THE UNPOSSESSED CITY Hardback - 2008

Summary

Media reviews

'Thirtysomething Jim Vilatzer lives at home and works in his parents' restaurant. He's going nowhere until gambling debts force him to make a change. He lands a job in Moscow (he grew up speaking Russian to his immigrant grandparents), interviewing survivors of the gulag for a not-for-profit company. His work soon makes him a pawn in a scheme to sell to the highest bidder four of the former USSR's top weapons engineers, which, in turn, leads him to become a target of Russian state security and the CIA. Fasman (The Geographer's Library, 2005), weaves two very different plotlines here, one the story of a man discovering a new world and realizing that his roots are more important than he realized, the other tracking the machinations of crooked Russian officials to sell fellow citizens for a profit. The first plot is deftly, even lovingly achieved; Fasman's Moscow is beautiful, tragic, brutal, and exhilarating. The second story line is convoluted and arcane. But, even so, the sum of the parts in this lyrically written novel is more than enough to keep readers engaged.'
Thomas Gaughan, Booklist

'Fleeing gambling debts and a messy life in the unglamorous D.C. suburbs, a likable loser goes to Moscow to seek, if not his fortune, perhaps a future.

If Fasman (The Geographer's Library, 2005) was worried about the second-novel syndrome, he needn't have been. This adventure of a man who has no business having adventures is a pleasure for most of its length, stumbling only occasionally as the author tries to get a grip on the technicalities of the spy thriller formula on which he has hung his shambling, gauche, goofy love letter to Moscow. His hero is Jim Vilatzer, only child of a Russian father and Irish mother whose strip-mall deli in Rockville, Md., provides their son with not nearly enough income to pay off the Serbian gangsters running the poker games where Jim has run up a tab of about $24,000. It was bad enough for Jim that he had been dumped by his girlfriend, bad enough that he was living with his parents years after he should have started a family, but to have screwed up so badly as to put his parents' livelihood in peril, that's the outside of enough. Thank goodness his lifelong friend Vivek, another child of immigrants, has the common sense to arrange a repayment plan, a course of action that sends Jim out of the country to one of his ancestral homelands, where he will be safely out of reach of the Serbians. It's not an insane plan; Jim speaks pretty good Russian, enough to get him a job at a sort of minor NGO where he's to spend his days collecting oral histories of life in the gulags and falling in love with Moscow. It's slow getting started, but then a sensational hookup with a gorgeous Finn finally sets him on the track of survivors who, alas, are not all they seem to be. They do seem to be of great interest to American intelligence.

Great fun in a great, if grim, place.'
Kirkus Reviews