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The Tsar of Love and Techno



Anthony Marra - The Author

"A half-century had passed—and with it the Soviet Union, Marxism-Leninism, the infallible tenets of communism that had undergirded her faith—and now she found herself the citizen of a nation politically enfeebled and spiritually desolated enough to permit prayer to an authority more omnipotent than its government. But how do you trade your gods so late in life? Six decades of Soviet-speak had left her vocabulary crowded with slogans. She had little practice articulating the complexities of individual desire."

From The Tsar Of Love And Techno - Wolf Of White Forest

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“I received an ARC of this book from the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, thank you!��

There’s a certain point when human behavior is so absurd it just becomes compulsively funny.
That is part of what I found delightful about Anthony Marra’s ingenious collection of short stories. The other aspect I very much enjoyed, was the feeling of putting together a puzzle, with each story providing some of the missing pieces until it was finally complete.

The best description I read of this book came from Jason Sheehan, food editor for the Philadelphia magazine, he described them as "... a novel, really, because it is one story...it's a story passed like a baton from one teller to another; a hundred-year relay made up of dreams crushed and lives cut short".

Marra who, as an undergraduate lived in St. Petersburg for a few years, had the opportunity to interact with Russian soldiers that were at the time, involved in the ongoing Russian war in Chechnya.

The stories on The Tsar of Love and Techno, are cleverly structured, bizarre, almost surreal. They encompass decades of Soviet history, from the Cold War to the dissolution of the USSR right up to modern-day Putin’s Russia.

The geographical settings include Siberia and St. Petersburg, but its Chechnya and its capital, Grozny that are at the center of most of them.

Marra drops enough cultural and political landmarks to help the reader recognize the historical context, but I personally appreciated The Tsar of Love and Techno more for its ability to recreate the Russian pathos than for giving me History lessons.

So here's a brief summary of the stories that most stood out for me:

FROM SIDE A

The Leopard
Tells the story of Roman who as a “correction artist�� working for the “Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation��, air brushes photographic images removing political figures that are undesirable to the government.
It shows the ridiculous extremes totalitarian states would go to in trying to control and in this case literately re-write history.

The Grozny Tourist Bureau
The narrator of this story is asked to become the director of his city's freshly launched Tourism Bureau. His first mission is to design a brochure that would lure tourists to Grozny, a city named by the United Nations as “the most devastated city on Earth��. His efforts to re-brand it are preposterous but utterly hilarious.


FROM SIDE B

Wolf of White Forest
Tells the story of Vera, a 63 year-old woman whose childhood was derailed when an innocent comment she made about her mother’s pie baking, lead to her arrest and ultimately to her execution.

A Temporary Exhibition
A con artist convinces gullible Americans to provide their social securities, birth dates and all sort of personal information in order to run his very “successful�� phishing business. Explaining to his father how and why the scam works, Sergei uses an analogy, “You remember how Mom had that embroidered pillow? When she got upset, she'd shout into it and no one would hear her. That's Facebook." This story was a riot!

The End- Outer Space
A veritable literary opera, a nostalgic story that pays tribute to an era of cosmonautic Russian ambitions and frustrated aspirations.
“We were patriots, victory was simple, declares Kolya, “the last living member of the species would be a Soviet citizen��.

You can almost hear in the background, Bum Ba-Da-Da Dum Bum, Dum Dum Dum!



Soviet Soyuz Capsule landing in harsh conditions - Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, Moscow

I felt in love with Marra’s imagination, his disparate characters with their tongue-in-cheek banter and the vulnerabilities he gives even to those alpha-male soldiers living under the most deplorable conditions in war-ridden regions.

The Tsar of Love and Techno is a beautiful contemplation on the good/evil nature in all of us, the transcendent power of art and the horrific, perhaps irreversible consequences of polluting the environment on the only planet we have.

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I absolutely love the retro, ultra psychedelic cover of The Tsar of Love and Techno. I was recently telling a friend that as someone who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, I spent plenty of hours mixing tapes for my friends and family, so this brings sweet memories!

Marra, who as part of the Millennial generation probably grew up using a different type of audio format, created a Spotify techno playlist which he says “mirrors the overall movement of the book��.

You can listen to the mix