Viktor Pelevin

There’s an allegory that could be teased out of this book but suffice it to say Brezhnev would have had the author sitting in a gulag for the rest of his short life while Stalin would have had Pelevin shot. There are two resorts by the sea; Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk and an unnamed one (Sochi) on the Black Sea across from Turkey. Isn’t it just too coincidental that we are reading this book that takes place in Sochi while the Winter Olympics are taking place there at the same time? In show more the Soviet Union, Sochi was a holiday spot for the workers who were guaranteed a yearly vacation. Could the comments on insects being poisoned by calcium cyanide since the wives need foreign currency, refer to the artificial famine (Holodomor) that took place in Ukraine? Stalin needed foreign currency to buy machinery for industrialization and got it by forcibly removing grain from Ukrainian farmers and selling it on world markets. Marina is impregnated by Major Nikolai from Magadan. Magadan was an infamous gulag on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk in Siberia. Marina and Nikolai are ants which represent the military and the KGB. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 which allowed Russian soil to become Ukrainian soil again. Seryozcha the cicada represents prisoners in the gulags who laboured in mines or digging canals. Could the cannibalism by Marina and Natasha the ants represent the cannibalism that took place all over the Soviet Union during WWII or Holodomor? Do the dung beetles personify a slaving population? I enjoyed the book for I took a degree in Russian literature, language, and history at university and was constantly reading between the lines. On the other hand, if you don’t follow Soviet/Russian history, then you’ll probably be in the dark. show less

Even if you don't ordinarily read science-fiction or novels with werewolves, you will still enjoy The Sacred Book of the Werewolf since Victor Pelevin grounds his novel in a fund of everyday reality and tells his tale in easy-to-follow linear narrative. True, the narrator is a 2000 year old female werefox in the body of a sleek, shapely gorgeous sixteen year old girl, but, still, there is enough human-like traits to identify with her desires and aspirations and conflicts. We follow our sly show more werefox , A Hu-Li by name, through a number of sexual encounters, frolicking adventures and emotionally charged relationships in Moscow 2005. What really adds a zesty flavor to this tale is the cross-species, supernatural qualities of several characters and how they transform and then interact with mere humans, or, in some cases, with other were-creatures, as per the below examples.

A Hu-Li also has a fox's tail, which she describes as follows : "When a fox's tail increases in length, the ginger hairs on it grow thinker and longer. It's like a fountain when the pressure is increased several times over (I wouldn't draw any parallels with the male erection). The tail plays a special part in our lives, and not only because of its remarkable beauty. I didn't call it an antenna by chance. The tail is the organ that we use to spin our web of illusion." And what a web of illusion! Enough to scramble the minds of any man she meets, any man, that is, who is fully human.

There are other magical, intuitive gifts that come along with being a werefox. A Hu-Li tells us about one such gift: "But thanks to our tail, we foxes find ourselves in a kind of sympathetic resonance with people's consciousness amplified when people take drugs. --- his consciousness was hurtling along some kind of orange tunnel filled with spectral forms that he skillfully avoided. The tunnel kept branching sideways and Mikhalich chose which way to turn. It was like a bobsleigh - Mikhalich was controlling his imaginary flight with minute turns of his feet and hands that were invisible to the eye, not even turns really, simply microscopic adjustments of the tension in the corresponding muscles." Such a description is an example of the clear, vivid language we find in Andrew Bromfield's translation.

And here is a snippet from a section where A Hu-Li observes a special someone in her life metamorphosing into a full-fledged werewolf: "And then he sprouted fur all over him. The word `sprouted' isn't entirely appropriate here. It was more as if his tunic and trousers crumbled into fur - as if the shoulder straps and stripes were drawn in watercolour on a solid mass of wet hair that suddenly dried out and layered off into separate hairs." If you enjoy your literary fiction super-charged with such shape-shifting, you will love Victor Pelevin's spins of imagination and will gladly keep turning the novel's pages.

All of this fictional ingenuity and inventiveness combined with social commentary, especially commentary on Russian history and society, along with a healthy amount of metaphysics and Eastern mysticism makes for one first-rate novel. One last note: If you enjoy listening to Audiobooks, Cassandra Campbell's breezy, saucy voice is pitch-perfect as Pelevin's frisky werefox. show less

I'm a big fan of Victor Pelevin, but I've never read the novella via which he first came to international attention. Until now, when I came across a sweet little used hardcover edition at the Powell's mothership on vacation in Portland last week. Which I then, while waiting for my sister and hostess to get off work, proceeded to take to the nearest pub and devour over a few pints of Guiness, not only because it is Pelevin, but because it is also another entry in that weird trope of fictions show more concerning perpetual railroads about which I have written here before.

The Yellow Arrow is the name of this train, crossing the wilds of the post-Soviet frontier but never actually reaching its possibly no-longer-existent destination. The train has been travelling for so long that most of its passengers no longer remember their lives before boarding it; indeed, many seem no longer to believe that they had lives before becoming passengers. A whole slightly Kafkaesque culture has developed on board, complete with histories, competing mythologies, secret societies and yes, black market economic cartels based around the strip mining of the train itself for raw materials. There is a news media, a secret governing cabal, even a set of peculiar funeral customs that, bizarrely, do not involve treating the bodies of the dead as more raw material for recycling and reuse; though the train never stops to take on supplies, some kind of basic carbon/nitrogen/water inputs are coming in from somewhere, even though we are assured there is no inhabited world outside the train anymore.

Pelevin is still kind of finding his voice here (this work was originally published in 1993), but already playing well with his themes of absurdity and willful ignorance and misplaced faith and trust and the way in which mass media manipulates reality. Its protagonist, Andrei, feels very much like an early sketch of his later hero, Babylen of Homo Zapiens fame, somewhere between a naif and a sophisticate in the ways of his world, not sure he should trust his friends, not sure if they are his friends, but willing to do what he has to in order to make it all work for him somehow. If it's not quite as wickedly funny as Pelevin's later works, it's plenty philosophical, impossible not to read as a parable of both Soviet and post-Soviet Russia (masterfully and weirdly, it manages to be both at once), and enjoyable. I wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to Pelevin -- I still think that should be Omon Ra -- but if you've found you've liked his other works and curious to have a peek at his beginnings, this is a must-see. show less

I have no idea how to rate this since I have no idea what I’ve just read. I’ll admit there were some thought provoking ideas being put forth, but I feel like I was on the precipice of something amazing, which was just out of reach. It reminded me of a Philip K. Dick discourse on reality or liminal space, but uniquely structured using internet chat room dialogue of twenty years ago as a group of isolated people try to work out who they are, where they are and the philosophical meanings show more behind various labyrinth symbologies that confront their individual spaces. The most interesting section presents a weird technical idea of a type of VR machine that recycles the past into the future to bring about the now. There’s also a nostalgic throwback to the old maze screensavers we used to have which made me chuckle.

I was absorbed in this for a day which is unheard of for me, but I remain fascinated and baffled all at once. Sometimes books can just feel too esoteric and intelligent for me and I think this is one of those. The tagline stating that in this age “information is abundant, but knowledge is ultimately unattainable”, is equally relevant with how this book unfolds.

I think further cogitation and maybe a reread. Or perhaps it wasn’t meant to have meaning and it’s one big trip intentionally designed to lose people. Certainly the ending confirms to that… show less