Other than that, Mrs. Oswald, how did you enjoy Minsk?

From the mixed-up files of Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald; plus a sad story about a bull who fatefully lost his way on the road to Pamplona, and a touching Wittgensteinian lesson about backing up our work on the computer.

By Douglas Cruickshank

Jun 24, 1999 | Seems everybody's got their piroshki in a twist over the Russian government's recent release of documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination. The collection reportedly includes a letter Lee Harvey Oswald wrote to the Soviets when seeking asylum in 1959 and, according to the Washington Post, "material gathered about Oswald by the Soviet authorities while he lived in Minsk." Now, there may well be some explosive nuggets of truth in these documents, but Ill place my rubles elsewhere. Thanks.

A couple years back, while I was delirious with some kind of flu gawdawfulness, a friend brought me Norman Mailer's "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery," which turned out to be the perfect reading matter while touring delirium, because brain-fever fantasizing was the book's required accessory. Reading "Oswald" was addictive -- just like staring at knotholes on the ceiling.

In researching the book, Mailer was given extraordinary access by the Russians to all manner of information (though not, presumably, that which has recently been released), including secret surveillance recordings made of Marina and Lee's conversations in their apartment. Fascinating? Not quite. More like the Bickersons on borscht by way of Beckett. The star-crossed couple dragged one another through numberless wee set-tos, utterly uncompelling in their dullness and focused on issues like Lee's helping with the housework (he was no dreamboat in that regard, comradettes) and, if memory serves, a run-in over the old in 'n' outski (apparently no dreamboat in that regard either -- wotasurprizski).

Oswald comes off as a dreary depressobag and a poor speller to boot. Poor Marina comes off as, well, a confused young woman stuck in the middle of Russia with someone who was either a megalomaniac homicidal loser or history's biggest patsy. In Oswald's single-page, handwritten letter that the Russkies just shipped to President Clinton, LHO, requesting asylum, tells the "Surprem Soviet of the USSR" that "I have lived in a decadent capitalist society where the workers are slaves," and yet a search of Salon personnel files reveals no record of Oswald ever having been employed here.

Next Page: Of bulls, mannequins and Wittgenstein

• View blog reactions