Will I love Rates of Exchange?

Published in 1983, this hilarious novel follows the travels and travails of a feckless British professor of linguistics – who, despite his academic discipline, laughably speaks no languages other than English -- as he embarks on an unexpectedly instructive cultural exchange in a fictitious eastern European communist country.

Though set during the cold war, Rates of Exchange seems both timeless and timely in its humorous but barbed criticism of both naïveté and cynicism.

As a college professor, I particularly enjoyed the novel’s brilliant, laugh-out-loud satire of the pretentions of academia and the hypocrisies of communism.

I can think of few novels as funny as this one.

Rates of Exchange depicts a hapless British academic, Angus Petworth, on his first journey behind Iron Curtain and into the imaginary land of Slaka, a country that combines elements of a number of East European communist states but is perhaps most like a combination of Romania and Bulgaria, with a touch of former Yugoslavia.

The riotous Cold War comedy begins as Petworth boards the flight (“Welcome here please on Comflug 155, destiny Slaka”) and it continues to the last line, as Petworth is feted, followed, seduced, and left thoroughly… show more.