Maybe Not A Ten Best, But A Most Renowned????????????????

                                     I have to say, between "A Gentleman In Moscow," which I read this year, and this absorbing novel, Russia is having something of a literary renaissance.   Only it isn't Russian authors writing about their country, but Americans writing about Russian experiences through their own observations, which, most likely, are vastly different from the residents themselves.

                                      Of course, the greats--Tolstoy, Dostoevsky--a referenced, but "A Terrible Country" is, at heart, a rather simple story about two brothers, Andrea and Dimar, born in Russian, but who came to the States with their parents and were raised there. Now, Andrei, a failed academic, has been ordered, by his more capitalistic and successful sibling, Dimar, to go back to Moscow, and care, for at least a time, for their aging grandmother.

                                      The relationship that Andrei and Granny develop is touching, and the plight of caring for someone losing her grasp on reality--she has dementia--moves Andrei deeply. He also, during the course of things, finds brief romance, a political group, a hockey team, and a life of his own in a country the grandmother keeps calling "terrible."  By the novel's end, Andrei comes to realize that Russia may not be such a terrible place.

                                       The scenes between Andrei and his grandmother are the most touching, as are those between she and her still remaining friends.  She laments throughout, the idea of being alone, since most people in her life have left her, and her lamentations touched me; with my parents both gone, and contemporaries getting older, and some gone already, I am coming to that point.  I understand how she feels.  It is a point one thinks will never come--until it does!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                       Yet, for all I have said, it is not depressing.  Witty, hopeful, but unbearably poignant, it could foreshadow an American-Russian literary renaissance.  We shall see what develops over time.

                                         Don't miss this very different literary Russian experience!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!