Stalin's Nose: Travels Around the Bloc - Hardcover

MacLean, Rory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316542393 ISBN 13: 9780316542395

Publisher: Little Brown & Co, 1993

Synopsis

The author shares his experiences traveling around Eastern Europe, and shares darkly humorous accounts of what life was like under communism

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

The British author proves to be more novelist than journalist here, leaving readers without referents to guide them through thickets of symbolism. For example, what is one to make of the death of MacLean's beloved Russian uncle Peter, a high-level KGB operative who, while already mortally ill, was killed by a falling pig in his Potsdam yard hard by the now-crumbling Wall, which once served as his garden trellis? And how did the lethal pig come to be called Winston? (Named after MacLean's esteemed countryman who made a bad deal at Yalta?) MacLean has been summoned into the twilight-of-empire bloc by his widowed aunt Zita to attend Peter's funeral, and also to escort her to Budapest to replace her lost false teeth. As they journey in Zita's unreliable auto, accompanied by the Communist pig Winston, we meet relatives and friends, believers and the enslaved. Providing the plot for MacLean's morality tale are the travelers' detours to Prague, to Zita's family homestead in Slovakia--where her antagonistic sister Vera, politically estranged from her for 40 years, has come to bury the recently released body of her RAF pilot husband, killed in WW II--through Poland and Romania and ultimately to Moscow. The book is best read as though it is fiction, its black humor and poignancy made even more affecting by its abstractions.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

This is a delightful romp around Eastern Europe, written just after the wall came tumbling down. Englishman MacLean, who was visiting relatives in East Germany at the time, embarks on a journey of rediscovery and welcomes readers along for the ride. Accompanied by his recently widowed Aunt Zita and her pet pig, Winston, he wends his way from the former East Berlin to Prague to Budapest, where an old servant digs up a bronze nose from a statue of Stalin pulled down during the 1956 uprising. MacLean's descriptions of the little group's rambles across the former Communist bloc is informative, insightful, and entrancing. His initial foray into travel writing emphatically unravels the lives of our long-lost neighbors to the east. An armchair traveler's delight, this book is definitely recommended for all travel collections.
- Jane Gilliland, Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0316542393
• ISBN 13: 9780316542395
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 233