“The recreations of revolutionary Russia are vivid (including his hatred of the Tsar, Lenin and Stalin) as is the daily reality of living in glasnost Russia. There are some positively Dostoevskian characters, and [Pieter Waterdrinker's] portrait of Russia caught at twin moments of upheaval (1917, 1988) is an epic tale told with deceptive simplicity.”
—Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, The Sydney Morning Herald
“Words by Waterdrinker are as amazing as a superior circus.”
Elsevier
“How evocatively Waterdrinker can write! A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, he makes this violent period of history shine once again.”
Zin
“Waterdrinker’s gift for savage comedy and his war correspondent’s eye have few contemporary equivalents.”
—Simon Ings, The Times
“In this compelling memoir … Waterdrinker recounts the awful and at the same time great decades that gave Russians a radically redefined role on the world stage … An intensely personal perspective on geopolitical transformation.”
—Bryce Christensen, Booklist, starred review
“[Waterdrinker] interweaves memoir and history in this impressionistic account of Russia from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the present day … [he] incisively captures the beauty and terror of his adopted country … Russophiles will savor this iconoclastic portrait of modern Russia.”
Publisher’s Weekly
Praise for Lenins Balsem:
“A book with an exotic elegance.”
—Elsevier
“A hilarious quest, written in a wonderful baroque style.”
—De Telegraaf
Praise for The Death of Mila Burger:
“In many respects The Death of Mila Burger is a novel about twenty-first-century Russia, dished up according to the laws of the nineteenth-century novel. Fluent, expressive, amusing.”
—NRC Handelsblad
“The Death of Mila Burger is a classic tragedy. It is quality prose. Exuberant in a rather un-Dutch way.”
—Vrij Nederland
“An octogenarian aristocrat cooped up in a decrepit Soviet madhouse, doctors requiring bribes before even considering treating patients, the wife of a Russian president touring Amsterdam's red-light district, lust-driven physicists embezzling foreign aid programs, the mad monk Rasputin. These are just a handful of the memorable characters Pieter Waterdrinker draws in his idiosyncratic, darkly humorous, captivating blend of memoir, history, and reportage that spans Russia's last century. It's a terrific read that will engage and inform in equal measure.”
—Gordon Peake, The Canberra Times