In his novel Dreams of My Russian Summers, the author told lively, fascinating tales of his hero's Siberian grandmother, then wavered into lifeless self-absorption in a present-day section set in France. His quirky, likable new novel returns to rural Siberia in the 1970s, where three clueless teenage boys try to make sense of rumored wonders: women, the Western world, adulthood. Their unlikely guide is the ultra-cool French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, one of whose films is playing in a town 20 miles away on a river called Amur (Russian for Cupid). Though the boys live in a backwater where spit freezes before...
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