Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Be careful about acquiring this effort on the basis of short synopses or seeming recommendations that you may read. You might get an unduly favourable impression, as I did myself, of what is in store for you. It is neither one thing nor the other, as Churchill said when he saw the name Bossom in a list of members of parliament. It is neither fact nor fiction, and to call it autobiography or depiction of a culture would involve a huge strain of either term. It is not really even a book in my own opinion.
What it resembles is a serial appearing every 7 days in some weekly magazine. When I was a boy there used to be several such magazines for my age-group, although the stories and events that they serialised were of course a lot more wholesome and edifying than this is. They were also shorter, and if you are determined to grit your teeth and finish this one you have 440 or so pages to cope with. Fortunately the quality of the writing is not a problem, it being competent enough. There are enough real difficulties, one being the corny narration of the supposedly quaint and purportedly interesting values and rites of this alleged community of Siberian criminals with their own codes of honour and conduct. When I was young the weekly mags that I have just mentioned used to fascinate us with tales of elite schools whose interns went through equally pointless pantomimes. We were intended to gawp at this exclusive nonsense like children with our noses pressed against the window of a shop whose wares were out of our price-range, and the whole atmosphere of it all came back to me forcibly when I read `The umbilical cord of newborn babies is cut with a pike, which must first have been left overnight in a place where cats sleep.' That gem is on p 31, but believe me, I really did struggle through to the bitter end, overcoming a powerful momentary sense that this was as much as I could endure.
It is all about the life and times (or deaths and times) of a Siberian community uprooted to the region of Transnistria. Transnistria is a strip of riverbank between the Ukraine and Moldova, and I believe that it declared independence in 1990, although this has been recognised only by Abharzia and South Ossetia, which in their turn have yet to achieve widespread recognition. The level of violence would have made the Kray twins quail, but, oddly, I experienced no sense of disgust because I believed very little of what I was reading. I don't doubt that it is all based on the author's background and experience, but it is blatant romancing. There is surprisingly little sex in the story, but if that is what you are looking for start at p 286, which inaugurates 20 or so pages of detailed descriptions of male rapes in a prison.
I can see no point in fretting over accuracy or verisimilitude, as these are manifestly not what this is all about. On p 79, for instance, I read that `in present-day Russia hardly anyone knows about the deportation of the Siberians to Transnistria.' That might be, I reflected, because it never happened, as a reliable source informs me. Even my own minimal grasp of the epoch is enough to let me correct the text on p 204, where the author seemingly commits himself to the belief that Yugoslavia was part of the Soviet bloc.
I hope and believe that that's a fair summary. If you wish to claim otherwise, you must at least read the lot from start to finish, as I genuinely did. It can be done, but it's a challenge.
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Product Description:
A vivid, shocking, at times poetic revelation of a world we never imagined existed. Siberian Education is a real-life Eastern Promises seen through the eyes of a boy growing up in the close-knit community of the Urkas, descendants of criminals relocated from Siberia to the banks of the Dniester River, between Moldavia and Ukraine, in the 1930s. A tale of an extreme boyhood - violent, governed by rules of honour passed down through legend and taught via elaborate and mysterious tattoos, and ultimatedly doomed to disappear amidst post-Soviet capitalist gangsterism: an utterly unique look at a vanished society from someone who knew it intimately, even though he is not yet 30 years old.
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