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'Crazy, charming, a delight' --John le Carré
'The most extraordinary debut in travel writing since "In Patagonia". A dark, sardonic and brilliant book which grows in stature with every page.' --William Dalrymple
'As an allegory it is powerful and frequently moving. As a tale it is tremendous fun. It is also a thing of beauty' --Jan Morris
'The most extraordinary debut in travel writing since "In Patagonia". A dark, sardonic and brilliant book which grows in stature with every page.' --William Dalrymple
'As an allegory it is powerful and frequently moving. As a tale it is tremendous fun. It is also a thing of beauty' --Jan Morris
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In Rory MacLean s groundbreaking debut travel book, Winston the pig drops on to Uncle Peter s head and kills him dead. It is a distressing end to a distinguished Soviet spy. Unwilling to be left alone in her house aunt Zita, a faded Austrian aristocrat and a vivacious eccentric, hijacks her nephew and, together with Winston, sets out on one last ride. The Berlin Wall fell only weeks before and Zita is determined to reach across the reopened borders and rediscover her remarkable east European family. In a rattling Trabant the unlikely trio puff and wheeze across the changing continent, following the threads of memory. Zita s relations - the angel of Prague, the Hungarian grave digger who buried Stalin s nose, a dying Romanian propagandist - help tie together the loose ends of her life. They picnic at Auschwitz. They meet Lenin s embalmer. They carry a long-lost corpse over the Carpathian mountains. Their surreal and darkly comic journey becomes Zita s catharsis. Through war and revolution, decay and regeneration, Stalin s Nose is an exhilarating ride from the Baltic to the Black Sea, between Berlin and Moscow, and a portrait of Europe like no other.
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Winston the pig fell into Zita's life when he dropped onto my uncle's head and killed him dead. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Winston the pig fell into Zita's life when he dropped onto my uncle's head and killed him dead. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great fun!,
By
This review is from: Stalin's Nose: Across the Face of Europe (Paperback)
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, especially the author's unique insights and personal involvement in the journey. Highly recommended. If you haven't read Rory Maclean's books before, this is a good place to start. His writing is very funny, but it is balanced with serious observations.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Story of a Central European family - tragic, comical and unresolved,
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This review is from: Stalin's Nose: Across the Face of Europe (Paperback)
This - one of Rory Maclean's early travel writings - is perhaps less of a travel piece than one may expect, having more to do with a family history, stretched across countries and times. It is nevertheless an excellent portrait of a region and of issues it faced in the early 1990s - much less optimistic and much less resolved than the mood in the West at the time had one believe.Starting the journey from the Baltic to the Black Sea, it is derailed in Berlin already, where the author's uncle suffers a rather fantastic end to his life. Fearing for his aunt Zita's sanity (as well as looking for replacement dentures for her), she gets taken along for the journey, together with Winston the Tamworth pig, in the trusty East German steed - the aunt's Trabant. As they wheeze their way through Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Russia, Zita has to resolve many issues that arose in her complicated past - including a Soviet spy husband, SS officer brother, Austrian aristocrat predecessors, etc. Through this we get an abridged look at some issues plaguing the countries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as how far from democracy and prosperity the countries were at this early point in their post Communist journey. It is often incredibly funny, at times quite tragical, shows the mental constructs many were forced to erect around themselves to be able to deal with their situation, the pretty fantastical but nevertheless real stories many a family went through in the time since WW2, as well as the bleak outlook. Many aspects described in the book have definitely changed since Maclean wrote it, so it has more of a historical significance now. But in capturing the moment of transition, the author did an excellent job and it is a book very much worth reading, if one wants to understand the past and possible futures of the region. If you enjoyed Koestler's Darkness at Noon or Kundera's The Joke, this book is likely up your street as well.
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