You abhor our praise, thinking it suspect, but I think you are an excellent reviewer, Language. I like the way you did this one and also the one of John Emerson's book, Substantive Marrow (great book of assorted essays), which I was thinking of writing about myself, until I read yours and saw that it couldn't be bettered.

No, it's not Substantive, it's Substantific Marrow. Sorry John, I'm no good at adjectives.

Thanks, and I by no means abhor the praise of my readers, who are self-evidently a perceptive bunch. If you weren't, why would you be hanging out here?

Aha! I just ordered this. Glad to know I'll be glad to get it. And I second -- or third, or fourth -- the praise. You are a wonderful reader.

Moscow... vividly realized

Yes:

"Through the vibrating rain drops on the car window, she could see the jagged monument marking the limit of the German advance in '41 and, just beyond it, the cobalt blue of an Ikea superstore."

I haven't been to Moscow. But that's Moscow.

Another nice moment from "The Repatriates" (husband and wife):

"At the gym, people involved her in the theatre of their daily lives as though she were a bartender, handing them not towels but glasses of gin. In the evening, when she’d tried to interest Grisha in these stories, he’d listened with a face of painful submission. When she was with him, the life that gave her pleasure seemed frivolous; it was like describing a sitcom—the plots unravelled, the jokes were no longer funny."

Wasn't sure about "the guttural cawing of a crow," though.

Krasikov was just named as one of the National Book Foundation's "Five Under 35" for this book.

http://www.nationalbook.org/5under35.html