Tsar of Love and Techno

Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra

Sometimes you read a book and you are astounded by the humanity of it.  The Tsar of Love and Techno is Anthony Marra’s second published novel.  I say that because I can’t believe he has only really written this and Constellation of Vital Phenomena.  He’s too good for just two. 

As in Constellation of Vital Phenomena, we are again in Chechnya and in this new book, Tsar of Love and Techno, we begin in deep tunnels with a man whose job it is to censor photos and paintings.  Take out faces of believed dissidents.  But as he does this, one day he decides to take out one face,  and put another somewhere in.  It’s the face of his brother. He inserts the face of his brother, whose very image was ordered destroyed.  Eventually, as many people are in 1930’s Russia, he is coerced to confess a collaboration with one of the subjects of his censorship.

Slowly we are taken through the lives of nine people who are quietly dissident in small controllable ways, some more successfully than others. Lives in Siberia and Russia who are connected to each other.  And always there is the painting of a landscape, a thread that runs through and ties these nine together.

We don’t often know what life is like, how it is endured, in secretive countries.  But Mr. Marra tells us.

What’s amazing is the humanity  in Marra’s books.  If you don’t feel for the people by page 10 you  must put the book down because you will never get it. 

I was given this book to ready by Blogging for Books in exchange for my opinion.   

One word - excellent.

Kitchen unveiling!

OK, folks, this is the before and after of the kitchen.  Notice again, as in everything in this house, it was Coca-Cola brown and orange.  There was a strange kidney shaped table built in next to the stove but it cut off the kitchen from the pantry, and it covered half of the doorway into the dining room. So, as you can see by the mess, (this was moving in day,) that table was the first thing to go. It opened the kitchen into a space I haven't ever had in a kitchen, not in 41 years!

And now.  I just noticed one of the glass door cupboards in open and I'm a little too lazy to go take a different picture.  As I said before, yellow was never on the color spectrum for me but it makes me smile every time I walk in the room.

Friend Barb said, "Why haven't you blogged this bathroom??? 

So, this is the before picture.  The picture is off the iPad and I can't resize it but you get the idea. Carpet and steps to the tub!  You walked up two steps to get to the rim of the tub and then you're supposed to step into a wet tub and survive to see another day.  No shower in this one, but big heavy teal curtains anyway.  Teal is NOT my color.  It's right there with orange in the don't pile.

 

We took out the steps when the carpet was torn out but discovered they must have been original to the house design because the side of the tub wasn't glazed.  So, my idea was to do a mosaic in the broken Polish pottery that didn't survive the move. Taking the steps out increased the size of the room considerably, too.

The tile man who came to fix the wall tiles that were damaged when the steps were taken out said he could do the mosaic.  But there isn't a single piece of Polish pottery in it!  When he arrived I gave him the bird tiles I found at a junk shop for $1.00 each and four soup bowls out of the cupboard.  And all of the Polish pottery .I told him I had no design, no plan, no recommendations for him.  Just to do what would look nice.  So he cut the picture out of the bottom of the soup bowls and they share the side of the tub.  The thick border at the top is the rim of those bowls and the stripe border at the bottom is another soup bowl I gave him from the cupboard.  The Polish pottery just didn't fit with his plan and I love his plan so it's all good.

So, that's it!  As far as we are concerned the only thing to do now is dust and vacuum.  We are done with what we are going to do to make this house ours.