Cafe Arcane

Review

Rating: 6

This is the second of the three major, Russian works in my 50 Classics reading list and I have to say I’m coming to appreciate the writers of this culture. War and Peace is often chided by wouldbe readers as huge in length and broad in scope. I advise a reader to simply put those factors out of their minds and the book will read itself. The truly daunting part for me was the staggering number of characters and the nature of Russian names. Only Japanese seems to have more ways to refer to the same person. :-)

All that aside, the book marvelously chronicles an important segment of Russian history using its array of characters as reflections upon and cornerstones of that history.