[Rates of Exchange] manages to be funny, gloomy, shrewd and silly all at once. Much of it, especially the first hundred pages or so, reads less like fiction than like a meticulously detailed journal kept by a jaundiced traveler with total recall. To anyone who has ever done time in that funny, gloomy place called Moscow the book will afford innumerable shocks of recognition. To everyone else it will provide comic but nevertheless reliable exposure to a land of astonishing inefficiency, awful food, rampant paranoia, and surprisingly hospitable (and lovable) people….

[The book is], more often than not, engaging, even though Bradbury, like all compulsive wits (and especially the British sort), sometimes lets his cleverness get in the way of his story.

His protagonist is Angus Petworth, a middle-aged linguist who travels from London to "Slaka," where he gives some rarefied lectures on the English language…. To call...