Tag: Soviet Union

Reader’s Corner: ‘Polostan’

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

My review of Neal Stephenson’s Polostan is up at PopMatters:

As the first volume of a projected trilogy, Polostan avoids the tendency of such books to serve as a crowded place setting for everything to come. Rather than spreading his narrative across a half-dozen main characters that he spends the next two books stitching together, Stephenson packs everything readers might want in their characters into one woman and lets her run with it. (Given Stephenson’s tendency for thousand-pagers, one wonders if he wrote this whole thing as one book and the publisher argued him into chopping it up)…

TV Room: ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, streaming, TelevisionLeave a comment

My review of the new adaptation of A Gentleman in Moscow, which premieres this Friday, ran today in Slant Magazine:

Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow was published in 2016, five years before Russia’s top opposition leader (and Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe) Alexei Navalny returned to his homeland and was immediately imprisoned. Showtime’s eight-part adaptation of Towles’s novel, about a Navalny-like political prisoner in Russia, serendipitously makes its premiere not long after Navalny died in a Russian prison camp. But the comparisons between reality and fiction largely end there. A Gentleman in Moscow is a glossy, romanticized series that mostly suggests rather than shows the horrors of a totalitarian regime…

Here’s the trailer: