A Keyhole Glimpse of Madness 
 Welcome to Absurdistan! Long before Gary Shteyngart took the name for his 2006 novel, commentators in the former Soviet Union had been using it to describe a state of political life becoming increasingly like the Theater of the Absurd. And the absurdity begins with Soviet Russia itself; what else can you call a system that kills, imprisons, or terrorizes most of its subjects to preserve a vision of Socialist Utopia some time in the future? As one of the characters in Marra's collection of connected stories remarks (in an official confession, no less), "the future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present." 
 The 72-page title story is placed as an interlude between "Side A" and "Side B" of the book; the whole thing is conceived as an audio cassette, which is also one of the many objects connecting different stories. In one part of it, two boys spy on two gangsters about to execute a third in a litter-strewn forest made of disintegrating fake trees. The pistol fails to operate, and the gunmen have to ask their victim to tell them how to load it. Later, one of the boys remarks: "I'd never imagined that something as solemn and final as death could be this idiotic. It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life's madness: the institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano." It is as good a summary of this book as any other, and if it intrigues you, you may well enjoy it. For me, however, the quality of the absurd soon began to wear thin. I prefer to have some solid ground under my feet, so that I may rejoice in love, lament over death, and see relationships between human beings as based on honesty and trust. Black comedy, I find, works best in stable environments that are not a comedy in themselves. 
 That said, there is a lot of invention in these stories, and Marra is very clever in how he connects them up. Although most of them are set in the former Soviet Union after the breakup, the opening story, "The Leopard," is set in 1937 at the height of the Stalinist purges. Its protagonist is a painter employed in doctoring pictures to remove people who could not of course have been there, since they have been declared non-persons, and occasionally painting in people whose achievements should surely have been recognized but unaccountably were not. So he paints out the figure of a once-celebrated ballerina since executed as a spy, and paints the figure of a regional apparatchik into an otherwise empty meadow in a 19th-century landscape near Grozny. Both ballerina and landscape will figure in the next story, "Granddaughters." This will add more objects and figures that will in turn be referenced in several of the seven stories that follow, sometimes with strikingly ironic results. It is as though a network of fictional coincidences is the only thing that can make sense of the absurdity of life. An excellent point, if so, and it puts Marra very much in the Russian satirical tradition. But I tend to have the same problems with Russian writers also--which I suppose is a compliment in its way.