Amazon.com Review
Russian writers tend to gravitate toward either Tolstoyan gravity or Gogol's brand of feather-light fabulism. Victor Pelevin, the author of four previous books, most definitely belongs in the latter camp. His work may be grounded in the grubby realities of contemporary Russia, but the food shortages, decaying apartment blocks, and political chaos serve him as a kind of naturalistic springboard from which he launches into one antic leap after another. Pelevin's latest collection is a case in point. The title story finds a young, Moscow-based slacker visiting the countryside, hoping for a little bucolic enlightenment. Instead, he stumbles across a pack of werewolves deep in the forest, who hastily induct him into their numbers. Pelevin expertly conveys Sasha's brand-new lupine perceptions: the way he can now "distinguish the creaking of a branch in the wind a hundred yards from the clearing and the chirping of a cricket coming from precisely the opposite direction." But as the pack heads into a nearby village, it becomes clear that Sasha has been chosen to purge a treacherous, four-legged comrade. Perestroika notwithstanding, man is
still a wolf to man--and vice versa.
Elsewhere, in "Sleep," a student discovers that the rest of the world is in a state of slumber, and promptly gets with the program himself. "It was all very confusing, and in order to be able to tell whether he was asleep or not at any particular moment, Nikita began carrying a small pin with a big, round, green head in his pocket, and whenever he was in any doubt, he pricked his thigh, and everything became clear. Then, of course, there was the new fear that he might simply dream that he was pricking himself with the pin, but Nikita drove that thought from his mind as quite unbearable." Political allegory? Existential parable? Arguably these stories are both--but Pelevin's talent is much too large and unpredictable to be jammed into such generic pigeonholes. He's a brilliant original who seems to get better (and funnier) with each book. --James Marcus
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Originally published in 1994, Pelevin's second Booker Prize-winning short fiction collection brilliantly and poignantly satirizes the economic, cultural and spiritual decay of Mother Russia under Communism. Kafka, one of Pelevin's more obvious literary ancestors, described his own enigmatic black fantasies as "parables," and so are Pelevin's: almost fable-simple on the surface with strange subterranean currents contorting their helpless protagonists into caricatures and corpses. These eight parables each close on a lesson illustrating the absurdity of life in the U.S.S.R. "Sleep" opens at a Marxist-Leninist university lecture, where Nikita Dozakin discovers that everyone, including his droning professor, has learned to avoid all unpleasantness-daily living-by functioning in their sleep. In "Tai Shou Chuan," Comrade Chan, whisked mysteriously to Moscow, rises to rule the entire country, but is dumped for telling the truth; power, in the eyes of the wise, he learns, is no different from an anthill. "The Ontology of Childhood," like the title story and "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream," reveals the bitter pain of every stage of life under the Soviets: adults make children "feel rotten because they want you to become just like them"-depressed, drunken, angry, isolated, less than human. The few feeble flashes of compassion and joy in Pelevin's bleak landscape are achieved only by sleep, alcohol, drugs or changing into something other than a citizen of a land where "you were born and grew up in a prison," subject to inhuman laws a Big Brother made and enforces, which you blindly endure with "the calm enduring hatred known only to Siamese cats with cruel masters, and Soviet engineers who read George Orwell."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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