Jerelle Kraus Author, "All The Art That's Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn't): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page" Set in the near future, Graham Diamond's Chocolate Lenin is a satire about a brilliant but mad scientist in a chocolate factory who recreates Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and restores him to life.Ī smart but quirky security team is formed to stop him and impending revolution before pandemonium overtakes the entire world. I can just imagine how much fun Graham Diamond had writing this book! What if those who funded the project had their delusions of power-grabbing thwarted by a scientist who taunted them by stealing all the research data and scattering it to the winds, creating a puzzle it would take a super-genius to solve? This novel might restore perspective and let some progress be made.Ĭhocolate Lenin postulates a "what-if" of the typical science fiction novel - what if someone cloned Lenin? What if the clone woke up and started walking around, being spotted, reported. That may well be because we just can't laugh at ourselves hard enough to gain perspective. We argue and even rage over political matters, but make no progress. If you've never heard of Lenin, this just isn't going to get to you the same way. This is a novel that requires the reader to have some depth of context to understand and appreciate how it's a take-off on our current reality.
If you know all about the historical figure Lenin and his relationship to Stalin, and at least some of how Russia came to be what it is today, and if you take all that reality-history seriously, this book could well keep you in stitches all night. It's very hard to categorize this book, which is part of its ridiculous charm. One of the strangest books you'll ever read May 17, 2012 Review of Graham Diamond's CHOCOLATE LENIN by
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