<p>As I posted in a different thread, I’m going to Russia (Moscow) and Italy (Rome) in a week, spending close to a week in each country. I really wanted to bring with me some literature that reflected each country. For Russia, I was initially thinking that I’d dive into War & Peace, or The Brothers Karamazov, or Dr Zhivago but looking at the size of those books, I’m afraid those might be too ambitious and dense for plane reading. Does anyone have any suggestions for some fiction that might get me into the mood / spirit for each country, but perhaps wouldn’t be as daunting?</p>
<p>For Russia - have you read ‘Gorky Park’?</p>
<p>The Italians, by Luigi Barzini. Written several decades ago but still pertinent, I think.</p>
<p>Brunelleschi’s Dome, Ross King</p>
<p>Anna Karenina, Tolstoy</p>
<p>The Idiot, Dostoyevsky</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I highly recommend the book by Edward Rurherford called ‘Russka: The Novel of Russia’. It is a substantial paperback, but from what I’ve heard it describes the history of Russia very well. The book follows the lives of sevral families all the way from Kiev Rus to modern times. Check the reviews on Amazon.</p>
<p>The Master and Margarita. [The</a> Master and Margarita - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita]The”>The Master and Margarita - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>The Russia House, John Le Carree.</p>
<p>Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco “The thinking man’s DaVinci Code”.</p>
<p>^I was thinking Eco, too! The Name of the Rose is fairly page-turnerish.</p>
<p>Seconding Gorky Park, though it’s not exactly current (early 1980s). PG, you might find that any of the Arkady Renko detective novels (Gorky Park was the first) by Martin Cruz Smith are what you’re looking for. I think the most recent is Three Stations; my favorite is Wolves Eat Dogs, a great page-turner set in part near Chernobyl. The guy’s a terrific writer.</p>
<p>Nicholas and Alexandra, by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Massie or his latest (which I have not read but gets great reviews), Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman.</p>
<p>Have fun!</p>
<p>Catherine the Great is wonderful. I can’t put it down. Also “The True Memoirs of Little K”
and don’t overlook “The Madonnas of Lenningrad”. The True Memoirs of Little K is about a very famous Russian primaballarina who was a mistress of the Czar. The Madonnas of Lenningrad is about the rescue of art during World War II at the Hermitage and conditions in the city at the time. Catherine the Great is excellent and a very important read for anyone visiting Russia. It takes off from the first page. I would say if you are too busy to do much reading Catherine the Great, Portrait of a Woman would be the one to choose.</p>
<p>For a good laugh on the plane, try The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart.</p>
<p>Thank you all!</p>
<p>If you’d like an easy read and are interested in Russian history, try books by Akunin - amazon has quite a few in English. I hope the translation is decent, I really like the originals.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s/ref=is_box_?k=Akunin[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s/ref=is_box_?k=Akunin</a></p>
<p>Classic novels are great. I really like “War and Peace”, but it’s quite monumental work and will take awhile to finish. Dostoyevsky is great author, but his books are very depressing. I love Pushkin, but honestly have never read him in any other language than Russian.</p>
<p>Hey PG, we had the same thought for our French/Italian vacation. For italy we brought along Italian Neighbors, which I highly recommend. It a story of expatriates living in Italy, and slowing working towards acceptance. It’s very much from an English perspective, but I felt like I understood a lot more about what was going on around me by reading that book. We also brought “enchanged april” which was nice and mindless, but really was a lot more about england than about italy. We also brought Daisy Miller, on the more general travelling subject, and Twain, the innocents abroad - more expatriot books.
My daughter adored my year in provence, but that one’s on france.
I’m not sure whether there are good books of that type about Russsia, but I think there are more recent books that discuss the expatriot experience.<br>
We all thought it was a great thing to do and expanded our experiences, We learned why cars on one streets don’t back down and you just have to back all the way down and get out the way. Somehow its helpful that thats just the way it is.</p>
<p>For Russia … what about Charm School by Nelson DeMille. Perhaps a little too current, it’s about a POW camp in Russia populated by Vietnam era US prisioners and the infiltration and rescue by CIA types and embassy staff. Escape fiction, action-adventure, spy novel. I enjoyed it … but it might not be what you are looking for!</p>
<p>“Archangel” by Richard Harris is an entertaining thriller set in present-day Russia.</p>
<p>Here’s a link to a review of a recent novel about Latvian immigrants living near Rome. It might not be what you’re looking for, but the author is an stunningly good writer, and this has caused me to put the book on my “to read” list.</p>
<p><a href=“‘The Free World’ by David Bezmozgis - Review - The New York Times”>‘The Free World’ by David Bezmozgis - Review - The New York Times;
<p>To get a feel for the countries, you might be interested in reading works by some authors that are popular there. For Russia, a lot of them are not published in English for a long time after the original Russian publication, if at all, so it is quite difficult to find very contemporary fiction, but you can find good examples in anthologies and short story collections like Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia or Moscow Noir. </p>
<p>Roman Senchin (Minus), Victor Pelevin (Buddha’s Little Finger, Homo Zapiens) and Irina Denezhkina (Give Me: Songs for Lovers) write fiction about contemporary Russia, but Pelevin and Denezhkina particularly are very ‘modern’ and might not be to your taste.</p>
<p>‘Ordinary people in extraordinary times’ fiction focussing mostly on the end of Stalinism and the introduction of perestroika and glasnost is quite popular. Ludmila Ulitskaya (Sonechka), Ludmila Petrushevskaya (The Time: Night), Natalya Baranskaya (A Week Like Any Other), Vladimir Voinovich (Monumental Propaganda) and Olga Grushin (The Dream Life of Sukhanov) are popular writers of this sort of thing, and Vladimir Sorokin’s The Queue and Grushin’s The Line follow a similar conceit of eavesdropping on ordinary people in queues. Magical Realism is a very popular trend in modern Russian fiction - you can see it in some of Pelevin and Grushin’s work, but it’s not the main focus of the books from them that I have recommended, if, like me, you don’t really care for it.</p>
<p>Older writers that are popular but reasonably accessible: Venedikt Erofeev (e.g. Moscow to the End of the Line), Mikhail Bulgakov (e.g. The Master and Margarita, Diaboliad).</p>
<p>To all who participated - thank you again; I printed this and took this to the bookstore and had an enjoyable time looking at all the selections.
Finally landed on the following -</p>
<p>For Russia: Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie (the author of Nicholas and Alexandra - this is on the current bestseller list, hardback)
Notes on the Cuff and Other Short Stories by Mikhail Bulgakov (the author of Master and Margarita, cited upthread - I wanted something shorter)</p>
<p>For Italy: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.</p>
<p>Thanks again for your help.</p>