Back to Anniversaries

[Mark Kohut]

There is an extended couple--three pages on the post office, the NY
section.

More when I make the time.

PS. I might be the first American to *use ANNIVERSARIES, the *new full
English translation
in a classroom--or one of the first, anyway. NOTES were taken about the
book and I may have "sold' at least one.
(Although I had not finished it yet. Too long and too much else).

Structured some of my Sixties class with it---the timeline and some themes
via NYTimes' diary entries,
chosen by Johnson as *entries* to give a national perspective on the nation
then. (And his sarcasm about
the *newspaper of record *is also so fine). He records a mention of Gunter
Grass, spelled Gunther Grass by
the newspaper of record.

I may have mentioned this before so your milage may vary but Johnson's
ongoing thread about the NYT
ongoing "reporting on"/interviewing/ going shopping with Stalin's daughter,
Svetlana Alliluyeva, is among the
best things I know of, or can imagine about a person only famous for being
famous. Johnson saw her--in the Times
and therefore the culture then...(I remember her book when I was a young
bookseller).... as we joke about Kim Kardashian today.
She has absolutely nothing beyond banalities to say--ever. Nothing about
Russia but the most superficial. Buying American things.
Her apartment and color schemes and a day in her life! Were her dad not
Stalin, she'd be absolutely invisible.
Like Gesine, the narrator (who is, however,
infinitely smarter and more observant, so to exaggerate)