In Red Plenty, Francis Spufford gestured to this book for an account of the rapacious 1990s in post-Soviet Russia. Being an airport novel it is nowhere as erudite, though sometimes the backhanded observations are as funny as the author intends them to be. We get the expected oligarchs, mafiosi, digs at Yeltsin and Brezhnev, the bling, the Moscow Barbies, the presumably-fictional "fred". At times he flicks the switch to Reservoir Dogs and is clearly angling for a movie deal. The plot twists become way too convenient, and with a decent edit it would have been fifty pages shorter and the better for it. I came to the end not really remembering the beginning and wondering why we were touring Sovietland in denouement.
Ben sucked me into this at the last minute. $10 he says, but Pia at the door says $15. Oh well. The schtick was making music using synthesisers and chains of sundry processing devices; laptops have almost, but not quite, made this anachronistic. I enjoyed the second set somewhat as it reminded me a little of Tooth and Nine Inch Nails. (The first was interesting but he cut too quickly between his samples.) The last act was essentially some kind of dance music familiar to 1980s/1990s club denizens.
