The Silver Bone (2024) by Andrey Kurkov

 Book Review

The Silver Bone (2024)

by Andrey Kurkov

   The Silver Bone, by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov, didn't make the 2024 Booker International shortlist, but it did make the longlist. I checked the Audiobook out of the library because it looked fun- a detective novel set in Bolshevik era Kiev?  Certainly it was more fun than the rest of the books on the Booker International 2024 longlist put together, which are mostly a sad, troubled bunch of narratives.   You could call The Silver Bone "The Accidental Detective" because Samson Kolecheko, the detective-protagonist of this book (and many to come) only finds himself a detective after he files a police report and is complimented on his ability to write.   Trained as an electrical engineer, Samson finds himself orphaned in Chapter one after a rampaging Cossack murders his father in the street.

  Samson retreats to his family apartment- spacious or "bourgeois" in the lingo of the time and is immediately invaded by two Russian soldiers who are billeted in his Dad's study.  This gets the ball rolling, and what follows is a good time with Samson running all over revolutionary Kiev trying to solve a murder and the mystery of a silver femur bone.   The Audiobook was narrated by someone using a Ukrainian accented English which is an Audiobook pet peeve of mine.  Audiobook accents are for different variations of written ENGLISH.  If a work written in another language is translated into English the narrator should either have No accent, or like everything else in a work of translated fiction, translated into the appropriate English language variation.

  Here, for example, everyone is speaking Ukrainian but Samson is a university graduate, while other characters are uneducated/working class Bolsheviks. It would make sense to give Samson a BBC accent and the working class characters cockney accents.  Or, keeping with the time period of the novel, Samson could have had some kind of trans-atlantic accent and the working class characters the accent of an early 20th century Brooklyn factory worker.   Giving all the characters Ukrainian accented English is dumb.