Denis Bryuhanov Bryuhanov từ Audrain County từ Audrain County

This is an amazing piece of writing and one I feel incompetent to review. The setting is eastern Europe, probably the Balkans, “after the war”. The story is the narrator’s relationship to her grandfather and her grandfather’s mythos, told around two stories that shaped his life: the story of the tiger’s wife from her grandfather’s boyhood in a small Balkan village, and the story of the deathless man from her grandfather’s life as a doctor. So, now I may have a little understanding of what it means to live where there is constant war or threat of war or distrust that war may come. I think I may also know a little bit more about why the people I love are important to me, not the throwaway meanings of love, but the scary ones that I cannot name.

This mind-blowing narrative recounts the true misadventures of a Wall Street banker and a British ex-consultant who try to make it big in the chinese automotive industry in the early 1990's, and how they end up fizzling away $500 million. The story is so incredible that it more than makes up for the mediocre writing and multiple repetitions. A story of the quintessential culture-clash, many will have trouble believing it's true.