Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #337985 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
Kurkov conjures up both Gogol and Dostoyevsky - Genuinely original --Scotsman

Kurkov's eye for the absurdities of Ukrainian life is as sharp as ever --Sunday Telegraph

Kurkov is hugely talented. Truly very funny --Time Out

Daily Sport
`Darkly humorous satire... Throw in a doomed romance and it makes for an hilarious mix'.

Literary Review
`Funny, tragic and sharp'.

Customer Reviews

Absurdly wonderful
Ukrainian President Sergey Bunin wakes from heart transplant surgery to find his country careering absurdly out of control: an oligarch is threatening to cut the nation's electricity supply, giant Vatican recognised miracle potatoes are sprouting in the east and, to make matters worse, a crazed widow is demanding visitation rights to her deceased husband's heart. It is just another day in the life of a president. But Bunin hates this life; all he wants is to go ice swimming with his friends. The question arises: how did he ever become president?

The President's Last Love chronicles Bunin's dubious rise up the political ladder, from catering college and failed romance to tragedy and the birth of a political career. But as he lives and loves it becomes apparent that there are some things beyond even the power of spin to remedy. The heart, you see, is not a potato. Kurkov is a wonderful writer, humane and hilarious, and this may be even better than Death and the Penguin. Read it; you are in for a treat.

Funny, moving, and memorably unique
Kurkov's previous books have been short and simple, and usually based around one quirky premise. I was wondering what he would do with a much bigger book. The answer is that this is basically three such stories woven together around the same character.

Written a little like diary entries, the novel flits between Bunin as the beleaguered president of Ukraine in 2016, and his earlier years as a student, or as a deputy minister. Some might find the cutting back and forth a little irritating. I thought it was quite effective. Each era has its own key characters and surreal elements, contributing their own aspects to the overall portrait and building well towards the final conclusion.

Fans of Kurkhov will find much they recognise - the seedy underbelly of Ukrainian society, a listless, unemployed protagonist, the regular quaffing of vodka - but this reaches further than any of his previous novels. It has a new breadth and depth, and Bunin feels like a much better developed, more complex character. And so he should be, with 40 years and 440 pages to play with. Kurkhov still can't write a decent female character unfortunately, the several here all being as capricious as any of those in his earlier works. That remains his only real weakness, in my opinion.

If you haven't read Kurkhov before, Death and the Penguin is still the place to start, but read this second. You'll find it funny, moving, and memorably unique.

It's just worth persevering with the irritating structure of this book
"Conjures up both Gogol and Dostoevsky" gushes the blurb on the cover. Really? I found this novel both irritating and frequently tedious, and would have given it up long before the end if I did not suffer from the compulsion to finish almost any book I have started. Perhaps that is just as well, since the second half of the book is better than the first.

This is the story, told in the first person, of Sergey Pavlovich Bunin, born in the Soviet Union in 1961, who progresses from being an unemployed youth to becoming the President of the post-Soviet Ukraine. The steps by which this happens are not explained. In 1987 he works at a restaurant for high-up apparatchiks. In 1992 a patron has him promoted to an `extra-governmental' post fostering Private Enterprise. By 2003 he is a Deputy Minister without any explanation of how he got there. By 2013 he is President - ditto.

There are references to oligarchs; to corruption (the Ukrainian Parliament has spent three years debating `how many categories of corruption there should be, which of them should be punishable and which should be considered a part of everyday culture, a tribute to tradition'); the revival of the Church (which, weirdly, has commandeered Lenin and proclaimed him St Vladimir!); pressure applied over the the power supply; deals with Putin's Russia (Putin is still President of Russia in 2013); the President being plotted against by his Prime Minister - but the intended satire is mostly heavy-handed.

What makes the book so irritating is that the 215 short chapters, each dated, each with lots of dialogue in short sentences and much inconsequential detail, continuously dart backwards and forwards from around 1983, when he is 22 years old and marries and divorces the first of his four wives, to 2016, the year after the President has undergone - with some curious consequences - a heart-transplant. I can't see the point of this device: the story could have been told perfectly well and less confusingly in chronological order; and I, for one, had to keep a chart by my side to remind myself what he was doing and to which wife he was married in 1983, 1992, 2003, 2006, 2013, 2015 etc.

What ultimately saved the book for me were the various subplots: one about Sergey's relationship with his mother and his mentally somewhat backward brother; one about the father of Sergey's second wife; scenes in a maternity hospital. These have nothing to do with politics; they are actually more important to Sergey than politics, in which he seems to be the passive instrument of his aide and of his head of security. They show that Sergey has a heart; and they are at times quite affecting.