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Title: The Tsar of Love and Techno

Subtitle: Stories

Author: Anthony Marra

Narrator: Mark Bramhall, Beata Pozniak, Rustam Kasymov

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-06-15

Publisher: Random House Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 277 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

From the New York Times best-selling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.

This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts.

In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.

Critic Reviews:

"Powerful...strikingly reimagines a nearly a century of changes in Russia. [T]he book's brilliance and humor are laced with the somber feeling that the country is allergic to evolution." (Kirkus Reviews)

"As in his acclaimed novel, Marra finds in Chechnya an inspiration for his uniquely funny, tragic, bizarre, and memorable fiction." (Publishers Weekly)

Members Reviews:

I switched to print.

What did you like best about The Tsar of Love and Techno? What did you like least?

The narration, in my opinion, was not worthy of the story. I lost so much in that the voices didn't sound as intelligent as the words being spoken. I missed SO MUCH. I am very glad the library had it so I could go back and appreciate the entire text. And I am usually not one to complain about voices but this didn't work for me.

What other book might you compare The Tsar of Love and Techno to and why?

Maybe, the Imerfectionists by Tom Rachman - for linked stories.

Would you be willing to try another one of the narratorss performances?

No.

Did The Tsar of Love and Techno inspire you to do anything?

I want to read everything Marra writes.

The Nutcracker's Cosmonautic March

I normally find it difficult to complete even half of a short story collection, except on the rare occasion the stories are intertwined by characters and events. I'll listen to 1 or 2 but eventually go back to the traditional Freytag's Pyramid, invest myself in a novel, and then forget about the collection of nice, but not compelling, stories.

In comparison, I quickly became absorbed by the lofty TSAR OF LOVE AND TECHNO because, for one thing, the first story is both chilling and compelling, and another, these stories make you want to discover the interlacing threads and watch the magic of the completed whole. That is to say, the reader learns through each story which characters are primary, and discovers that character has returned in a later story in some other context. The stories so complement the others that, aside from the 1st, 3d and 4th stories, I'm not sure the others would have nearly the impact they do had any one of them stood on its own outside the context of the collection.

I enjoyed the entire collection excepting the second story.