Kangaroo

An absurdist farce about the life of Fan Fanych, alias Etcetera; a thief in Stalinist Russia who is sent to the gulags for the supposed crime of raping an aging kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo. Narrated by the same criminal shortly after his release it begins with an elaborate interrogation and show trial where the prisoner begins to doubt his own memory. Followed by many years in the camps with a cohort of early Bolsheviks and his reminiscing of earlier escapades (Picking Hitler's pocket, and eavesdropping at Yalta, etc.)Yes, this is another story of a russian writer who has suffered through the senseless paranoia of Stalin's judicial system, yet the writing is original and the dialogue crude: I kept thinking of a Kathy Acker novel. The whole carries you along and definitely makes this an interesting companion to Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, etc.