{"id":631,"date":"2004-04-04T21:06:12","date_gmt":"2004-04-04T21:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2004\/04\/the_case_of_the\/"},"modified":"2004-04-04T21:06:12","modified_gmt":"2004-04-04T21:06:12","slug":"the_case_of_the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2004\/04\/the_case_of_the\/","title":{"rendered":"The Case of the General&#8217;s Thumb"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1843430169\">second<\/a> of Russian author Andrey Kurkov&#8217;s translated works, following <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1860469450\">Death and the Penguin<\/a> a year or two ago.<br \/>\nKurkov seems to specialise in slightly off-kilter novels set in Russia, and other former Soviet states, where the absurd still seems to be the norm. Part farce, and part serious consideration of the state of play today, they make enjoyable if slight reading. I probably didn&#8217;t enjoy this book as much as his first, but then it has a slightly more serious tone to it.<br \/>\nI note that Death and the Penguin now has a sequel, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1843430959\">Penguin Lost<\/a>, which I&#8217;ll look forward to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>1843430169<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}