Immediately banned after it was published, Paranoia is a novel about how dictatorships survive by burrowing into the minds of those they rule, sowing distrust and blurring the boundaries between the state’s and the individual’s autonomy. Although Minsk and Belarus are never mentioned, they are clearly the author’s inspiration for the novel’s setting. The plot focuses on a doomed romance between a young man whose former lover has disappeared and a young woman whose other lover is the minister of state security. The novel evokes classic dissident literature while artfully depicting the post-Soviet, globalized world.   Emerging from the authoritarian nation of Belarus and written originally in Russian by a now-exiled novelist and activist, Paranoia is a satire of and attack on that very thinly disguised regime. In limning a society in which the most minute behavior is investigated and reported upon by the authorities, Martinovich mixes narrative with governmental “reports.” Inside the framework of a repressive society is a romance between the writer Anatoly and his beloved Elisaveta. The surveillance files describing their most intimate actions and bedroom conversations are given in deadpan, Soviet-style bureaucratese while what is actually being described is basically a love affair. It is Martinovich’s contribution that he parallels the commonplace but painful paranoia of love (i.e., jealousy) and the frighteningly appropriate paranoia of life in a harsh dictatorship. If the novel is at times strained, Martinovich can be excused a heavy hand in dealing with a regime that rules with an iron fist. Scholarly prefatory material provides needed context. --Mark Levine "Martinovich’s debut novel conjures up  1984 ’s Big Brother as it tells the story of Anatoly and Elisaveta’s star-crossed affair . . . A thrillingly twisted tale of a love triangle set in an all-too-plausible political nightmare." — Kirkus  "Full of passionate intelligence and incisive wit." — Publishers Weekly "An exciting novel that is not easy to forget." — Times Literary Supplement  "Victor Martinovich is a funny writer . . . the novel is as hilarious a send up of modern Belorussian tyranny as one can expect."  —Russian Life VICTOR MARTINOVICH is a deputy editor of BelGazeta, a Belarusian weekly newspaper, and the dean of the Faculty of Politics at the European Humanities University, a Belarusian institution closed by the authorities in 2004 and now based in Vilnius, Lithuania. DIANE NEMEC IGNASHEV is Class of 1941 Professor of Russian and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College in Minnesota and the translator of No Love Without Poetry: The Memoirs of Marina Tsvetaeva’s Daughter by Ariadna Efron (Northwestern, 2009).