New year's first...

...book. As I was coming back from Germany I finished my first book for 2007. No, it's not Figes' monograph about the russian revolution yet, curiously, it has something to do with it and it's called "The Commissariat of Enlightenment". The book is a novel taking place right before, during and after the same revolution, having as main character a russian man called Gribshin, an early cinematographer believing in the power of the images of changing history and people, Stalin and a professor who invented a revolutionary way to preserve a human body, Vorobev.

It's a hard book, both in language (for the first time in a long time I had serious roubles in reading a book in english, and that is right before my TOEFL exam, scary) and in atmosphere, especially the second part, taking place in the violence of the civil war and in the claustrophobic year followed the communists' victory and consolidation and eventually the last day of Lenin and Stalin's triumph. Yet it's a little gem, compelling and extremely well written, full of characters that pass by and sometimes get lost in the whirlwind of events of that period, leaving you, despite their brief appearance, with the immense curiosity of what happened to them.

The Commissariat is Klefus' first work, bought by my father second hand I think, and already my serial reader nature is moving me to find other books by him... if only I didn't have another meter and a half of books waiting for me on the shelf...