New Satan takes over in hell, wants to install airconditioning. That is Memoirs by Mikhail Gorbachev in brief. And brevity is a thing of which you’ll have a high, fine appreciation after 769 densely printed, generously sized pages containing, in total, more than 350,000 words. Memoirs (Doubleday, $ 35) is an impressive work — if you drop it on your foot.
Marx spoke of the ash heap of history and here it is. The prose style is appalling: “The need for major changes was in the air, as the saying goes.” Perhaps the translator is an idiot. But, “Camp David is a beautiful spot in the woods, designed for recreation, with many a shady nook and sports lawns and buildings,” can be blamed on no translator. The third-person voice is used to such Bob Dolerous extent that consciousness of authorship begins to fog. “Many people still suspect Gorbachev of trying to save the Party nomenklatura,” appears on the page, and you think, “What witless, purblind pinko sap is writing this?” Then you remember. It’s the fellow capable of penning the sentence, “My speech started off like Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: ‘How to deepen and make irreversible revolutionary perestroika, which on the initiative and under the leadership of the Party has been launched in our country — this is the fundamental question . . . ‘” To which, if I remember my Shakespeare, Ophelia replies, “Sweet Prince, take your Prozac.”
