The Mayakovsky Tapes

September 19, 2016
As in the Sufi tale of the four blind men describing an elephant, the four women in this complex but rewarding novel from bestseller Littell (A Nasty Piece of Work) each possesses a different truth about their late lover, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom they are discussing around a recording device in a Moscow hotel room in 1953. The events they are talking about took place in the years just before and after the Russian Revolution. The ladies, Mayakovsky, and many of the minor characters are based on real people, and the relationships are pretty much as described. The author’s invention is in the differing interpretations of their multifarious relationships and the myriad of small facts that don’t make it into the history books. Mayakovsky was a “complicated man, trying on different versions of
himself,” according to his anti-Bolshevik lover, Elly Jones. The Russian Revolution and its aftermath are viewed from varying angles, showing that truth is always
contradictory and never simple. Agent: Ed Victor, Ed Victor Ltd.

September 15, 2016
From the reminiscences of four worldly women emerges a vivid portrait of the life and times of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.Secrets play little part in this latest from esteemed espionage author Littell. Rather than spin a tale of clandestine agents, Littell fashions an extended dialogue among four blatantly forthright witnesses to history. As a premise, Littell opens with one R. Litzky, once "a young American...Moscow State University [student]...minoring in Fatal Flaws of Capitalism" and now an 86-year-old man living in Brooklyn Heights. Litzky stumbles upon a cache of tapes he recorded more than 60 years ago in which four women recall their relationships with idolized poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. (Mayakovsky and the women are all based on actual people.) Litzky says the women tell "the butt-naked truth," and he means it. As Mayakovsky "couldn't decide which was more important to consummate: erections, poetry, or revolution," the transcribed tapes are akin to an R-rated version of All About Eve with the four ex-lovers sniping over the primacy of their passionate affairs and relationships with the poet. In a comment intended not "as a compliment, only a description," Nora Polonskaya, a "foul-mouthed blonde theater actress," calls Lilya Yuryevna, Mayakovsky's muse, "an epicurean at the table of carnal love." Besides bedrooms grand and fetid, Littell's mural offers vivid images of Moscow, Paris, and New York in the 1920s as politically committed writers like Mayakovsky spread their political and physical seeds. In New York, "Negro musicians" entertain "the crowd with the latest wrinkle in jazz, something called the boogie-woogie," and in Moscow, Boris Pasternak and Mayakovsky fire up revolutionaries at bohemian soirees. An inexorable momentum in the women's recollections brings Mayakovsky to the end of the decade and a melancholy, tragic demise. Littell's mordent wit is perfectly suited to his melancholy tale, rich in dark imagery and razor-sharp dialogue.

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November 1, 2016
After poet Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930, his one-time lover, Lilya Brik, wrote to Josef Stalin to complain that party officials in the literary world had snubbed the poet. Soon after, Pravda reported that Stalin called Mayakovsky the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his work is a crime. Soon after that, the poet was honored with a city square, a metro station, a statue, and a town in Armenia that was named after him. Littell, the dean of American espionage novelists, seems to have an affinity for Russia's poets. The Stalin Epigram (2009) focused on Osip Mandelstam. This time Littell uses four sophisticated women who had relationships with the poet to illuminate his life and character. The women were his lovers; two anti-Bolsheviks who fled Russia, one Moscow actress, and Lilya, the wife of a literary critic. Separately and together they paint a vivid picture of a gifted poet, a tireless womanizer, and a man beset by wild mood swings. The ladies' narration is both raunchy and often hilarious. It also illuminates a tumultuous period of Russian history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2016

Celebrated Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) was a larger-than-life figure whose personal motto might have been "Revolution--Poetry--Erection," with the order depending on which passion prevailed at the moment. Littell (A Nasty Piece of Work) narrates the poet's life as if recalled by four of his lovers. With Lilya and her husband, Mayakovsky participated in a menage a trois. Elly and the poet met in New York City, and their brief affair produced a daughter. Tatiana was a Parisian model who insisted on saving her virginity for her aristocratic fiance. Nora, while clinging to her acting career and husband, was with the poet just before his violent suicide. In 1953 the women meet at Moscow's Metropole Hotel to reminisce, and their conversations are recorded by an American student writing a thesis about the poet. The dialog can be a bit stiff, but the narratives become compelling once the seductive energies of these free spirits are let loose. VERDICT Based on real-life personalities and blending in a great deal of the literary ambience of the times, Litell's historical novel dramatizes a chaotic experience in the tumultuous era from the end of the tsars to the ascendance of Stalin. Mayakovsky's life and works have been intensively studied, but surely this is the first time his sexual ardors have been reimagined by a master of the espionage genre.--Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2016

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger winner whose The Company was a New York Times best seller that became a television miniseries, Littell sets his new novel around the time of Stalin's death in 1953. Four women gather at Moscow's elegant Metropole Hotel to recall gloriously inventive Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, with whom they were all in love. What's revealed: a groundbreaking artist and complex individual who turned against the revolution he first supported because of censorship battles and eventually committed suicide. Edgy conflicts with the state apparatus would explain why this book is called a thriller, but it will be so much more.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.