This book — the title is from Pasternak —is billed as ‘literary fiction’. The narrator, a Russian gambler and drinker who has settled in the West, leaves his rich American wife of two decades when he falls hard for a Russian prostitute he meets in London (‘the first and last love of my life’).
Andrei Navrozov has worked as an editor and journalist (he has written for this magazine) and published several books, including a poetry collection with the same title as his new volume. As the subtitle indicates, he and his narrator are keen on self-deprecation — a sure sign that one thinks oneself frightfully clever.
The £300-an-hour hooker, Olga, is 25 when the narrator meets her, and he is 20 years her senior, a man wearing ‘the perennial plumage of optimistic duplicity’. He enjoys exploiting ‘the Lebensraum of [Olga’s] unconcealed social innocence’.
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