SlowRain reviewed The Visiting Professor by Robert Littell
Review of 'The Visiting Professor' on Goodreads
3 stars
At its most basic level, the story is about a professor from the former Soviet Union being a guest lecturer at an American college. Along the way, he meets a beautiful hairdresser half his age, gets caught up in an environmental protest, is courted by espionage agencies from around the world, and works with the police on a serial-killer case.
Although primarily known as an espionage novelist, here Robert Littell gives us a satire about America in the early '90s. His sentences are interesting, his characters are engaging, his wit is keen. However, the narrative is a bit unfocused as it switches back and forth between the third-person to the first-person perspectives of the two main characters. It also doesn't handle the professor's transition to America in enough detail to be entirely convincing.
What it does do, though, is spend a great deal of time talking about chaos theory, randomness, …
At its most basic level, the story is about a professor from the former Soviet Union being a guest lecturer at an American college. Along the way, he meets a beautiful hairdresser half his age, gets caught up in an environmental protest, is courted by espionage agencies from around the world, and works with the police on a serial-killer case.
Although primarily known as an espionage novelist, here Robert Littell gives us a satire about America in the early '90s. His sentences are interesting, his characters are engaging, his wit is keen. However, the narrative is a bit unfocused as it switches back and forth between the third-person to the first-person perspectives of the two main characters. It also doesn't handle the professor's transition to America in enough detail to be entirely convincing.
What it does do, though, is spend a great deal of time talking about chaos theory, randomness, God, redemption, the journey vs. the destination, and relationships. This, I think, is where a lot of readers lose interest. It's not as heavy as, say, The Name of the Rose, but the reader has to be prepared to do a little work with this one.
Still, it's a decent read. Littell's die-hard fans may be disappointed because it appears to be a huge departure from his usual fare. Seeing as this is my first encounter with him, I'm suitably impressed. I'd say it's more of a 3 1/2 stars than the three I gave it, but I know it's not an all-out four. The novel served its purpose of entertaining me in a way that was not insulting, so the impression it left was a favorable one.