Rates of Exchange: A Novel

The oddly titled novel Rates of exchange follows a British professor on a two week visit to give some lectures in an Eastern European country. He is never quite sure what is going on though he constantly gets instruction from two bickering hosts. Great satire on communism, foreign travel, and academia. Beautifully funny writing especially for how the natives talk to him in not quite right English. I laughed aloud at multiple places and had to read some funny passages aloud to my wife.

Interesting perspectives held my interest, plus good characters in some strange situations. Not a page turner, but good summer reading. I appreciate good use of language and structures of sentences and paragraphs...good writer.

The late Malcomb Bradbury was at the top of his game when he wrote this mordantly funny satire of cultural exchanges during the Cold War. His hero, Petworth, is a bland Everyman of a British academic with two weeks to spend behind the Iron Curtain. Bradbury's trademark wordplay, his brillant observations on socialist hypocrisy, and his heartbreaking insights into the foibles of human nature, make this a deeply rewarding novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

This was a hard book to get into. It's about an English Lecturer (Angus Petworth) who travels to the 1980s East Bloc capital Slaka to lecture on the internationality of English. While there he struggles with the regimentation, inflexibility of the native's mentality, language issues, paperwork, and general craziness of the eastern communist mentality.The problem with the book is it's written in the 1980s, and so feels a little dated. In addition, as someone who has lived in China for 6 years (where the regimentation, inflexibility of the native's mentality, language issues, paperwork, and general craziness ARE crazy, but not as crazy as is laid out here -albeit for comic effect), the book feels mean spirited too.

This tale of a naïve academic on a lecture visit to a fictitious Eastern European country - it could be Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria - was written before the Cold War ended. All the political conformity, all the mystery and secrecy, all the austerity and shortages, its all there, and as I remember it personally in Prague or Sofia as a visitor in the '60s. But its there in an hilarious confusion of language, misunderstandings, clandestine sex and Marxist dogma, with at least a chuckle on every page, as Petworth (Petwurt,Pitwit, etc) is entertained (in more than one sense) by his official and unofficial hosts. I relived some of my own experiences, but this time with brilliant wit and humour.

I really struggled with this book. My parents travelled extensively in the eastern block at this time. They found it hilarious. For me I found it as irritating as travelling at that time evidently was and gave up before the end.

arrived in good time and good condition, would order again from them

A modern classic. Echoes of the kinds of social/cultural unrest that is still alive across the world. Both amusing and challenging.