I just moved to Moscow and this is the first book I've read start to finish since arriving. It should have been depressing, since it's the story of an alcoholic dissident writer struggling to eke out a living at a tourist site devoted to the writer Pushkin during the early 80s in the Soviet Union. Instead, it made me laugh more than once, mainly because of the narrator's ironic and observant sense of humor about his situation and life in general.