RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksWe are plunged back into a world of furious beauty, sprawling, majestic landscapes, and erotically charged and traumatic encounters, with life and love hanging in the balance ... It is clear that Fitch, like her heroine, is fond of \'Peter’s creation,\' as Russia’s foremost poet, Alexander Pushkin, called St. Petersburg; her depictions of it are loving and lavish. Those who enjoyed the seductive, sexually explicit relationship between Marina and the horrifying Arkady von Princip, from the previous volume, will find more of them here ... By showing us Marina’s visits to various St. Petersburg literary salons, Fitch beautifully captures the fragility of that world and its cast of characters ... Readers of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories, which capture the dehumanization of the Soviet gulag, will find similar messages there.
Ismail Kadare, Trans. by John Hodgson
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books...the novel transports the reader across all parts of the empire, from the center of power to the tempestuous periphery ... The novel relentlessly exposes the impact of authoritarianism, showing how it crushes the human spirit ... Yet the story is also a more encompassing parable of authoritarianism that is relevant far beyond its immediate historical moment ... In The Traitor’s Niche, as in all his best works, Kadare powerfully evokes — and critiques — the sheer, irascible strangeness of unchecked power.
Janet Fitch
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...despite the book’s size and the headiness of the material it tackles, Marina’s unlikely bildungsroman — her growth, her loves, her dreadful losses and disappointments, but, above all, her enduring hope and determination to survive, against all odds — proves so gripping that it’s hard to put the book down ... n its most harrowing passages, The Revolution of Marina M. shows us the full extent of female vulnerability in chaotic times ... There is enough pain to go around in Fitch’s sprawling, majestic book, as people shed old identities like snakeskins ... At the end, Marina is left to confront the Russian Civil War almost completely alone??, and the modern reader — like the readers of Tolstoy’s and Dostoyevsky’s serialized novels — is left itching for the next installment.
