Fiction Book Reviews

Book Review: Breaking of Eggs

By Sandy Amazeen Aug 24, 2010, 18:40 GMT

A debut novel unwinds the tangle of twentieth-century history with wit, humor, and humanity 61-year-old Feliks is a naturalized Frenchman, a displaced Pole and former Communist-and a curmudgeon-who has made his living writing a yearly travel guide to the countries behind the Iron Curtain. In 1991, with the Curtain now fallen, Feliks finds his beliefs beginning to crumble around him. When a rapacious American publisher offers to buy ...more

Prosaic and stodgy, sixty-one year old Feliks Zhukovski is a solitary man maintaining an apartment in Paris who spends most of his time making the same travel circuit throughout Eastern Europe. As the author of a self published, decidedly leftist travel guide, Feliks never felt the need to develop long term friendships or look into family ties. A chance comment by his landlady and the offer of a lucrative buyout set Feliks on a journey of self discovery that forces him to question lifelong assumptions about his mother, brother, Stalin, politics and himself.

This compelling story uses the protagonist as an effective means to examine communism, fascism and family issues while illustrating how easy it is for misinformation to damage relationships. Feliks starts out as a very dry character who gradually gets pulled out of his shell into the mainstream and discovers there is a great deal more going on then he knew. Powell has seamlessly blended history, politics and family into one sweet read.