Wladimir Kaminer

An entertaining, ironic look back at the experience of growing up in Soviet Russia in the 70s and 80s. Amongst other things, we get more than we ever wanted to know about Soviet underwear, tips for Pioneers on achieving their production quota for helping old ladies across the street, and a guide to getting a brand new Lada car into working order (bring plenty of 5 rouble notes for the technical inspection). This isn't quite a Russian version of Ostalgie, though. Whilst poking fun at its show more idiocies, Kaminer doesn't try to conceal that the Soviet government was a corrupt, oppressive dictatorship, but he does remind us that the majority of ordinary Russians found ways to live with the system, as people always do, however difficult things are. show less

As with Bill Bryson (who does for the British and Americans pretty much the same thing Kaminer does for the Russians and Germans), Kaminer gets rapidly less funny the more of his books you read: he's something of a one-trick pony. All the same, he's a fluent and entertaining writer, and there's a lot of good stuff in this collection of essays about the collision between the romance of travel as an idea and the reality of other places.

He writes about the disappointment other people have show more experienced in going to Paris, about the decline of Russian illusions about the American Dream, and about his own experience of visiting Copenhagen without seeing Denmark (he gets sucked into the pothead culture of Christiania and spends three weeks listening to the same conversation every night). He also tells us about his friend who — despite Kaminer's warnings that there was nothing to see there — went to the Crimea to look for traces of Joseph Beuys and discovers a whole culture of local people who have reinvented themselves as descendants of the Crim Tatars who (supposedly) looked after Beuys when his aircraft crashed, and who now live off the flocks of German art-historians who come to the region every summer to spend their research grants. We clearly shouldn't take everything we read here entirely literally... show less

Short, rude and funny. It strikes me that I haven’t read many books about the last years of the Soviet Union – the early stages of the Perestroika, before the collapse was imminent. Kaminer’s autobiographical account of his days as a an apolitical slacker in a society everybody has stopped believing in feels like a story more or less untold. Young Vladimir isn’t really doing anything of value to anyone, much less society, but has no problems slipping through the holes in the net. show more Even KGB isn’t what it used to be anymore.

Kaminer acts as tour manager for some underground rock groups on tour to living rooms in other cities. He lives in the woods in Latvia for a few summers. He even gets a weird job of making sure a herd of oxen on a train get to Kazakhstan alright. And finally, he even joins the army – a lethargic suicide air defense squad in a swamp outside Moscow.

This was a fun and fast read, built as a string of episodes. I especially enjoyed the hilarious bits about Kaminer’s time at the theatre as dramaturg assistant, but giggled loudly throughout this book. It’s a shame it doesn’t seem to be translated into English. I can really see how many of my LT friends would enjoy this! show less

Endlich, mein erster Kaminer :-) Es soll zwar deutlich bessere Bücher von ihm geben, mir hat das Dschungelbuch dennoch gefallen. In kurzen Geschichten beschreibt er die Städte, Menschen und/oder Erlebnisse, die ihm auf seinen Lesereisen begegnen. Obwohl er sich meist nur wenige Stunden vor Ort aufhält, gelingt es ihm vielfach, das Wesentliche zu benennen (ich denke beispielsweise an Kiel, Osnabrück und Northeim, gilt aber auch für viele andere). Da mir rund drei Viertel der show more beschriebenen Örtlichkeiten mehr oder weniger gut bekannt sind, muss ich sagen: Der Wiedererkennungswert ist recht hoch - und das steigert die Freude beim Lesen beträchtlich. Allzuviel Tiefgang sollte man nicht erwarten, dazu sind die Geschichten einfach zu kurz.
Zusammengefasst: Menschen, denen die vorkommenden Lokalitäten bekannt sind, werden ihre Freude an diesem Buch haben; für die Anderen mag es etwas dröge sein. show less