Customer Reviews

The Unpossessed City [With Earbuds] (Playaway Adult Fiction)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book reveals Jon Fasman's deep understanding and love of Moscow. While the plot entertains and moves along briskly, it is really his descriptions of the city and its inhabitants that captured and delighted me. Well worth the read!

I tend to like books that transport you to unfamiliar places through the eyes of characters poised at familiar crossroads, in search of their identity, their roots and their possibilities. Fasman's new novel does just that. The opening chapter set in a Russian prison draws you in immediately with its tension and foreboding tone while the shift to Rockville, Maryland introduces you to Jim Vilatzer, a 32 -year old at odds with himself and his life. The plot moves swiftly and engages you throughout with unexpected twists and turns that make you want to know with increasing urgency how these worlds connect. But what I loved most of all in this book and in Fasman's last, The Geographer's Library, (and for that matter, what will keep me looking forward to whatever he writes next), is the writing itself. This is an author with a gift for immersing you in the locales he writes about, for making you feel as if you are in Moscow traveling alongside Jim, experiencing the city's "unpredictability and toughness" and at the same time, discovering its "unexpected, genuine moments of kindness."

This book was great on a number of levels. As a mystery, the plot was complex and surprising. As a novel, the writing was wonderful, a pleasure to read. And as a lesson about contemporary Russia, this book was fantastic. I feel like I understand more about Russia by reading this novel, in a way that I couldn't just by watching the news or reading non-fiction. This is a beautifully composed, nuanced book with very strong, almost cinematic imagery that makes the story electrifying. 100% recommend this book.

This is one of those novels that are disappointing because you get the idea that it could have been better. Fasman does a great job describing a Moscow that is incredibly hard to live in, and yet immensely appealing at the same time. I can't say how accurately he is portraying the real Moscow, but the city he creates is one you could fall in love with and defend to everyone who only sees the dirt and corruption.
This is why it's so disappointing that the story falls flat. It starts with all the pieces but none of them deliver in the end. There is a mystery going on, but it's told initially through a series of chapters involving characters who discuss what they're doing in veiled terms so that the reader never knows what's going on. There's an attempt at a romance for the protagonist, but it's confused with a tease of a relationship with an American embassy worker who seems to get more attractive with every description, though the romantic triangle never pays off.
The worst disappointment is the journey of self discovery undertaken by the main character, known variously as "Jim," "Seamus," or "Dzheem." He's a kind of loser that readers will be familiar with from Fasman's "The Geographer's Library," who takes what might be an "interesting" job as a way of running from his loser life. As a gambler, he is thrilled by the danger of living in Moscow, but he is never really completely at risk because he carries in his pocket an American passport and a return ticket. The morally questionable American diplomats that catch Jim in their web have the opportunity to put this safety net in jeopardy, but the terrible ending of the novel shows them to be just another enabler for Jim's dilettantism. Instead of coming up with his own solution to the situation he's gotten himself into (or even figuring out what was going on), Jim is magically rescued and transported home to the good old USA. But while he may have been transformed from "Jim" to "Dzheem," he's still the same loser he was at the beginning of the novel. Fasman should know better than to rely on this kind of deus-ex-machina - that's Storytelling 101.

Fasman takes you on the express from everyday Washington suburbia to the Moscow underworld. He gives you a real sense of the way it would feel to live in Moscow. He conveys both the hard edge and the soft center of life in that city. He takes you there with a sympathetic if rudderless main character, Jim, who drifts into an escalating situation that quickly makes the book a real page-turner. The plot twists and turns from loan sharks in America to a beautiful woman, bio-terrorists, the CIA, Russian police and murderous plots in Russia. The ending is surprising and satisfying.

This book is not only a well-written, literate, well-paced thriller, but a love letter to Moscow as well. Mr. Fasman's descriptions of Moscow are wonderfully evocative, giving the reader a sense of the grimness of the city and the fortitude required of it's citizens for survival. The descriptions of the various characters are likewise precise and compelling: "His driver was short, pudgy, and given to sweating. With his ill-fitting uniform, his nervous smile, and a pallor that gave him a slightly boiled appearance, he looked every inch the low-level apparatchik, constantly trying to gauge which way the wind is blowing, certain that whichever direction it comes from will be unfavorable." The book abounds with passages that are similarly picturesque. I highly recommend The Unpossessed City; especially for those who have lived, visited, or plan to travel to Moscow.

I just finished listening to this audiobook. The narrator is awesome. He really brings the characters and narrative to life. I enjoyed the story, the intrigue, plot twists and especially the descriptions of life in Moscow were riveting.

A droll yet harrowing tale of a rudderless man sucked into the maelstrom that is modern Moscow. If you like John LeCarre but also like happy endings you may like it.

This was an extremely obnoxiously written novel. The pace was disjointed and jarring. The plot does not appear until around page 220 of this 300-or-so page book. In the first 100 pages the action switches back and forth from the main character to a different situation and set of characters somewhere else in Russia. Although these characters tie together more or less by the end of the book, for these first 100 pages it's like reading the beginning of five different novels in a row. Just as I think I have a handle on what's going on I have another set of undeveloped characters who's names I have to memorize. And that's the biggest problem with the book: With such a large cast of supporting characters there is very little characterization for me to discern them. They become little more then a set of character names with dialog attributed to them. The primary characters are well fleshed out I will admit. But almost all other characters meld into a gray blob of uninteresting writing. And considering so much of the plot and mystery in the novel hinge so ridiculously on the supporting cast and their unclear motives this is a major problem. The pace, as I mentioned, is anything but fast. The entire book consists of overlong exchanges of dialog. This in itself would not be a problem, but so little of it ever pushes the story forward. In fact many of the middle chapters, as boring as they were to read at the time, are then rendered moot when we learn that certain elements were all lies being told to the character. Group these problems with an uneventful and uninspired ending and I would not recommend this book to anyone.

This book is fantastic and I couldn't put it down.. I'm glad I bought it...