Lovable oddballs: Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, by Andrey Kurkov, reviewed

The year is 2011, and in Lviv, a city straddling the East and the West, ‘no fog had been thick enough to impede the last 20 years of Ukrainian capitalism’. On the anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, a group of ageing hippies perform a bizarre ritual by a grave marked with his name. Alik and his friends, who have been gathering here since the 1970s to worship the musician, are now living in ‘a “double” past: another age and another country’. They know ‘time can’t be rewound like an old VHS tape’, and yet Alik keeps reminiscing about their Soviet days – a time when, despite everything, the whole town could hear their ‘strange music that the regional party committee didn’t recognise, with strange but, thank God, incomprehensible foreign lyrics’.

Fluently translated by Reuben Woolley and recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize, this novel revisits some of Andrey Kurkov’s trademark subjects, among them men, often on the fringes of society, behaving oddly without quite realising it. Alik lives in a squalid room, crammed with hippy paraphernalia. Captain Ryabtsev, a retired KGB agent who used to spy on Alik, resurfaces to apologise and tell the ‘true’ story of Hendrix’s posthumous journey to Lviv. It turns out that 30 years earlier, tasked with fighting the flower-power counterculture, he fell in love with it. In one comic twist, Alik loses his house key and gets a spare from Ryabtsev, whose work duties once involved paying him secret visits.

Another narrative thread is centred on Taras, who keeps cacti for company and makes a living as a ‘vibrotherapist’, driving his customers down ‘carefully selected’ cobbled streets until their kidney stones come out. His friend Oksana can be relied on for authoritative opinions and practical help; even love in her view ‘is more like mutual aid than anything else’.