The Book Bump

First Published: 2014 (for the edition I read)
Author: Owen Matthews
Original Language: English
Reading Language: French
Translated by: Karine Reignier-Guerre
Genre: Literary/Historical
My rating: 2.5/5

I spent my entire summer with these characters, and I have to say… I hardly remember anything. It’s hard to summarise what actually happens in this book.

Roman Lambert is a British expat living in Moscow in the 1990s. He enjoys the post-Soviet decadence until he meets Sonia, a tragically beautiful woman. Their relationship blooms until Roman commits a heinous crime—one for which his beloved Sonia will never forgive him.

This book is a curiosity. I found it in one of my little village book box libraries, and I must admit, the blurb intrigued me from the get-go.

In Russia, I’ve loved, and I’ve killed. And I discovered that of the two, love is worse.

How could you not be hooked by such a statement?

However, the novel didn’t live up to its blurb.

The plot is fuzzy, and the pacing is excruciatingly slow. For most of the novel, I didn’t know what was happening, except Roman was living his best life in Moscow. Any potential action was lost in descriptions of Moscow, its inhabitants, and their decadent behaviour.

The characters all seem clichés of themselves, with very little character development. Despite being part Russian and living there with his Russian girlfriend, Roman fails to learn anything about the Russian way of life.

There are so many secondary characters (Katia, Dimitri, Pound, just to name a few…) and micro subplots that it’s impossible to keep up with who’s who and what’s going on. It felt like a mishmash of many different excerpts of stories strung together in a semi-coherent novel.

I was expecting some dramatic takeaway from this novel: some higher knowledge about post-Soviet Russia, a true insight into what life was like for that generation, adapting to capitalism and consumerism. But even here, I felt I was left hanging.

There is a lot to admire about the book, the prose, the knowledge of Russia, the history… but unfortunately it wasn’t for me.