Snowdrops

Snowdrops - A.D. Miller
Doubleday - 2011
262 pages
Shortlisted: 2011 Man Booker Prize

photo from Goodreads

      A snowdrop, is far from the idyllic winter image the mind may conjure up.  Instead, it is Moscow slang for a corpse, which, hidden by the layers of fallen snow, only becomes noticeable of once the snows begin to thaw.  Snowdrops begins with our narrator, Nicholas, the English expat lawyer working in Moscow, finding one of these snowdrops.  However, that is essentially a flash-forward to the end.

       The story is told by Nicholas, an English lawyer working out of an office in Moscow in the middle of the 2000s.  Whom he is telling the story to remains unclear in the beginning, but the story begins with his chance meeting of Masha, a women he clearly fell in love with his final year in Moscow, and her sister Katya.  The story revolves mostly around his affair with Mascha and her relations along with his work on securing an oil project for a mysterious character known simply as "the Cossack".

       As the narration is clearly being told by one of the main characters, I found myself sometimes wondering how credible this character was, along with the fact that he is clearly recalling things from his memory, where things sometimes may seem a bit fuzzy around the edges.  Miller crafts Nicholas in a way that I found myself not sure at times if I liked him or not, but then again, I think that was the point.  All the while, the narrator does seem to be telling the person all that he knows.  This is almost, at times, to a point of fault, such as when he confesses checking out Masha's naked sister as the three of them spent time in a Russian sauna. 

This is Miller's first novel and almost from the start I found myself engrossed in it.  In part, it may be due to the flashforward at the very beginning of the story.  From that flashforward, you know there is a snowdrop somewhere to come and I found myself at times reading the story as if it was a mystery to be figured out. 

The back flap of the book explains that Miller previously worked in Moscow for the magazine The Economist.  The author's time spent in Moscow shows in the way the author, through his narrator, describes Moscow and Russia.  The language somehow able to be descriptive without drowning the reader in them and, cliche as it may seem, the city of Moscow becomes, itself, a character. 

Overall, I really really liked this book.  I usually have a problem, personally, trying to express why I liked something when I review it.  However, this book is both simple and complex with it's colorful descriptions and plot I'd rather not go into too much for sake of spoiling it for other readers.  2011 is about to come to the close and this will most likely be on my best of list for the year.

Rating 4.5 of 5.