From Publishers Weekly
Like his creator, the narrator of this unclassifiable workhe himself constructs the lumbering term "novel-denunciation-report-tyrade"is a "Soviet emigre in the West" living in a pension in West Berlin with others of his ilk bearing such tags as the Cynic, the Joker, the Whiner, the Dissident. The slight fictive elements are not significant here; what matters is that an incisive intelligence delivers a blistering denunciation of the Soviet system. Dripping venom, the narrator ranges in systematic fashion through the actions of the communist regime from 1917 to the present, excoriating Soviet history. Seen through the cold eye of the observer, the System is duplicitous, corrupt, inefficient and boring, when it is not simply maddening. This furious, outraged, highly theatrical monologue documenting the emergence of the New Man, Homo sovieticus, will seem a definitive portrait to those familiar with the ways of the Kremlin.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In his new book Zinoviev ( The Yawning Heights , The Radiant Future ) persists in offering us a "novel" that consists of mini-essays and contrived dialogues between interchangeable characters with names like "Dissident" and "Enthusiast." Working within the milieu of an effete emigre community in Germany, he portrays Soviet and Western man as taxonomically distinguishable types and posits the former's inevitable domination of the latter. Zinoviev offers a wry analysis of his Russian "types," but his format is rankly self-indulgent and blank in the areasplot, character, stylethat make fiction worth reading. At its best Homo Sovieticus is pop sociology; at its worst it is rambling, xenophobic, sexist, and misinformed. Rob Schmieder, Boston .,
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
