The Tsar of Love and Techno

The nonlinear structure and large recurring cast trip readers up on The Tsar of Love and Techno; several say they had to flip back to earlier stories just to remember who a character was. One reader who loved Marra's debut novel found this collection “uneven” by direct comparison, and singles out the title story, the longest in the book, as the place where the black humor and aphorism-coining tips into someone “trying too hard to be funny.” The density of Soviet-era political detail and a large set of Russian names makes it a genuinely slow read for some, heavy going even for readers who end up loving it. The final story, 'Outer Space,' is flagged by more than one reader as the weak link, reaching for a profundity it doesn't fully earn, and a lone reader admits it was simply “too much history and war for me.”