Stalin's Nose: Travels Around the Bloc

The British author proves to be more novelist than journalist here, leaving readers without referents to guide them through thickets of symbolism. For example, what is one to make of the death of MacLean's beloved Russian uncle Peter, a high-level KGB operative who, while already mortally ill, was killed by a falling pig in his Potsdam yard hard by the now-crumbling Wall, which once served as his garden trellis? And how did the lethal pig come to be called Winston? (Named after MacLean's esteemed countryman who made a bad deal at Yalta?) MacLean has been summoned into the twilight-of-empire bloc by his widowed aunt Zita to attend Peter's funeral, and also to escort her to Budapest to replace her lost false teeth. As they journey in Zita's unreliable auto, accompanied by the Communist pig Winston, we meet relatives and friends, believers and the enslaved. Providing the plot for MacLean's morality tale are the travelers' detours to Prague, to Zita's family homestead in Slovakia--where her antagonistic sister Vera, politically estranged from her for 40 years, has come to bury the recently released body of her RAF pilot husband, killed in WW II--through Poland and Romania and ultimately to Moscow. The book is best read as though it is fiction, its black humor and poignancy made even more affecting by its abstractions. (Feb.)