Reading Vasily Aksyonov's "The Burn" - which places it's comic heroes in a dystopian society (early 70's Russia), - a relentless drunken stream-of-consciousness tirade that pits the narrator - and his American friend "Patrick Thunderjet" - against the State, the World, and recalls me to reread "The Master and Margarita".
I will come back to "The Burn" in another review, I promise.
Now this is a book that I actively proselytize, along with "Confederacy of Dunces", "Lolita", and "The Discovery of New Spain", Herodotus, a few dozen others, that I place joyfully in another's hands to have them read and discuss, only to discover the book again not a day later in a thrift shop or curbside library.
So goes literacy.
In any event, while looking for it online I came across this translation:
Online Translation: https://www.weblitera.com/book/?id=205&lng=1
Which I took a few hours to reread. I'm not certain this is a translation by either Mira Ginsberg or Michael Glenny, but - aside from typos, this was not so bad. And yet again I found myself - after the Ball - both laughing and crying on the same page, the circumstance, characters, the details - forgotten, or perhaps never in the editions I recalled.
Anyways, a joy once again.