Status Updates From Le Décaméron des femmes

ANOTHER blackly comical funniest thing I've read all year in this book: An anecdote about a mutually unfaithful couple, who were reconciled through a practical joke involving a ram's penis and spare blood one half of the couple got from a friend who worked at a butchery. Which ended up reminding them of an old Russian fairy tale.

Something you're not bound to find in many more books for sure!

The chapter where Valentina (the apparatchnik lady) gets attacked by a would be rapist, only his private parts to get entangled in a loose string of yarn from one of her winter gloves, which then she uses to turn the tables on him, is one of the funniest things I've read all year. VERY dark sense of humour but I guess that's to be expected from early-1980's Russia.

I started reading this because I realised that I heard of this book BEFORE I heard of Boccaccio's original Decameron, since my mother owns a copy of this one - follows 10 women in a maternity ward in 1980's Russia sharing various tragicomical anecdotes from their sex lives, very blackly humourous and also insightful into how gender roles evolved through the USSR's history