I mean, a personal predilection for just a little bit of pretension, for the fluency with literature and the literati, definitely does have an impact on my opinion of Sergio Pitol - lists of names and works and influences and times that are not known to me make me a bit jealous and admiring. I think without a little bit of that, you could get a bit fed up with this book and likely the whole of his Trilogy of Memory - although how you have gotten past The Art of Flight to this sequel is a bit beyond me.

Anyways this is a wonderful melange of biographical travel, literary and artistic criticism, sociopolitical insight into the latter USSR and perestroika, and involuntary memory à la Proust. A quick foray from Prague to Tbilisi via Leningrad and later Moscow leads us through museums and discussions and performances with an occasional snapshot of a character, bits and pieces of Pitols past slipping through the cracks here and there; disjointed and insightful, with some sort of logic-defying cohesion that I guess must only point to the one static, center point of Pitol himself. I found it pretty enjoyable! Although not as good as The Art of Flight. I look forward to The Magician of Vienna.