The hero of Valery Genkin's new book, a sarcastic old man who lives with his wife, dog and chickens in an abandoned village, fills his leisure time with notes in a thick notebook. What's in them, in these records? Episodes from life, pictures of the past extracted from memory, where reality is so mixed with fiction that the author himself can hardly distinguish between them. Caustic judgments about historical events and characters and reflections on religion alternate with recipes for Kapor tea, old letters and observations about the language - either great poetry or wretched advertising. The narration is colored with subtle irony and, despite all its mosaic diversity, it is thought out in such a way that you can read the book from any page, and its last phrase makes it easy to go to the beginning.