Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: The lost art of letter writing...
Review: I liked this book well enough reading it, even though it is a bit slow for my style. Actually, in the present, not a whole lot happens other than the main character has made his way to the Crimea on the pretense of trying to find a specimen of butterfly that is said to be extinct, but if he finds, he will be paid a pretty penny for.

However, there's more to the book than a butterfly place. J. (the main character) is a player.. He makes his money buying things, selling things, transporting things across borders, etc. "Professional smuggler", if you will. He thinks he's the master of his game.

And maybe he is one of the masters of the goods-running, but he wasn't expecting V., a beautiful Russian woman, who played on his feelings, then used him to escape Turkey and return to her native Russia. J. is convinced that somehow, since she has managed to contact him through the post, that he can study the art of letter writing to somehow find favour with her once again.

With such a scenerio, the 'more classic' writing style fits well. Reading this, one can almost imagine that one is back in the late 1800's, despite the fact that the map of Europe has changed drastically, and one of J.'s wares that comes up many times are night-vision-goggles. At the same time though, had I not a lot of "down time" to actually sit and read, I'm not sure that I would have had the patience needed to enjoy the 'atmosphere' of the book.

Rating:
Summary: The lost art of letter writing...
Review: I liked this book well enough reading it, even though it is a bit slow for my style. Actually, in the present, not a whole lot happens other than the main character has made his way to the Crimea on the pretense of trying to find a specimen of butterfly that is said to be extinct, but if he finds, he will be paid a pretty penny for.

However, there's more to the book than a butterfly place. J. (the main character) is a player.. He makes his money buying things, selling things, transporting things across borders, etc. "Professional smuggler", if you will. He thinks he's the master of his game.

And maybe he is one of the masters of the goods-running, but he wasn't expecting V., a beautiful Russian woman, who played on his feelings, then used him to escape Turkey and return to her native Russia. J. is convinced that somehow, since she has managed to contact him through the post, that he can study the art of letter writing to somehow find favour with her once again.

With such a scenerio, the 'more classic' writing style fits well. Reading this, one can almost imagine that one is back in the late 1800's, despite the fact that the map of Europe has changed drastically, and one of J.'s wares that comes up many times are night-vision-goggles. At the same time though, had I not a lot of "down time" to actually sit and read, I'm not sure that I would have had the patience needed to enjoy the 'atmosphere' of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Witty, Delicate, Delightful
Review: Imagine the precocious offspring of Borges and Nabakov. Then imagine said progeny in front of a typewriter, living off the sum total of his parental royalties. The result would be something like this. Read it slowly, savor its many smile-inducing similes, like comparing the accumulation of traffic at a red light, and then it's release at a green light to that of a drop of water approaching its maximum weight before falling off the tip of a leaf. Something like that. I'm not the author. Obviously. Just a reader who enjoyed the author's work. Like the wings of a butterfly -- delicate, intricate. You'll want to chase after it again and again.

Rating:
Summary: An international thriller read through a kaleidoscope
Review: The narrator of "Nocturnal Butterflies," simply named J., is a smuggler crisscrossing the borders of post-Soviet Europe and dealing in contraband such as night-vision goggles. Stockis, a wealthy and shadowy butterfly collector from Sweden, engages J. to find the yazikus, a nocturnal specimen that is extremely rare and difficult to catch. While in Istanbul, however, J. falls in love with an equally elusive "nocturnal butterfly" of a different sort: a prostitute named V. Trapped in Turkey by an Armenian thug who lured her there under false pretenses, V. enlists J. to help her escape her bondage and return to Russia, only to vanish when they both arrive.

All this is made known to the reader in the first few pages, and the bulk of the novel details seven letters he unexpectedly receives from V. while at a pension in Livadia, recounts the events that led to J.'s abandonment and despair, and describes his attempt to construct an appropriate response, a letter that will make his feelings known to V. and bring her back to him. He assembles their story in bits and pieces, much "like the mental process I am using here in Livadia, reconstructing her from the fragmented image in her letters."

While planning his own letter, J. enlists the help of epistles by famous literary and historical figures, from Saul of Tarsus and Abelard to Oscar Wilde and the Russian double agent Evno Azef. And, of course, the butterflies, the letters, the narrative technique, the Russian themes, the immigrant experience (both the author and J. are Cubans who immigrated to Russia)--all rather deliberately recall Nabokov, who was a famous lepidopterist himself. Prieto skillfully weaves these literary, historical, and biographical details into his own rich narrative, and the result is a collage of compellingly topical yet hauntingly resonant passages.

Breaking the density of these musings, which are best appreciated slowly and piecemeal, are the description of J. and V.'s evolving (if one-sided) love affair in Istanbul and a plot drawn from an international thriller, which reaches an unexpected crescendo in a terrific chase scene.

Cuban cubism is the facetious label one could use for the novel's structure. A drawback with cubism as a technique in prose, though, is that no matter how solid and invigorating the individual pieces, stepping back from the work reveals both its thematic richness and a narrative jumble. Such bipolarity can certainly work in a painting, but whether it succeeds in fiction will depend entirely on the assiduousness of the individual reader.