This fascinating novel is easy to admire but harder to define. It's an irreverent epic that carries a family through one of the most terrible eras in recent history: Joseph Stalin's Russia in the 1930s, when Stalin's madness led to mass starvation, show trials and the summary execution of thousands. "Stalin's Barber" captures that horror and yet maintains an undercurrent of absurdist humor. "The source of my humor is not joy but sorrow," its title character says, and he surely speaks for the author, Paul M. Levitt, professor of English at the University of Colorado.
When the holiday shopping season morphs from casual, nog-sipping fun to some sort of "Alice in Wonderland" White Rabbit scamper for gifts, often the best rabbit-hole to seek out is a bricks-and-mortar bookstore (talk about Cheshire-like disappearing acts), if not a virtual one ("Go ask Amazon / I think they'll know.").
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