Henry’s “Holiday Reading” entry, just below, emboldens me to mention the last two books I’ve read. Both are political novels and I highly recommend them both, but that’s where their similarity ends.
Windy City, by Scott Simon (yes, the NPR guy), is an engaging novel of Chicago politics. If you’re not a politics junkie, you’ll probably be bored, but I think it’s safe to assume that the great majority of the people who are reading this blog entry are politics junkies, so I’m not too worried about the boredom possibility. Mimicking Chicago politics itself, the novel abounds in ethnic stereotypes, albeit in a celebratory way, and it does go too long, describing every ficitional member of Chicago’s oversized city council, lengthy and providing verbatim accounts of long-winded speeches and second-by-second descriptions of numerous public and private events. But I found it an engaging read, and along the way I learned a lot about Chicago politics, urban politics, and just plain politics.
The Stalin Epigram, by Robert Littell, is something else again. Littell, in case you’re not familiar with him, is the author of a shelfful of Cold War espionage novels, but if you’re thinking “Tom Clancy” here, think again, because he is way better than that. I especially appreciate his magnum opus, The Company, though, again, it’s probably too long and convoluted for those with only a casual interest in the tradecraft of intelligence (although, come to think of it, I myself have only a passing interest in the tradecraft of intelligence). Anyway, I approached The Stalin Epigram expecting more of the same — that is, expecting it to be a typical Littell offering. That means I expected it to be a literate inside view of what are normally assumed to have been the competing intelligence establishments of the combatants in the Cold War. Littell’s recurring theme in those novels (which eventually become so formulaic that if you’ve read a couple of them, you pretty well know where the next one is going) is that the methods and, more importantly, the interests of the two sides often converged, so that, in a sense, the two melded into one another and you — and even the participants themselves — couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys.
And now, totally unexpectedly to me, comes The Stalin Epigram. I don’t want to say much about it, because you should “discover” it for yourself. I will say that it’s set in the Soviet Union primarily in the 1930s and that it chronicles events triggered by the dissident poet Josip Mandelstam’s recitation, to a few friends, of a poem disparaging Stalin. Littell uses many voices, including those of Stalin’s bodyguard, Mandelstam’s wife, his and her lover, and even an illiterate weightlifter, to tell Mandelstam’s story. It’s an extraordinary performance — wonderfully written and, to me at least, absolutely riveting. I have no hesitancy about placing it right up there with Solzhenitsyn at his best.. It may seem over the top to equate this novel, by an author whose ouevre consists of a succession of espionage-focused thrillers, with the work of a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, but see for yourself and you might just agree.