Boris AkuninRezensionen

I'm lying when I say I've 'finished' this book. I gave it a couple of goes, but never got beyond page 60. I couldn't get to grips with the cast of thousands (well, dozens, anyway)and perhaps its only fault really was in being a swashbuckling tale of derring-do. I don't really do swashbuckling tales of derring-do, so I'm not really one to judge. But I couldn't finish it.

i have read 3 akunin mysteries and this is my favorite so far. The use of narratives from different characters (reminiscent of wilkie collins, one of my all time favorites) worked well and added to the variety, making up for the closed setting of the ship.

Il primo di una serie di gialli storici ambientati in Russia nella seconda metà dell' ottocento.
E' un romanzo un po' anomalo, che gioca a sovvertire le aspettative del lettore a cominciare dal protagonista, Fedorin, che non si conforma a nessuno stereotipo dei detective da romanzo: non è geniale ma non è neanche un sprovveduto che si imbatte nella verità per caso, non è una macchietta come Poirot e neanche un cinico indurito dalla vita come i protagonisti degli hard boiled: è giovane e come tutti i giovani è impulsivo, idealista e ogni tanto un po' ingenuo, ma compensa con un gran coraggio ed un ottimo intuito. Insomma sembra dotato di una personalità ben distinta che lo rende un personaggio tridimensionale e non solo uno strumento per portare avanti la trama. Anche con la trama d'altronde l'autore si è divertito a spiazzare i lettori, giocando col sottogenere di riferimento: dovrebbe essere un intrigo internazionale ma a volte calca così la mano da sfociare in parodia, altre volte invece amplifica la suspense infilandoci dentro due o tre cambi di prospettiva che funzionano a meraviglia. Il tono dell'opera è molto leggero, permeato da una velata ironia che ci fa vivere tutto con distacco, ma il finale dimostra una volta di più che niente è come sembra in questo libro.
Il risultato è un romanzo schizofrenico, che mi ha lasciato frastornata ma con la voglia di approfondire e continuare la lettura dei volumi successivi.

I read this book, the first in the series of 13 novels about the late 19th century Russian detective Erast Fandorin, when it first appeared some twenty years ago. I remember little about the plot, but I remember vividly how I felt — and how shocked I was at the ending. I have now read it for a second time.

Boris Akunin is a brilliant story-teller and also an excellent historian. His books are set in a real historical time and place (imperial Russia from 1876 to the Bolshevik coup d’etat in 1917). He’s been compared to Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming, but I think Akunin (whose real name is Grigory Chkhartishvili and who was born in Georgia) is a unique voice. One should not rush to compare his Fandorin to James Bond or Sherlock Holmes.

In this first book in the series we meet a very young Fandorin at the beginning of his career in the police, naive, prone to make mistakes, an incurable romantic and someone with truly amazing luck. Initially investigating the very public suicide of a student, Fandorin stumbles upon a vast international conspiracy — and no, it’s not the one you’re thinking of. A real pleasure to read and highly recommended.

Du très classique et du très revisité également.

too involved for me, but look forward to more stories½

In 1900 Moscow is abuzz with a rash of suicides, and rumours that a suicide club is in operation somewhere in the city. The Lovers of Death, a group of misfits under the charismatic leadership of a man named Prospero, meet weekly to discuss which of them will be the next to meet the long-desired embrace of death. Erast Fandorin joins the Lovers of Death in the guise of a Japanese prince and attempts to get to the bottom of it all.

The story is told from the points of view of two of the Lovers: Columbine, an impressionable girl from the country and an unnamed informer who is writing reports for the police. There are the usual twists and turns, although the ending was a little drawn-out and implausible. Akunin's next book in the series is He Lover of Death, which tells the same story from a different point of view, and I'm keen to see where he goes with that.

This novel soon had me searching for information about the Russo-Turkish war in 1877/78, a war I knew nothing about. The reader meets Varvara Suvorova, a Russian woman at the beginning of the novel. She has made her way from Russia to Romania to be with her fiance, a cryptographer with the Russian army at their HQ. She is thrilled by her romantic gesture as she arrives dressed as a man but hadn't really thought through how she would be received in a military camp. She meets lots of journalists, who are covering the war, and Erast Fandorin, whose powers of detection are more obscure than any detective you will come across. A mixture of farce, derring-do, romance, intrigue and military action, the characters vary some more richly drawn than others. All in all this novel didn't quite hang together for me.

I mourn the fact that this is the final book in the Erast Fandorin series. It starts with a most outlandish circumstance and builds up from there. Not a moment of tedium. But plenty of unpredictable revelations... A gem of a novel, just as all preceding it. Background - Russia of 1918, "... a country that wishes to exchange a bad past for an appalling future", as Fandorin puts it (how ironic and true today...). Here, he is at his best as always, forever a "noble man", with his trusted Japanese assistant Masa (whose absolute devotion and astounding competence cannot be overstated) at his side.. An excellent read!

París, marzo de 1878. Tras la aparición de una serie de cadáveres en la villa de lord Littleby, un coleccionista de arte indio, se hace cargo del caso el comisario Gauche, viejo sabueso de la policía francesa. Las pistas lo conducen hasta el Leviatán, un lujoso transatlántico que realiza la ruta entre Southampton y Calcuta. A medio camino, en Port Said, se une al pasaje un apuesto, culto y sagaz diplomático ruso llamado Erast Fandorin, que viaja a Japón en misión profesional. Ante su presencia en uno de los salones del buque, donde Gauche reúne todos los días a un grupo de confiados pasajeros entre los que se encuentra el asesino, las mujeres caen rendidas a sus pies y los hombres recelan. Poco después, cuando todos empiezan a sospechar de todos y el ambiente se enrarece, un nuevo crimen pone a prueba la sapiencia y astucia del experto comisario, que deberá discernir si la impresionante intuición del joven ruso es digna de su confianza o si, por el contrario, es preferible atenerse a sus propias lucubraciones.

En el año 1877 Varia, una joven rusa, acompañada de Erast Fandorin, agente de contraespionaje, decide sacar a su novio de la cárcel, acusado de espionaje en el frente búlgaro. El agudo contrapunto que se establece entre Fandorin y Varia marca el ritmo trepidante de esta segunda e imprescindible aventura de Fandorin.

Un espléndido día de primavera de 1876 un estudiante aristócrata se dispara un tiro ante la estupefacta mirada de una joven que poco antes le había negado un beso. Es tan sólo la primera de una inquietante cadena de muertes, tan extrañas como inexplicables, que pronto suscitarán un sinfín de interrogantes en la intranquila sociedad moscovita y que el inspector Erast Fandorin tendrá que investigar.

Un rumor desconcertante recorre los pasillos del hotel Dusseaux, desborda los muros del recinto y se extiende por todo Moscú: ¡El general blanco ha muerto! Mijail Dimitrievich Soboliev, epítome del héroe ruso, una síntesis de Aquiles, Alejandro Magno y Napoleón concentrados en un solo hombre, ha muerto de improviso en la flor de la vida. A pesar de la enorme conmoción, y cuando la voz de la trágica noticia aún reverbera tanto en las imponentes avenidas como en las callejuelas de la metrópoli, dos oídos atentos y una nariz suspicaz se concentran en la escena del suceso. Ha regresado Erast Fandorin ...

Set during a time when Russia and the Turks at war in 1877, Erast Fandorin finds himself accompanying a woman whose fiancee is covering the war. She is determined to reach him. When the Turks capture her, he wins her back by gambling. She must pose as his personal assistant to be allowed to continue seeking her fiancee whom they are certain has been captured. The plot deals more with espionage than being a true mystery, and while there are murders, they all stem from the espionage element. I did not like the first installment, but I mistakenly read the third next and enjoyed it quite a bit. I did not really enjoy this one--mainly because I don't enjoy espionage that much. I listened to the audio book read by Paul Michael.½

Boris Akunin er vinsæll rússneskur glæpasagnahöfundur sem er þekktur fyrir sögulegar glæpasögur. Frægastur er hann fyrir persónu sína Erast Fandorin, rússa sem er uppi undir lok 19. aldar. Fandorin tekur sín fyrstu skref sem rannsóknarlögreglumaður þegar hann hefur rannsókn á dularfullu sjálfsmorði sem hann telur tengjast öðrum málum.
Akunin hefur skrifað sögurnar um Fandorin með ólíkri nálgun og í þessari flettir hann ofan af alþjóðlegu samsæri sem teygir anga sína m.a. til Bretlands. Skemmtileg skoðun á rússneska keisaratímanum.

Аж 4 звездочки, но не потому, что такая замечательная книга, а потому что она такая замечательная на фоне трех предыдущих.
Какой-то особой детективной составляющей и правда нет, интригует всю дорогу только одна линия: что же станет с Фандориным в итоге? Расщедрится ли Акунин на happily ever after или (более ожидаемо) добьет-таки своего персонажа, чтобы придать весу всей истории?
Так или иначе, читалось легко и увлекательно, но теперь я уберу эту книжку подальше и постараюсь забыть концовку к чертовой матери.

ЗЫ. И вообще фандориана закончилась на "Алмазной колеснице", простите.
ЗЫ 2. Я передумала, 3 звездочки.

The main hero - Erast Fandorin - is quite young and romantic. That's why he sees something strange in the "usual" suicide. This leads to a series of dangerous events.

Sometimes I was annoyed with Erast's views and way of thinking. But they are quite understandable for his age and lack of experience.

It was a pity that I knew who was the main criminal in the middle of the story. But the events in the last chapter became a shock for me.

To sum up, I have mixed feelings about the novel. Some things were good, some were boring. But I think I'll try and read the next book in this series to see if I should continue reading about Erast Fandorin.

I circled back to read the Fandorin book I'd missed, and Akunin is also doing strange things in this narrative. The story is told from the point of view of an unreliable witness, but the 'unreliable' part is constantly corrected by Fandorin, which I suppose is a way to keep the reader on track with the wildly gyrating plot. The wild gyrations are a pity, because the novel is set amidst the coronation planning for Tsar Nicholas (yes, that one), and some of the incidents are historically accurate. Our narrator keeps complaining that Fandorin lectures him, and in the same way the author lectures the reader. Sigh. Not sure what to do about a series I had initially enjoyed.

I was so excited to read this one. And the first third was fun. But it all fell down for me and by the end I was laughing at the Perilous Perils of our Preternaturally talented Protagonist.

This is a strange mystery, a sort of mock Sherlock Holmes adventure with a little Chesterton mixed in. Someone is convincing people to commit suicide, and Fandorin decides to find out how this could be. A bit more hysterical than most of the series. I wonder where Akunin is going?½

Anyone who read through all the previous 11 Erast Fandorin novels by Boris Akunin has been waiting for this moment. Those novels chart the career of the master detective during the final decades of tsarist rule in Russia, beginning in the 1870s when Fandorin was a young man. In the last book of the series which I read, Fandorin was killed off the final page — never making it to see the 1917 revolution. I like many others felt cheated by this. But in a plot twist borrowed from Sherlock Holmes, it turns out the our hero survived, albeit in a coma. He awakens Rip-van-Winkle-like in the unrecognisable reality of Bolshevik Russia in 1918.

The book follows Fandorin, his faithful Japanese valet Masa and his new female friend Mona as he experiences the various “colours” of the Russian civil war — including Red, White, Black and Green. None of them offer a palatable vision of Russia’s future and Fandorin is resigned at the end to leave the country which he has served for so long. I won’t reveal how the book ends, but I was intrigued by the sympathetic portrait at the very end which the author paints of Anton Ivanovich Denikin, one of the most successful of the White generals, who very nearly defeated the Bolsheviks and captured Moscow.

Akunin (whose real name is Grigory Chkhartishvili) is a historian as well as a novelist and this book, like his others, is infused with his knowledge of the period. Highly recommended.

I just did not like the tone of the book; all the pomposity bored me as did the all of the lengthy erudite first person narratives of Afanasi Ziukin, the majordomo of Grand Duke George Alexandrovich.

Grand Duke Georgii Alexandrovich arrives in Moscow with three of his children for the coronation of Tsar Nicholas. During an afternoon stroll in the park, Georgii’s daughter Xenia is dragged away by bandits, only to be rescued by Erast Petrovich Fandorin and his Japanese sidekick, Masa. Then the group realizes that the four-year-old, Mikhail, has been taken in the ruckus.

A ransom letter arrives from the kidnapper demanding ransom in form of the Count Orlov Diamond from the royal coronation scepter.... and so the adventure began.

This is made up of two stories. I finished the first one months ago and just started the second on (8/5/15). Just delightful right off the bat. Love the characters.

Quite the spirited mystery. Set in the late 1800s primarily in Russia, the tale features a young clerk in the police services, Erast Fandorin, who is given the chance to investigate an unusual suicide in Moscow.

The man who killed himself was young, educated, well-off. He rushed up to a young woman and her governess in a park and, after pledging his undying love to the young woman because of her beauty, and asking for hers in return, pulled out his pistol and shot himself in the head.

Odd though it was, it would not have attracted police attention if it hadn't been that there were several other attempted suicides happening right around the same time.

After Fandorin makes progress on the case, he is suddenly warned by his kindly superior that changes have taken place in the office and that he should take care. As it happens, Fandorin is quite taken by the chief's replacement, especially his up-to-date methods. He follows his lead and is even given the opportunity to travel to England and France in pursuit of his theories.

It all comes together in a shocking conclusion.

While much of the novel is written in a way that might characterize it as a "cozy mystery" I am happy to say it is nothing of the kind. We do become fond of our hero and I look forward to finding others in the series as they are translated to English.

Not bad, but just not for me.

I'm not keen on pastiche and this was very ... unoriginal. It felt like a story cobbled together with bits and pieces of other books: Sherlock Holmes, Conrad's The Secret Agent, some Chekhov...and possibly some early James Bond.

The writing was consistently good and there was certainly lots of fun to be had and lots of atmosphere to be enjoyed, but I just couldn't get excited about the story or the characters.½