Tag: adventure

Book: Vayner brothers “The Age of Mercy”

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Ever since childhood, I’ve loved watching detective stories on TV. Later that hobby spilled over into books too (I wore my Sherlock Holmes volumes out back in that same childhood). And among detective stories, I always singled out films and series about the Soviet police fighting the criminal underworld. You can’t not mention epic staples like The Experts Are Investigating and Born by the Revolution.

But one particular favorite for viewers was the four-part 1979 TV film The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed, directed by Stanislav Govorukhin and featuring a wonderful cast. Vladimir Vysotskiy brilliantly portrayed the tough Moscow Criminal Investigation Department detective Zheglov, while Vladimir Konkin played the very young Volodya Sharapov, who joined the force right after the war, where he had commanded a reconnaissance unit. For Konkin, this role was probably the most significant in his entire career—he never played anything else quite as memorable. And the characters outgrew the film itself long ago—making their way into jokes, songs (like Lyube’s “Atas”), and everyday culture.

At the heart of the story is the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department’s fight against a brutal, elusive gang known as the Black Cat, which terrorized postwar Moscow.

I loved this film too. I’ve rewatched it countless times since, and every year I noticed something I hadn’t caught before, simply because I was too young back then. What’s more, as I got older, even my attitude toward the characters began to change (but more on that later).

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Book: Boris Akunin “The Pit”

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I haven’t read all of Boris Akunin’s work, but I’ve read a fairly substantial part of it—enough to say that the series about Erast Fandorin is probably the most significant thing the author has come up with so far.

And so, when the hero’s life path started nearing its end, true fans were very saddened. The thing is, in my view the later books in the series fell far short of the first ten. Still, they were bought and read as soon as they came out. And when it seemed like Erast Petrovich was finished once and for all, first there was Just Masa, telling the story of his constant companion, and then suddenly The Pit came out, bringing back the wonderful detective himself.

The narrative throws us into a time when Fandorin is still a long way from death, but in Russia he’s already persona non grata, so he makes his living investigating cases in Europe. For example, together with Sherlock Holmes he fights Arsène Lupin. Yes, that story appeared earlier in the collection Jade Rosary Beads, and now the author takes us back to the very end of that investigation to tell us what happened next to our heroes.

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Book: J.K.Rowling, John Tiffany & Jack Thorne “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”

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Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is, first, a play—and second, it was written with J. K. Rowling’s involvement, but still not by her alone. Both of those facts affect the way it’s presented. A play doesn’t really need vivid descriptions or direct access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings. You can’t show all that directly on stage; interpretation is the job of a specific director and a specific production. And having two co-writers as well also makes a difference.

Chronologically, the story begins almost exactly where the last novel of the main series ended—where, in the epilogue, we were shown the now-grown-up Harry, Hermione, and Ron seeing their children off to Hogwarts. Among them is Harry’s second son, Albus Severus Potter.

Up to this point, I hadn’t written reviews of any Harry Potter book. I mean, why would I, when tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people have read them already, so everyone knows what they are and what they’re about. But with this play I decided to make an exception.

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Book: Robert A. Heinlein “Orphans of the Sky”

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Well, since we’re on a classics streak, after the Soviet Those Who Survive it’s time to talk about Robert A/ Heinlein’s novel Orphans of the Sky.

Originally, the book was written as two separate parts, published independently as novellas in Astounding Science Fiction magazine back in 1941: Universe and Common Sense. Only twenty years later, in 1963, were the two novellas published together as a single work under the title Orphans of the Sky. Russian readers know the book as Stepsons of the Universe, as it was rendered as Stepsons by its first Russian translator, Yuri Zarakhovich.

For Soviet readers, the novel was first published in Zarakhovich’s translation in 1977 (incidentally, the year I was born), serialized across five issues of Vokrug Sveta (Around the World) magazine. I don’t know the exact reason, but for that magazine publication Zarakhovich produced an abridged translation. Nevertheless, it was this version that became the canonical one for many years and continued to be reprinted right up until 2003. Only in 2003 did a complete Russian translation of the novel appear, by Elena Belyaeva and Alexander Mityushkin. Neither of them were professional translators, yet their work still received an award. In addition to restoring the full text, they also slightly revised some terminology that had become “familiar” over decades of reprints of Zarakhovich’s version.

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Book: Kir Bulychev “Those Who Survive”

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Kir Bulychev is most often regarded as a children’s science-fiction writer. When people hear his name, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the adventures of Alisa Selezneva.

However, Kir Bulychev wrote many works that are anything but children’s literature. Among them, probably the most well-known is the novel Those Who Survive, originally published in Russian under the title Posyolok (The Settlement in English). Initially, Bulychev wrote only the first part of the story, titled The Pass, which was published as a standalone novella in 1980. Only eight years later, in 1988, he wrote the second part, Beyond the Pass, and only then did the book become a single novel known as Posyolok.

The story is built around a spaceship that crashed on a distant planet many years ago. The planet is not exactly hostile; rather, it is simply what an alien world should be — not Earth. It has its own flora and fauna, which were never meant to coexist with humans. As a result, survival is extremely difficult for the crash survivors. The entire world is against them, and after the catastrophe almost none of the technological marvels of the future remain. Those who avoided immediate death are forced to focus solely on survival in this unwelcoming environment — and even that does not always succeed.

Over the years, they have become increasingly primitive in terms of everyday life, yet they have learned how to survive. Children born on this planet know nothing of any other life; they learn about it only through lessons in the small school of the Settlement. Even those who were born before the crash were very young at the time and remember almost nothing of life “before.”

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Book: Jonas Jonasson “The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared”

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Swedish writers have been pleasantly surprising me lately. Not that I’ve read a lot of them, but first Fredrik Backman became an insanely “tasty” discovery for me a few years ago, and now Jonas Jonasson. There’s something about these Swedes. They seem to write about life, yet they do it lightly, beautifully, and with touches of humor.

For many years Jonas Jonasson worked as a journalist and television producer (just like my wife), and then suddenly decided to drastically change his life and write a book. And that book sold like crazy—first in Sweden, and then around the world.

The book titled The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared really does begin with the main character, the old man Allan—whose 100th birthday is literally minutes away from being celebrated at the retirement home—deciding to escape through the window. And to get far away before anyone notices he’s gone. What follows is a chain of unforeseen events, in which the old man almost immediately finds himself in possession of a suitcase with a million, a whole group of companions, and a small trail of bodies behind him.

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