Customer Reviews

The Slynx: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Having thoroughly enjoyed much of this novel, I wish I could give it a higher rating. It's the ending that deflates what could've ended with a bang: not literally but dramatically. Tolstaya loves her creation, and the grim blend of satire and realism in the post-apocalyptic shadows she presents often proves moving in its narrator's attempts to make linguistic and philosophical sense out of the beauties and the harshness he (at first uncomprehendingly) witnesses.

Parts of this book, especially in its first half, offer scenes of memorable poverty and ingenious social commentary. Maybe for Western readers the poetic remnants from past Russian voices resonate less, and there's details (as in the layout of the hamlet) that those of us unfamiliar with Moscow don't really "matter" the way they might to a Russian reader. Still, the fall and rise of the narrator keeps you page-turning. Especially relevant are passages keyed towards booklovers and the pages we hoard and guard against the unlettered mobs: these musings are among the best in the novel and well worth attention.
Though I doubt any of us could match the appetite of the narrator's bookishness THAT much; but, read it for yourself.

The novel's pace in its latter third (cf. Riddley Walker's plot) seems too predictable given the variety Tolstaya's invented so far. I cannot figure out why she could not sustain a more satisfying climax and denouement. Again, distance from the original text and context may be partly to blame; I may not recognize all the symbolic figures or allegorical allusions that a native reader might find more illuminating.

Granting this discrepancy, I emphasize that the build-up doesn't lead to an equally inventive conclusion. So much wit and poignancy and insight pours into this novel, but it overflows into a storyline that spills out and diffuses its gathered potency into dribbles and splats.

"The Slynx", the debut novel by Tatyana Tolstaya, the granddaughter of the Russian writer Alexey Tolstoy, is worth reading. There are many reasons to recommend this book. The first and perhaps most important one is the language - funny, full of neologisms and contrasts, bursting with life; the novel is an excellent satire on the contemporary changes in the language, its simplifications and slang. The second is the atmosphere, as if taken from a painting of a primitivist. The third are its deep roots in Russia, its history and nature, the Russian soul and destiny.

Although obviously possible to classify as a dystopia, "The Slynx" cannot really be compared to any other dystopian novels (I cannot see any resemblance to Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale, except that it is also a dystopia, which is not too much of a similarity), except the other contemporary Russian ones (it seems like the Russian writers have only futuristic visions nowadays) - and from those I have read, I enjoyed "The Slynx" the most. The other association I had was with "The Clockwork Orange", mainly because of the linguistic stylization.

The action takes place in some settlement consisting of bigger and smaller wooden huts (later we learn that it is placed on where Moscow used to be), sometime in the future, after the undefined explosion. The inhabitants are superstitious (their beliefs are wonderfully re-told old Russian folk tales; the novel is full of literary references, to the tales as well as to poetry and prose, which are delightful for the reader), they make all tools of wood, they eat mice and are scared of the slynx, an unseen, mythical creature from the forest, and of the Chechens from the South. They suffer from various mutations, or so-called "Effects" of the explosion. They never read, only praise and fear Fyodor Kuzmich, the absolute ruler, never ask questions and try, like animals, to find their place in the world of poisonous rabbits and other post-explosion deviations. The main protagonist, Benedikt, although raised among the same people and unable to really get out of his environment, has a lot of doubts, sometimes asks inconvenient questions, and reads all the books he can lay his hands on (it does not make him any wiser though, as he falls in love and marries into a rich family, which numbs him almost irreversibly). The society is surprisingly similar to the Russian society (as it is now and as it was throughout the centuries) - there is a grey mass of poor, common people and the few unscrupulous rich, there is also a special degenerated group of people from Old Times, who are used instead of horses to pull sledges (I had a most strange association with taxi drivers at this point) and, finally, The Oldeners, people who survived the Explosion and their Effect is mainly a very long lifespan. The Oldeners long for the old days (who could blame them?), keep secret libraries of forbidden books and try to preserve the old culture, which has deteriorated (their dialogues with the ordinary people cause laughter through the tears), and memories of the past. They speak the normal language of educated people and sometimes are completely clueless and childlike in the Slynx reality (paradoxically, for them, as for us, the rest of the society is childlike and clueless about the world).

There are, of course, obvious parallels to the Russian reality (I do not think that "The Slynx" can be read as a universal dystopia, it is Russian to the core). The Explosion can be explained in several ways, some would see it as Charnobyl, but most likely it is the Great Revolution, Fyodor Kuzmich is a personification of Stalin, and The Oldeners are the old intelligentsia, a class specific for the Communist countries from Eastern Europe.
"The Slynx" is enjoyable, although it is also thoroughly pessimistic and does not give any hope (although, maybe, at the very end, there is a tiny grain of hope for a change). Tatyana Tolstaya has been noted for her nihilism already after the publication of her short stories, and "The Slynx" seems to confirm this thesis. The book could be shorter, though, after a while the language gets a bit tiresome, and the ending is also not its strongest point.

Published a mere 6 years ago, Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx has already been dubbed a 'classic' by the New York Review of Books; perhaps with good reason since the book, a dystopian Russian fable depicting peasant life post nuclear blast, seems timeless in its political and social themes. Tolstaya, great grandniece of Leo Tolstoy and a frequent contributor to the NYRB, sets a darkly comic tone in this her first novel.

As the author paints vividly on a bleak canvas, what appears is a horrifying, reconstituted world. The main character, comrade (Golubchik) Benedikt works for Fyodor Kuzmich Glorybe, the head feudal lord ("The Greatest Murza"), as a scribe copying out classic literature and poetry, which Kuzmich claims as his own. On his free time, he catches mice for dinner and tries to meet women, preferably ones with few consequences (as a result of the great "Blast" most citizens live with "consequences" like Varvara "with one eye, not a hair on her head and coxcombs growing all over it").

The Golubchiks live in huts called "izbas" and dine on "worrums" as well as the ubiquitous mice, which also serve as tender. There are the Degenerators, half-human half-canine, who are enslaved and used to transport Golubchiks via troika. The Saniturions are a sort of KGB, sniffing out and obliterating any hint of "freethinking". Then there are the "Oldeners": humans who have survived the great blast and are somehow now immune to natural death. Most Oldeners have been around for 200 years or more and feel great disdain for the feudal Murzas.

The fearsome Slynx of the title lies outside the boundaries of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk (formerly Moscow). It's the fear of moving on, expanding, change, and discovering just what does exist at the nether regions of the "flat pancake of the earth"; the serpentine Slynx is the fear of knowledge and it devours all that dare trespass on its turf.

As Benedikt discovers and becomes obsessed with books, which are forbidden as sources of freethinking by the Greatest Murza, he leaves himself vulnerable to the rebellious machinations of his newly acquired father-in-law. Benedikt finds himself on a quest for the ultimate book, the book of the great "White Bird", that will reveal to him the correct way to live his life. Here, the meat of Tolstaya's cautionary tale emulsifies like a big bowl of mouse stew. By the end of the novel she auspiciously delivers her final ironic caveat: Those who study history are doomed to repeat it.

The Slynx is by turns wry and laugh out loud funny; it evokes at once hopelessness in its pathos and sincere hope through its humanism (as evidenced in the oldeners). I recommend this book to any curious reader.

4 stars

I would reccomend reading some of Russian history (around the time period when Stalin was president) otherwise it would be difficult to understand some parts and what Tolstaya is talking about.

I read this book in Russian and English, and of course the english translation is not nearly as good as the original Russian. However, the story is still amazing, and I love how she uses irony, and makes fun of certain concepts-it's sad, but funny at the same time!

The review from Publishers Weekly is wrong saying that the world described in The Slynx is the world of permanent winter. The reviewer obviously have not read the book.

The book is a masterpiece of Russian language. I suppose it is equally hard to translate to English as to translate Shakespeare from English. Tolstaya's language is not a simple Russian, it is a colorful, rich literature language. Note that the book is written as if on behalf of Benedikt. And Tolstaya in a masterly fashion gives the prose a rural and still noble shade of Russia primordial. It's really enjoying.

This is a witty story in spite of its dark theme, but you really need to have a good background knowledge of Russian lit, history, and politics to get the jokes/references. I usually pass on the books I enjoy to friends, but I fear that few of them would see the humor here.

Slow to start the plot, this novel is occasionally confusing, and probably 100 pages too long. The post apocalyptic tableau is misleading; this is an overwrought Russian fable. It's best classified in the post-modernist, semi-fabulist genre. I suspect some of its appeal was lost in translation, but I also suspect the Translator may have saved the book by her superb rendering of Russian colloquialisms into English. The ending is a disappointment.
There are some redeeming qualities. Several laugh out loud moments of Russian humor and irony. I liked the novel plot device of "Olden-Timers" who survived "The Blast", were mutated and apparently immortalized. The descriptions of "golubchiks" muddling through winter hardship were simultaneously comical and horrendous.
Other NYRB books I have read have been outstanding. This book was mediocre.

Tolstaya is an amazing novelist. I've never read any of her poetry, but I want to after reading this. I hope she writes more novels in the future. The vocabulary she creates is interesting and hilarious. This book gives insight to the origins of politics and art. It is profoundly thought provoking and enlightening. You owe it to yourself to read this book.

The post-Apocalyptic narrative has become a common genre by now, ubiquitous in novels and movies. Yet Tolstaya has created something quite different from the expected, a darkly-comic Gogol-like world of Russian peasants, "Golubchiks" (many with horrific mutations - "consequences" - from the nuclear fallout) who've recreated a bureaucratic book-confiscating state out of the ashes of nuclear winter, as bizarre and cruel as anything under the former Soviet Union.

The unlikely protagonist, Benedict, is a bumbling, if well-meaning fellow, who finds that his deceased Mom's intellectual pals expect great things of him. Many of these are "Oldeners", survivors from before the war, who've inexplicably had their life spans extended by centuries. They wrestle with both the profound ignorance of the post-war population and the absurd social restrictions invented by the new generation to foster a sense of control over their brave new world.

The eponymous Slynx, an apparently mythic cat-like predator of the northern forests (of which Benedict is terrified), comes up in passing throughout the story. But the Slynx remains unseen and unknown, a literary revolver drawn, but never fired, perhaps a symbol for the inchoate fear imbued by the totalitarian state into its citizens. Other not-quite-human beings include the Degenerators, talkative horse-like creatures with human faces, whose vulgarity offends even the crude Golubchiks.

The novel takes an absurdist turn in its second half, as Benedict abruptly marries a desirable coworker, only to find that his new father-in-law is one of the hated and feared Saniturions, a class of samurai-apparatchiks who terrorize Golubchiks suspected of keeping books. This leads to an unexpected and perhaps somewhat facile conclusion, which I won't spoil. In this change of tone, Tolstaya leaves behind many of the deftly written characters and plot devices she's developed, including the poignant friendship between Benedict and Varvara Lukinishna, a sensitive and intelligent woman whose body is grotesquely covered in cock's combs. In an amusing scene, Benedict mistakes her attempts to get him to join her band of revolutionary book-readers as an invitation to a sexual dalliance, leaving both disappointed.

The second half of the book feels rushed, symbolism and satire gaining the upper hand over the lovingly depicted characters and narrative of the first half. An engaging story morphs into a parable, and the characters' actions lose subtlety and become broadly farcical. The reasons for the Slynx's evident importance remain similarly obscure, as if dropped or forgotten.
But in spite of this, The Slynx is a fascinating, funny and provocative book.

It's practically impossible to write something new, inspiring and/or different in the dystopian genre. Take movies for instance. There are various different versions of post-today societies, bunch of ground shaking changes of environment, giant leaps in available technology, totalitarian states of any kind and power-hungry overlords with control problems. But almost every movie in the genre is more or less the same. You have your hero who is struggling to keep moral compass of the days gone by, you have some oppressive thing that tries to stop him, you have a battle or two with bunch of explosions and dramatic dialogue thrown in for the good measure and in the end of the day hero fails or succeeds (basically depending on movie being made by big Hollywood studio or not). Where these movies differ from each other is level of world-building and intelligence of the script. Dystopian literature functions in more or less the same way. Since it belongs to different media, one has much more space for world building, and one is not limited by budget in creating epic scenes of destruction. Like every genre, dystopian genre has almost spent its resources. Almost all of the imaginable scenarios have been used (though reality always surprises us with something even weirder), writers recycle same lines and use familiar opponents, and so on. So how do we judge if dystopian literature is any good? Well, it has to do with literature in itself, particularly SF part of it. Dystopian book is not about the future, it's about today. Once we grasp this, we can judge it by how well does it capture the problems of our own world, how it uses them to fuel the story, and finally, how well it fares in scaring the [..] out of us.

And "Slynx" does this on so many levels that it's almost unbelievable.
I've been reading dystopian literature almost as long as I can remember, and when something like this comes out of the blue, I am left speechless. What you need to know is that "Slynx" heavily relies on language. Croatian translation was excellent, Croatian, being the Slavic language, allowed translator to explore and translate almost exact sentiment of the Russian. How well Jamey Gambrell did this I don't know. Apart from the language bit, "Slynx" offer at least two reading levels. You can read it as a disturbing view on modern-day Russia but as far as I'm concerned this approach takes away much from the book and limits it to very narrow context. Second level explores the contrast between high-culture and pop-culture (to put it that way), which basically reads as complex narrative about inability of cultural elite to deal with essential changes, showing low-culture (i.e. working class) to be much more versatile in this matter. Higher culture is shown as monolithic and out-of-place calling back entire ivory-tower debate. Tolstaya uses irony, surrealism and absurdity to develop these notions, criticizing the blindness and inertness of the elite.

From the first page "Slynx" puts you on the wrong track. There was a nuclear accident of catastrophic proportions which plunged humanity back to Neolithic. Post-nuclear humans don't know anything about pre-nuclear civilization. Remnants of memory are stored inside the minds of few old ones, which lived Before. But, from the perspective of post-nuclear people they are nothing but crazy weirdoes whose language is on the brink of being undecipherable. Somehow, one expects that main struggle is going to be about this - about reinventing and re-implementing entire discourse of pre-disaster civilization. Very soon though, we find out that Culture is nothing but a set of codes which makes sense in appropriate context. In the world of Slynx, few books remained, but skill that is required to understand them is long gone. In the world of constant struggle for survival, level of abstraction needed for critical reading of any kind is inexistent. Book is nothing more but a collection of sentences and Schopenhauer holds same value as gardening tools catalogue. Post-nuclear world exist on simple notions and reinventing the culture will take the long time and will take its way (unburdened by the old masters). In a way, this is the most powerful notion in the book, one which sheds disturbing light on contemporary society and its culture. It's a question of reading (or being able to read) Hegel and consuming short video-clips on You-tube. Dystopia of Slynx isn't going to happen in some far-away future, it is, from a certain point of view, happening now. Tolstaya dwells much on this, with depressive and disturbing conclusion of You-tube society winning, being accessible to most and making itself into a new culture, obliterating anything that was before. This kind of regression (if indeed it is a regression) makes a final point in the anti-modernist debate, picturing the progress (or cultural change) as something that can go in any direction. Tolstaya isn't agitated by this - entire book reads much as coming to peace with these notions.

There is much more to this book (different subtexts, different conflicts, different problems), but my space is running out. In the end I can't do anything but recommend this one. It gives much to think about and in a way it's much more poignant than dystopian novels that deal with totalitarian policies and oppressed societies. Be wary though. It hits hard.