Platonov is the finest Russian prose-writer of the last century, but this republication of a volume first published around 1970 is a disappointment. Firstly, the translation is mediocre; secondly, the short novel "Dzhan", the longest and greatest work in this volume, was translated from a heavily censored Soviet text. Many of the most striking, most unusual or most subversive passages of the original have been cut out.

If you really want to know how it all happened, you have to read this book. But don't just read it, try to place yourself there and at the time. And you will understand it.

I have somewhat of a penchant for short novels. There is something rather delightful about a hardback novel of 100 pages or so. So slight, and yet so solid and real.

To read a book in one sitting is another delight. An hour or two spent with the book in your hands, a temporary escape.

There have been a few books this year that have wonderfully filled the above criteria, most notably Embers by Sandor Marai, and I was hoping that Makine's latest novel would be another. However, I was very disappointed.

The story begins with great promise but the narration is stilted and fragmentary, requiring the reader to check back to make sure a key plot point has not been missed. Usually it hasn't, it is just that Makine's style is to jump cut from scene to scene, often neglecting to take the reader with him.

Don't bother with this. Go for Embers instead.

Our narrator (name unknown) is waiting in a snowbound train station in the Urals when he encounters a peculiar man silently running his hands over the keys of the grand piano upstairs. The next morning, on the train together, he learns the man's name -- Alexei Berg -- and his story. When Alexei was young and living in Moscow, he was on his way to becoming a classical pianist. And he was engaged to be married. But on May 22, 1941, two days before his first solo concert, he was on his way home to his parents' apartment when a neighbor hurried past warning him not to go back. The secret police had come. And so he fled. After his fiance's family betrayed him, he took the identity of a dead Russian soldier and spend years fighting in the Soviet army. He was befriended by a General, taunted by his daughter, cast adrift without name or family ... but he has never forgotten his music.

Despite a very real poignancy, MUSIC OF A LIFE is far too short (109 pages) and undeveloped to be a truly satisfying novel. As I read I kept thinking that if Makine had spent more time on his plot and allowed it room to grow, the story could have been a winner. All the necessary elements -- danger, love, loss and rediscovery -- are present. Yet they're crammed into a few spare paragraphs and the reader is mostly told things, not shown them, between great jumps in time and place. Makine has obvious talent for description, for picking out the forgotten snapshots of life and portraying them as something strangely beautiful, but in this effort at least he lacks the ability to create an impression strong enough to last.

I wish I could recommend this little book because I really wanted to like it, but in truth I found MUSIC OF A LIFE only a rough draft, not a finished symphony, and so I can't.

This novel is lyrical, wonderully written, economical with language, and deeply emotional. In this age where post-modern writers craft 700 page monsters that are in dire need of editing (of course there are wonderful novels this size, but mostly written before 1970), here is an intimate tale that is excatly as long as the story requires. With all due respect to the two reviews below--ignore them and you won't be sorry. Their criticism reminds me of Salieri's critique of Mozart's work in Amadeus--"sire, there are too many notes"--to which the proper response here is the same--"too many, there are just the right amount". The writing here is wonderful, straightforward and most of all, lacking attitude and artifice (for another writer similarly talented, try Ha Jin). Buy it.

This book is a confusing mixture. It tells the story of a rather fascinating human monster, but gives the reader no real understanding or empathy for any of its characters. The voices of the book are too removed, too cold. The countess tormented and killed her hundreds of young women with no interest in the reality of their lives and interests; the book chronicles the killings in the same manner, and thus fails to involve the reader. Even the parallel plot line of the modern-day Drake, drawn into the mystical world of immortal evil, fails to involve the reader closely. Too much blood, pain, and perverse excitement, not enough understanding. All in all, it was lurid and adolescent.

As a graduate student in the area of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, I always go into historical novels with a bit of skepticism but also hopeful optimism. Codrescu's account of 17th century Hungary and the historical character of Countess Bathory met my optimistic hopes. The brutality, suspicion and general hardship of the time was obviously well-researched, as was the totalitarian power of the noble class which provoked peasant revolts like the one described in the book. The characters were possibly not developed enough, particularly the modern-day Count Bathory-Kereshtur about whom I would have liked to know more. But the complex psychological motivations of Elizabeth Bathory were developed quite well and in a chilling and descriptive manner. The descriptions of violent acts were perhaps a bit graphic, but relevant within the historical context for the period and place in which they occur. Overall a book definitely worth reading, but not for the squeamish.

If nothing else, this story will remain imprinted in my memory throughout my life. "The Blood Countess" is absolutely the most graphic book I have ever read (and I've been reading horror/gothic/sci fi for a long time), and yet, through all my disgust and horror, I found myself unable to look away from the scene written before me. This, I finally concluded, was not necessarily because of the innate urge for humans to gawk at car accidents and watch Jerry Springer, but because I was curiously attracted to the mad genius of Elizabeth.

Although the modern-day secondary story annoyed me with its shallowness and (mostly) irrelevance to the "true" plot, I truly admired the author's writing style, and the few moments of insight into Elizabeth's psyche touched me. Please, gentle reader, do not think that I would release a monster from its due blame - but I nearly cried the few times the Countess actually showed her vulnerability. How alone, how lost, how angry she must have felt to do such things! Her vision of reality was so skewed and disjointed that I felt I must mourn for the genius that could have done so much, but instead felt compelled to cause suffering.

The use of sexuality is extremely powerful in this novel. In my darkest dreams and nightmares, I could never have conceived of such horrible torture, and at the same time the sexual naivete of Elizabeth. The fact that so many of her victims were tortured and murdered sexually simply adds to the disturbing image of the Countess. The reader can clearly see each point at which the Countess is faced with a glimpse of her own fragility and humanity - she wavers on the brink of self-understanding, then the madness rips it from her and she resumes her ritualistic pasttimes with a newfound viciousness.

The author's perception of European witchcraft during this time in history is rather interesting - those who are familiar with "The Burning Times" as they are called in the neo-pagan communites may be shocked and horrified at the idea that women during this time had indeed incorporated the Devil into ther rituals and spells. It disgusted me, too, at first. A couple of things saved this plot-device for me: A) this is a work of (mostly) fiction, and B) It makes sense that after a few hundred years of being told that midwifery, herbal lore and women's spirituality was evil and wrong, that the women would come to believe it as well, whether they practiced it or not.

On the whole, a great story with a lot of filler. It seemed to me as if the author threw the "real-time" scenes in to fill the story to novel-length. This, I found disappointing. I should have just skipped over these parts, because they seemed unrealistic and flat.

I honestly do not know how much of Elizabeth's story is historically accurate. It may be that this novel is all fabrication and assumptions - but knowing nothing about Hungarian history, I found the intricate details fascinating. The story has a great flavor - although the explicit violence and sex may leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Although I very much admire some of Ariel Dorfman's work (especially _Death and the Maiden_ and _Heading South, Looking North_) _Konfidenz_ struck me as not only under-realized but boring even though it is only 177 pages with lots of white on its pages. The "play" is all the author's in withholding information and the novel (consisting mostly of dialogue--though it's hard to believe the dialogue adds up to nine hours of conversation--and taunts of the reader) trivializes resistance to fascism, loyalty, and world historical cataclysm. That Leon's sexual obsession may be incestuous makes it all the creepier.

Not only is this book intriguing in its storyline, but it is also intriguing in its composition: Dorfman uses several different narrative voices with great success. He puts the reader in the position of being the voyeur--watching the characters, as well as himself, the author. He also turns a voyeuristic eye on the reader, making you wonder if you, like the characters, are being watched. The novel raises issues of trust in a society where basic human rights are consistently compromised. "Private life is an illusion in our world, Barbara. When you can torture one person, private life ends for everybody else."

This short compilation of memoirs was published from the Karta Journal web site for Russian war veterans. The contributors include officers of the Spetznaz and air forces, and professional mercenaries. Basically, these are standard Soviet war memoirs: fairly impersonal accounts of battles, ambushes, casualties. Caravans of foreign weapons and jihadists constantly intercepted from Pakistan. The Afghan government forces ("tsarandoi") were considered soft targets by the rebel mujahedin ("dushmani"), and often proved to be of little help to their Soviet comrades. The book contains details of a couple of notorious massacres, in which Russian platoons were abandoned or even betrayed by their Afghan allies. And there are some curiously indifferent accounts of torture at the hands of mujahedin. Although translated from the veterans' own words, the anecdotes and interviews give little indication of their writers' emotions. The translation itself is barely adequate. The overall quality of the book is below average. It appears to have been printed on a Xerox machine. Pages alternate between text and illustrations, the latter consisting of small, badly-reproduced sketches and photos. There are approximately twenty different illos, which are repeated in series. Each one appears over a half-dozen times, apparently for the purpose of "padding" the contents. ...! Overall, these memoirs are interesting, and valuable as historical reference. ...

This book was originally written in Swedish and takes place in St. Petersburg, Russia. To me, the story about Andrei was confusing.

Andrei remembers the house he lived in when he was in his mother's stomach. When she disappears, he is taken to a children's home. Here he meets a friend, Vova, who has never met his mother because she was a dog and only wanted puppies. Andrei and his little friend leave to find Andrei's mother. He remembers she wears a blue dress and has a barrette in her hair. I'm not sure how it ended, it was unclear to me.

Sweet watercolors illustrate the boys' journey through the bustling city.

This is a very frustrating work for a beginner to try to use. It is very difficult to distinguish between a lower case "C" and an "E" as well as an "L" and an "I".

For eight years I've been scouring Bucharest and the States for a good Romanian-English dictionary. There isn't one, let alone something that could rival what Morton Benson has provided for Serbo-Croatian (publishers, take note, you might make some money in the Romanian-English niche emulating that example!!).

This particular dictionary is not the same Bantas that Editura Teora used to produce in Romania until a few years ago, but it's pretty close. Bantas' strength was always a modest one: he'd write dictionaries that had more words than anyone else's, but the number of words, let alone the brief, sometimes dubious, and usually British-colloquialism-centered translations and spelling mistakes, still left a great deal to be desired. You won't find grammatical help with Romanian endings (i.e., something as necessary as plural nouns!!), mutations, or verb conjugation forms at all here, nothing more than the gender of nouns. And the printing quality/typeface, as with so many Romanian dictionaries, really is sloppy and erratic in quality (although Hippocrenes are even worse).

The only other alternatives for students of the language (as opposed to tourists) I've seen worth considering are all available only in Bucharest/Romania and are as follows:

1) Other Bantas versions, but the quality is getting slimmed down over time/editions in the editing of the smaller versions, forcing you to get the bigger, more expensive hardback of equally lousy quality but a few thousand more words, and going both ways - Romanian to English and back.

2) Irina Panovf's dictionaries--far fewer words, but actually has useful grammatical information, although translations are still erratic. If you see one, buy it. I first learned Romanian using the old Panovf for grammar, and the old Bantas for translation/vocabulary, in the early days. As far as I know, the best edition is out of print, and increasingly extremely rare at street kiosks and used book shops in Bucharest. I think there's a newer version, but if memory serves, it's smaller than the old one.

3) A dictionary by Georgeta Nichifor, roughly comparable to the old Bantas', with better typeface, better translations (generally speaking) and spelling, fewer words but perhaps a tad more expressions and occasional hints at prepositions to use with verbs, and with about the same problems in lack of attention to grammatical changes. Nichifor is sort of the "best of the rest" on display in new book shops, at this writing. For tourists, Nichifor would do.

4) Romanian to Romanian dictionaries sometimes have all the grammar changes you need as well as definitions enlightening for the non-Romanian with a good command of the language (not for beginning students, obviously). For long-term students of Romanian, it's worth searching for a good used one in the numerous "anticariat" shops all over Bucharest. For a new Romanian to Romanian dictionary, the mother of them all is the huge, dark blue "DEX" (Dictionar Explicativ)--kind of the one-volume limit for a foreigner who does not want to buy and transport some 10-volume set published by the Romanian Academy or whomever. Still, you won't beat the DEX for vocabulary size and grammar.

Needless to say, you may well end up in my situation: I have about five dictionaries plus another six phraseological and synonym dictionaries simply because none fill every need. It taxes your patience to learn the language across three "regular" dictionaries until your skills develop enough to get by on Bantas and maybe one other for rarer words, but that's life in this particular niche until most of the English professors and their editors in Bucharest start producing foreign language dictionaries worth the name. To be fair, they at least outdo the usual trash published by Hippocrene.

This dictionary is the most commonly-used English-Romanian dictionary in the US and in Romania, and it is definitely adequate for a tourist or for someone spending a short-term (several months) stay in Romania. The more serious language student will find, however, that many everyday Romanian words are excluded at the expense of many seldom-used words. In addition, the dictionary fails to reflect the numerous spelling changes that have occurred in the Romanian language since 1989, and "British English" is the standard English used in the dictionary.