Han Ong

So I'm always looking for role models, if you will, or who to model myself after in terms of trying to be –

An artist living in a crueler and crueler society and how to overcome the usual artist feelings of inutility and impotence.

Yes, the lab was shut down.

I think it was because they'd entrusted a typist, an office typist with Samistat, to put down on record, and then the typist had turned them in.

And so in the profile, it says that Ulitskaya and her colleagues had got off relatively easy.

They were detained for 24 hours, and then they were released, but they lost their job as a consequence of having been turned in.

There were a couple of things that stood out to me.

First of all, I think I am, as a reader, partial to the kind of

skullduggery that is involved in trying to skirt the impositions of a cruel regime, you know, which can also be a kind of parental despotism.

So the spy story elements in it are very thrilling for me.

So that's one.

And then the other one, which we can talk about at length later on, is there is a description of

bunch of old women taking a bath.

That was just so outré.

And, you know, usually my admiration for a writer as I'm reading him or her is that I'm usually just very quiet in my admiration.

The pleasure sensors are being

sort of massaged when I'm happy in a story.

But for this particular story and that particular stretch of the story with the old women taking a bath, I just felt like putting the pages down and standing up and applauding.

I don't think I've ever encountered anything like this in my reading.

The Fugitive