New York Times: A novel imagines Putin is retired and has dementia

There's a reason Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump seem to like each other: They both dislike reality. It takes a special dispensation, not to say freedom, from the facts to look at garbage and call it a garden, and vice versa; to - in Putin's case - advocate against corruption while using political power for personal gain; to make a promise one day and the next do its opposite. Putin has so comprehensively transformed Russia (restored, some might say, after a flawed semidemocratic interlude under Boris Yeltsin) that he has transformed reality itself. Putinism seems as pervasive in that country as Soviet rule was, and all without the machinery of a totalitarian state. It's phantasmagoric performance art on the world’s grandest stage, which makes it only more remarkable that Putin has spent so little time as the subject of fiction. (In the West, he tends to show up in spy novels; in Russia, in elaborate, surreal allegories.) Perhaps his reality doesn't require artistic ­embellishment.