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Somewhere East of Life is a rambunctious black comedy for the nineties. Burnell is a retiring guy who operates out of Germany, attempting to hold the world together culturally. He moves around the more outrageous parts of the globe, listing architectural gems threatened by war, history, and human awfulness.
Such is man's ingenuity to man, that Burnell is also threatened. Someone has stolen a chunk of his memory - ten years, in fact. This chunk, including the more salacious bits, such as Burnell's marriage to Stephanie, has been chopped up and sold to lovers of soft porn everywhere.
Trying both to continue work and recover his missing years, Burnell is sent to long lost parts of the old Soviet Empire, such as a corner of Georgia, where civil war rages, and Turkmenistan in Central Asia, which proves stranger than we had any right to expect. Along the way, the unfortunate Burnell tangles with a number of odd characters, a valuable icon, bargain-price sex, and a worthless bridge.
Of a recent collection of Aldiss stories, the critic Gary K. Wolfe said, "Aldiss seems to be showing off his mastery of technique, his ability to take a story wherever he wants to, depite our expectations, and to convice us that it ends up where it belongs. Not very many writers ought to try this, but Aldiss knows how, and never fails to provoke or enlighten." It's a comment that can very definitely be applied to the fun and surprises in Somewhere East of Life.
