OK, another riddle now. What is happening in this photo from a Russian high school? What are the school children witnessing?

Everybody is hell – bent on making the Baltimore riots about Freddie Gray and nothing else. This is a tidy and easy way of dismissing the whole thing with a feel-good ending. Just prosecute the cops, and Baltimore will magically become a happy place.

Pathetic and disgusting.

But as long as people can inscribe the story into the familiar framework of bad cowboys vs good cowboys, nobody will want to look any further. The discussion of Ferguson dissolved in the ridiculous narrative of traffic tickets. And now the story of Baltimore riots is being taken in the same direction.

As a new contribution to our Relationships series, let’s discuss the story of a woman who is going to meet her casual lover over the summer holidays (the woman in question requested input). The lover asked the woman if she was willing to be introduced to his children:

It wasn’t exactly a surprise when TA asked me if I’d like to meet [the children] while I was there this time. I’m going to be spending lengths of time in Home State this summer, as opposed to my previous brief weekends, so it would be somewhat odd not to meet them at some point, especially if TA and I want to spend extended time together. . . TA wants me to meet them, though. He adores his kids and they’re a big part of his life; he said it would be nice to have me meet them in some capacity while I’m there.

He did ask me what I thought about the idea and I said we could talk when I’m there. Because I’m not sure what I think. . .

Is it too soon? When do you meet someone’s kids? Do you need to be in some defined state before you introduce the girl and the kids? We don’t even claim to be dating – because we’re not, given the distance between us and the understanding that we’re free to be with other people if we wish.

I’m torn. On one hand, I’d like to, because they’re a facet of TA and it seems false not to see that side of him if we’re going to keep spending time together. On the other, it seems like a step and I’m not sure about taking that one.

This will not be of interest to everybody, so I’m putting my response under the fold. If you are not very happy about your personal life, I suggest you consider what you would do in this situation before seeing my comments.

Continue reading “Relationships: Power Struggles” →

You know things get really hectic and overwhelming at work when I start to read in Russian. I almost never read anything in this language because there is simply nothing to read. Russian literature has been dead for decades and there are no signs of it coming back to life. Marinina, however, is a mystery writer I’ve been reading for exactly 20 years. She was huge back in the 1990s, and it’s kind of hard to let the characters go if you’ve followed their lives for two decades.

This book is Marinina’s most recent installment in her long-standing series about a slightly autistic, gauche yet brilliant detective Anastasia Kamenskaya. It’s extremely hard to write police procedurals in Russia where convincing the readers that there are police officers who not only take bribes but actually investigate is next to impossible. The very genre of a procedural implies the existence of a procedure that people at least try to follow. And Marinina has to work very hard to make her detectives with their sincere desire to solve crime believable.

In order to compensate for the too-honest-t0-be-true detectives, the writer sets the mystery in the world of figure skating which, as you probably know, is the most corrupt sport of all. I knew it was a very dishonest sport but after reading the book (based on very painstaking research, by the way) I will never watch another figure skating competition or performance in my life. The sport is inhuman, cruel, and involves a lot of really harsh abuse of the poor children who play it.

The mystery was fine but it’s missing the beauty of the author’s novels from the 1990s. It feels like the author was more at home back then and is not fully integrating herself into the twenty-first century. However, the omniscient narrator says “in Ukraine and Belarus” instead of “at Ukraine and Byelorussia”, which shows to me that she is a decent person and makes me enjoy the book more.

Author: Aleksandra Marinina
Title: Ангелы на льду не выживают 
Year of publication: 2014
My rating: 5 out of 10