Book review

Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous, and because it was the kind of name a ‘lucky’ fool would have; in Russia, fools were held to tell truths, albeit obliquely. ‘Teffi’ wrote for newspapers, most notably the Russian Word. By 1911 she was writing more fiction than journalism; her short story collections achieved instant popularity. In 1919 the Russian Word was closed down. Teffi was evacuated, ending up, like so many ‘lesrusses’, in Paris. She never returned to Russia, except in her stories. Teffi’s fame evaporated almost immediately after her death in 1952.

Genghis Khan, unlike most Mongols in history, is a household name, regularly misappropriated as a right-wing totem. If we recall the genocidal killing sprees of, say, Stalin and Mao, perhaps it would be more historically accurate to say ‘to the left of Genghis Khan’. In the popular imagination he is the despot’s despot, a one-man killing machine who led his army of mounted archers to triumph after triumph, terrorising and slaughtering by the million to carve out an empire that stretched from the Caspian to the Pacific. His martial conquests place him in the top trio of world conquerors, alongside Alexander the Great and Tamerlane.

The Emperor Waltz is long enough at 600 pages to be divided, in the old-fashioned way, into nine ‘books’. Each book has a date, sliding from 1922 to 1979 to next year to 203 ad to last month. This might suggest an overly systematic novel in the mode of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning breezeblock The Luminaries. But Hensher has always been a writer with a wandering, curious eye (on its most exhilarating display in 2011’s King of the Badgers), and The Emperor Waltz is a novel that, despite its superficial restraints, won’t sit still.

Steven D. Levitt was a Harvard economist who specialised in politics and spent a lot of time watching cop shows on TV. Then he had an idea: why not switch from politics, which he found dull, to crime? Soon he was studying the crack cocaine economy. Stephen J. Dubner was the guitarist in a rock band called the Right Profile. But he didn’t like the rock’n’roll lifestyle; he was a bookish type. So he became a journalist, got a job at the New York Times, and found himself interviewing a go-ahead Harvard economist who had written interesting stuff on the crack cocaine economy, among many other fascinating things. This, of course, was Levitt. Dubner made a suggestion: why not write a book together, based on Levitt’s work?