A few good jokes in there, but who knew getting drunk could be so boooooooring ( )

meesterwerk : de ultieme drankroman ( )

Re-read this one. Brutal and hilarious. I guess people describe it as an Anti-epic. Reminds me of Gogol. ( )

This grail was coveted for years; what followed was a classic Jon Faith faint moment when I saw it on a shelf. I read it in a blur, which may have been a problem. It is an effective device to have the dissolute protagonist repeat and finally divulge, but it didn't click for me. This book PROFOUNDLY desverves another look. ( )

This didn't quite work for me, although I can't quite put my finger on what I didn't like -- it is an amusing tale (it helps if one has modest knowledge of Russian culture and literature), but particularly towards the end the story felt rather unstructured and thematically didn't really come to any kind of satisfying resolution, although that may kind of be the point in this case. It reminded me a bit of Gogol's "Dead Souls", with its hapless hero travelling aimlessly across the countryside, drinking and conversing with people on the way or with his imaginary angels about the Russian experience. In this case, our hero is actually trying to get somewhere, but in his state of drunkenness he is hardly able to find the train station, and even once on his way, his attention seems little focused on the destination. This may, I suppose, be an appropriate description of the Soviet experiment in the late 1960s, but for me as a reader it made the plot rather unfulfilling.