masterpiece — looking forward to Tolstaya's "White Walls" short story collection, also translated by Gambrell (who ALSO translated Sorokin's Ice Trilogy — another masterpiece) ( )

Do you like zany, hallucinatory prose? I don't, I'm a big partisan of Realism, Magical or straight up, but I read this novel anyway. Set hundreds of years after a nuclear holocaust in a village in a spot that used to be Moscow, people have built a social order based on mice and tyranny. Oldeners have survived the blast, which rendered them immune from natural death, but they do nothing useful, just wait around for society to evolve and engage in old arguments. People born since have a variety of radiation- related Consequences, and never understand what the Oldeners are talking about. Cultural memory has suffered a complete break.

Benedikt, our hero, is a simple Golubchik who has a fortuitous marriage into a powerful family and through this means comes into contact with books from the pre-nuclear blast. He falls head over heels for them and reads through the whole library of thousands of surviving volumes.

But lest you think all this reading elevates or improves Benedikt... no. Lacking all the cultural memory needed to place these works in context, they are just collections of words. There is no difference between a Brothers Karamazov and an issue of a knitting journal.

So it is clear then that books, ripped clear away from their cultural context, no longer function for the cause they originally sprung out of. Here I feel for Benedikt, as I think I as an American reader of Tolstaya's novel share a degree of trouble with him. The novel, in the midst of its inventive flights of prose, frequently references Russian poetry and touchstones I don't know, and the whole thing can be seen as a satire of Russian society from feudal through Soviet times, of which I only have the average piddling understanding of a member of the educated American masses. I no doubt missed a lot that an educated Russian wouldn't. ( )

I find this almost impossible to review. Terrifying and humorous at the same time. A post apocalyptic Tsarist-Soviet fantasy. Pieces of Borges, Burgess, Gaiman, Hoban, and Walter Williams come to mind. I laughed my ass off at times. ( )

Written in a mixture of first, second, and third person, this novel about a post-Blast Moscow is a stinging commentary of the second half of the 20th century Russian politics. Everyone's a mutant, life is an abominable mess, and the people are fed selected bundles of art and literature by a familiar sounding State. Themes include the dangers and joys of art, man's vile and selfish nature, and those transcendental moments evoked by poetry and landscape. What, really, makes us civilized? Or, have we ever been?
My only qualm is that I don't know enough about Russian history and literature to understand the subtler intentions of the book. A , though, would read again. With Wikipedia close by. ( )

Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx is a jewel among the list of classics published by New York Review Books, a post-apocalyptic satire taking place two hundred years after “the Blast” in what was the city of Moscow. Human society has reverted to a state more primitive than a village in the darkest age of medieval, dark-age Europe. And that’s understatement - mice provide the main diet and are used for barter and trade; fire is a source of magic forcing people to rely on “stokers” to keep their stoves going; strong taboos and prohibitions surround writing and books.

Life from end to end is filthy and brutish – even some of the population serve as beasts of burden while others born following the Blast have all sorts of bodily deformations: gills, one eye, cockscombs, nostrils growing out of their knees, webs between fingers, long tails, claws instead of feet. Not exactly the stuff of Madison Avenue.

The novel’s main character is Benedikt, a young man who is, as the saying goes, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Among those Benedikt deals with are some Olderners, that is, people who survived the Blast and miraculously continue living for hundreds of years. I suppose one can infer such longevity is the result of direct exposure to the aftereffects of the Blast.

Benedickt’s mother was one such Olderner, a woman who would still be alive if she hasn’t been poisoned by a nebulous something or other, perhaps a critter, known as a fireling. Poor mum, she pined over the loss of those pre-Blast days where she could visit deportment stores and booticks - and, yes, such bending of language runs through the entire novel. Jamey Gambrell deserves special praise for her English translation from the Russian in what must have been one of her most challenging projects.

All in all, a peculiar, highly original work of fiction having more than a little in common with Russian absurdist author Daniil Kharms. For those unfamiliar with Kharms, he wrote a story where a man not only loses his handkerchief, hat, jacket and boots but also loses himself. One of his plays features Pushkin and Gogol who do nothing but repeatedly trip and fall over each other and another play with several characters running out on stage one at a time only to vomit followed by a young girl telling the audience they might as well go home since all the actors are sick.

So, we may ask, why did Tatyana Tolstaya, granddaughter of Aleksei Tolstoy and grandniece of Leo Tolstoy, author of two previous collections of lyrical, poetic short stories, spend four years (1996-2000) devoting herself to writing a three hundred page wacky dystopian novel?

One reasonable answer is such a tale gave Ms. Tolstaya a broad literary canvas to make sharp, penetrating observations on the nature of language, art and literature, particularly in the context of her own country’s history. Additionally, a reader can sense elements of Russian folktales popping up now and again. But, let me underscore, on the level of sheer storytelling The Slynx is highly entertaining, a lively humdinger featuring all flavors of screwy high jinx. To take one small example, someone's chickens go mad, start to talk like people and lay big, creepy-looking eggs.

The many references to literature and the arts are among the most fascinating parts of the novel. Here are a few of my favorites:

There’s Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe, a puffed up leader who feeds the population heaps of lies and other assorted crap. Among the long list, he claims to be the author of all sorts of poetry and prose, the work of Pushkin in particular, and even decides to write a shoppinghower and calls it The World as Will and Idea. He goes on to say art for art sake is no good since art should be connected to life. Oh, my, with this statement, we hear echoes of Leo Tolstoy’s famous What is Art?. A number of characters attempt to address questions revolving around the purpose and nature of writing and the arts.

One of the Oldeners, Nikita Ivanich, the Head Stoker, makes his presence felt throughout the tale. Old Nikita (I couldn’t help but think of Khrushchev) says he wants to keep memory alive and hopes for a spiritual runnysauce (his word for renaissance). Old Nikita’s notions of art are linked with improving morals. Yet again another dimension explored within The Slynx.

Meanwhile Benedikt’s marriage gives him access to his father-in-law’s library where he can immerse himself in books. At one point he observes: “You read, move your lips, figure out the words, and it’s like you’re in two places at the same time: you’re sitting or lying with your legs curled up, your hands groping in the bowl, but you can see different worlds, far-off worlds that maybe never existed but still seem real. You run or sail or race in a sleigh – you’re running away from someone, or you yourself have decided to attack – your heart thumps, life flies by, and it’s wondrous: you can live as many different lives as there are books to read.”

Fantastic! Even someone like Benedikt who isn’t exactly scholar material (he thinks The Gingerbread Man is a scary story since the fox eats the Gingerbread Man in the end) can enlarge their imagination and multiply mental vistas. It might be claimed Benedict uses literature primarily as an escape rather than other, more profound reasons to engage with books and ideas, but who knows where even Benedikt’s escapism might lead since tapping the imagination can open up so many worlds.

Imagination brings us to the Slynx. Beware! Old people say, “The Slynx sits on dark branches and howls a wild, sad howl - eeeeennxx, eeeeennxx, eenx-a-leeeeeeennxx! - but no one ever sees it.” The Slynx will bite you, take away your reason and make you go crazy and then you’ll just die.

What can the Slynx represent? Is it the destructive animal side of the novel’s men and women with their tails and claws? Or, is the Slynx the power of imagination and mythmaking that grabs us so we can undergo the needed death and transformation that will empower us become more complete selves? As Charles Bukowski said, “You have to die a few times before you can really live.”

The Slynx as the creature that sets our imagination on fire, in this case the very novel we are reading. Personally, above all others, I favor this interpretation - The Slynx is the Slynx.

Special thanks to my Goodreads friends Jeffrey Keeten and MJ Nicholls for their glowing reviews that prompted me to give The Slynx a whirl.



“You, Book! You are the only one who won't deceive, won't attack, won't insult, won't abandon! You're quiet - but you laugh, shout, and sing: you're obedient - but you amaze, tease, and entice; you're small, but you contain countless peoples. Nothing but a handful of letters, that's all, but if you feel like it, you can turn heads, confuse, spin, cloud, make tears spring to the eyes, take away the breath, the entire soul will stir in the wind like a canvas, will rise in waves and flap its wings!”
― Tatyana Tolstaya, The Slynx ( )