginsburg plots to steal Lenin's head from his Red Square tomb and use it as a bargaining chip to gain open emigration from Soviet bloc countries. This offbeat thriller should enhance the already considerable reputation Hoyt has garnered with such books as Cool Runnings . Dennis Dillon, Univ. of Texas at Austin Libs. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
