Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Verdict According to Barney., 24 Mar 2003
This novel is like Dr Zhivago set in New Delhi, India, with plot that reads
like a fast-paced thriller. While the characters fall in love, shady people
slope around in the background. Maya makes beautiful, life-like puppets -
and you know that all the characters in the book are really puppets. As they
fall in love, or sleep, or eat, or decide to sell biological weapons to a
foreign government (!) they are being pulled along by something irresistibly
like fate. I loved the lingering descriptions of Delhi, and the strange
enclosed world the two main characters make for themselves, and Lev's
travelling from one extreme to another, from Delhi to Leningrad. It's a book
full of surprises which I loved!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Where do I start?, 21 Mar 2003
When I read this book I couldn't put it down. Why haven't I heard about this
author before? It's a topical book, dealing with weapons and biological
warfare. And it's about a man's mid-life crisis, and life in Russia
post-Communism. Lev, the hero, is super-qualified and intelligent, but he's
never been the same since he watched a colleague die slowly, painfully and
dreadfully, after infecting himself with one of the lethal viruses they were
creating. He gives up his job, or his job gives up on him, and becomes a
chauffeur. But then he decides to leave Leningrad and go to India, the idea
being that he'll turn his luck around by selling his knowledge to the Indian
government. He falls in love with a young woman in Delhi, and their affair
is beautifully described. But you realise it's a heady, intoxicating thing,
love; beyond our control, and prone to go horribly wrong. But there are too
many things going on in this beautiful, literary and gripping novel to list
them all. You should read it!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A novel of love, imagination and violence that really sings, 21 Mar 2003
I've not read much Indian literature, and kind of thought it might be very serious or very confusing. But this is the best book I have read in a long time. The action shuttles between Russia and India; between the male and female protagonists; between the idea of love, and of weapons of mass destruction. From the very old - plague breaks out in Delhi - to the very new, this is one of the most ravishing and extraordinary books around.
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