Stamp Album

Winner of the Russian Booker Prize, Stamp Album is a pastiche of memories "illustrated" with family documents, newspaper clippings, slogans, letters, children's rhymes and irreverences. Sergeyev slips back and forth in time -- before, during and after the war -- as well as in place -- between the communal apartment where he lives in Moscow (the best room is occupied by the eccentric widow of a French merchant, an erstwhile prostitute now bedridden with gout: before the Revolution the entire apartment belonged to her) and the dacha where he spends his summers and where this mosaic begins. With photographic clarity and overarching logic, Sergeyev recreates the very texture and perversity of Soviet life.