Title: Koba - Robert Littell - book

Summary :

In his twentieth novel, Robert Littell features a child as both hero and narrator for the first time. Young Léon is both intellectually precocious and disarmingly candid; his encounters with a peremptory old man whose identity he does not know will be surprising and instructive for both. The House on the Embankment is a vast building in Moscow, home to civil servants, Soviet apparatchiks, and the young Léon Rozental.

After the death of his nuclear physicist father in a laboratory accident, and his mother's arrest during Stalin's purge of Jewish doctors, Leon and other children hide from the NKVD in the building's secret rooms. During an underground expedition, he discovers a passage leading to a vast, abandoned ballroom. There, he meets Koba, an unfriendly old man whose apartment is protected by several chess-playing guards.

Koba is a high-ranking Soviet officer, more important than Leon can imagine, and who has disturbing knowledge of Comrade Stalin's thoughts and machinations... In these discussions between a naive young boy and a paranoid tyrant, Robert Littell paints an ambiguous portrait of the Soviet dictator, showing his human side and at the same time a total obliviousness to the suffering he inflicted on the Russian people for decades.

The charm and spontaneity of young Léon make him an irresistible character - and one reminiscent of Holden Caulfield, with whom he admits to identifying - caught in the spider's web of the story woven by this enigmatic figure.

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