The Senility of Vladimir P. – Michael Hong

Rating: 4 stars

When I was getting my undergrad, I met a few people that thought the punchline was the most important part of a joke. In fact, it was so important that it didn’t matter what else the person had to say. I’m sure someone has met a few of them in their life. They were, for me, always nerds and in graduate school. That isn’t to besmirch grad school or nerds because I did go to grad school and am a really big nerd. But I highly suspected this book was that: the title was the punchline, basically ‘look at Vladimir Putin, who thinks he’s all that and is probably the richest single human alive right now, and how when he’s old he’ll shit his pants’.

But this book isn’t that. Oh, yes, there is a decent amount of the book that is this sort of non-humor, but there’s more to it than that. There are about three different stories going on, and they’re not that related. Until the end, and then it’s kinda tenuous. Okay, let me explain.

The first is the titular (heh) Vladimir. He’s now senile and has severe dementia, so Sheremetov, the protagonist, acts as his nurse at Vladimir’s sprawling, private dacha. The first chapter talks little about the protagonist, and it’s all about Vladimir’s disrespect for the new incoming president who he remembers as his old minister of finance. We get some themes, the absolute corruption and inviolability of the people at the top.

Then the rest of the story is about Sheremetov in two ways. The only real characteristic of him is that he’s the only honest man in Russia. So much so, in fact, that he let his wife die because he was unwilling to take bribes to be able to afford to bribe the doctors into treating her. Okay, the first story: he’s slowly finding out that everyone else that’s working for Vladimir, the bodyguards, the maids, the cook, the housekeeper, everyone is grifting Vladimir. They’re stealing things, over itemizing and otherwise profiting from the senile old man. One example is the gardener, who, once a passionate zealot who wanted to free Russia from tyrants, now commissions greenhouses on the land to presumably grow the vegetables that are cooked but really so he can sell them himself.

The third is his slow but eventual corruption of the protagonist. He has to raise 300,000 dollars to help his nephew, so he eventually tries to sell some of Vladimir’s near-endless supply of upscale watches. He ends up ripped off, loses everything, and things at the dacha seem to come apart.

So, I want to explain my grade. First: the book wasn’t published by a mainstream publisher, nor did the author get an agent. So that automatically makes me judge the book less harshly because it means there just wasn’t as much time pin-pointing the fine details with editors. This makes me forgive a lot of the many small mistakes. Second: the first and the last chapter are pretty good. The middle drags on and takes awhile to tell a fairly mundane story. Third: though the book was better than just the punchline in the title, it didn’t live up to great potential. So realistically, this book would’ve gotten a bit less than 3.5 stars, but the first point makes me think, ‘eh, it tried, and that’s a lot better than a lot of books’.