The Dissident
A Novel
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
“A feast for serious fiction readers.” —Wendy Smith, The Washington Post
“A dead-serious, dead-funny, no-he-didn't marvel.” —Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus
A thrilling, witty, and slyly original Cold War mystery about a ragtag group of Jewish refuseniks in Moscow.
On his wedding day in 1976, Viktor Moroz stumbles upon a murder scene: two gay men, one of them a U.S. official, have been axed to death in Moscow. Viktor, a Jewish refusenik, is stuck in the Soviet Union because the government has denied his application to leave for Israel; he sits “in refusal” alongside his wife and their group of intellectuals, Jewish and not. But the KGB spots Viktor leaving the murder scene. Plucked off the street, he’s given a choice: find the murderer or become the suspect of convenience. His deadline is nine days later, when Henry Kissinger will be arriving in Moscow. Unsolved ax murders, it seems, aren’t good for politics.
A whip-smart, often hilarious Cold War thriller, Paul Goldberg’s The Dissident explores what it means to survive in the face of impossible choices and monumental consequences. To help solve the case, Viktor ropes in his community, which includes his banned-text-distributing wife, a hard-drinking sculptor, a Russian priest of Jewish heritage, and a visiting American intent on reliving World War II heroics. As Viktor struggles to determine whom to trust, he’s forced to question not only the KGB’s murky motives but also those of his fellow refuseniks—and the man he admires above all: Kissinger himself.
Immersive, unpredictable, and always ax-sharp, The Dissident is Cold War intrigue at its most inventive. It is an uncompromising look at sacrifice, community, and the scars of history and identity, from an expert storyteller.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This enjoyably absurd if sometimes unwieldy Cold War farce from Goldberg (The Chateau) is set in the mid-'70s Soviet Union and begins with Viktor Moroz, a Jewish "refusenik" and the titular dissident, discovering a gruesome double murder on his wedding day. The KGB knows that Viktor, who is desperate to leave the U.S.S.R. and emigrate to Israel with his new wife, Oksana, was at the scene of the murders, and gives him nine days to solve the crimes, lest he become a suspect himself. But this is no ordinary whodunit: Goldberg goes for something much more kaleidoscopic, introducing an enormous cast of characters (including several real-life figures, Henry Kissinger among them) and peppering the narrative with lengthy asides on literature, history, and geopolitics. The result often trades narrative thrust for painstaking portraiture of Soviet Jewish life, but Goldberg is an impressively encyclopedic guide. Readers looking for an ambitious, off the beaten path comedic mystery will find plenty to enjoy.
