Volume 36, Number 14 · September 28, 1989
Betrayal
By Viktor Erofeyev
The Russia House
by John le Carré
Knopf, 353 pp., $19.95
Russians have a saying that life is richer than any book can be. I have always found this ironic, since life in Russia tends to be dull and gray, notwithstanding the numerous bloodlettings in its history. If Russians have loved literature so passionately, it is perhaps because they have used it to forget themselves, to outwit the tedium of life. Today, however, I find much less irony in that silly saying, since I am writing about John le Carré's new novel, The Russia House, in a country that has never fully come into being, a different Russia, which is now emerging, and whose future is still uncertain. And in its unique confusion of old and new, contemporary Russian life has a richness that seems to resist description.
Review, 3608 words
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