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A review by clairen
Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War by Owen Matthews
2.0
I was finding this an interesting, if stylistically a bit paint-by-the-numbers, story of a Russian family and the struggles of the author's Welsh father and Russian mother to be together.
But then Matthews started talking about his own time in Eltsin Russia and I read something that angered me so much that I spent the rest of the book (which, by the way, becomes increasingly boring as we go from the story of Matthews' grandfather and mother, to that of his father) waiting for it to be over. Specifically, he mentions a girlfriend he had at the time, a Russian woman named Yana who, after he lost contact with her, was raped and murdered. While reminiscing about this woman and the tumultuous times Russia was experiencing, Matthews muses: "it seemed right, somehow, that Russia swallowed her in the end" and "if she'd been character in my novel I would have killed her off, too". Wow. The nineties were super violent in Russia, and a young woman was murdered, but at least he gets to write about it in his book?
And this is part of a bigger problem I have with the book, and especially the parts where Matthews writes about himself: the tone-deafness of it all. He is very much a foreigner in Russia (and freely admits to it), but that's no excuse in my mind for the way he speaks of some things: even the second war in Chechnya, which he covered as a journalist, is just a catalyst for his own personal epiphanies; and while I understand that this is not a book about politics, or about Chechnya, it still comes off as superficial and leaves a bad taste.
But then Matthews started talking about his own time in Eltsin Russia and I read something that angered me so much that I spent the rest of the book (which, by the way, becomes increasingly boring as we go from the story of Matthews' grandfather and mother, to that of his father) waiting for it to be over. Specifically, he mentions a girlfriend he had at the time, a Russian woman named Yana who, after he lost contact with her, was raped and murdered. While reminiscing about this woman and the tumultuous times Russia was experiencing, Matthews muses: "it seemed right, somehow, that Russia swallowed her in the end" and "if she'd been character in my novel I would have killed her off, too". Wow. The nineties were super violent in Russia, and a young woman was murdered, but at least he gets to write about it in his book?
And this is part of a bigger problem I have with the book, and especially the parts where Matthews writes about himself: the tone-deafness of it all. He is very much a foreigner in Russia (and freely admits to it), but that's no excuse in my mind for the way he speaks of some things: even the second war in Chechnya, which he covered as a journalist, is just a catalyst for his own personal epiphanies; and while I understand that this is not a book about politics, or about Chechnya, it still comes off as superficial and leaves a bad taste.