From Publishers Weekly
Young Russian author Pelevin (Omon Ra; The Yellow Arrow) demonstrates that Generation X is more of a post-Soviet Russian phenomenon than anything experienced by the youth of Western democracies. In this quartet of phantasmagorical short stories (originally published in Russian in 1994), the author drives home the creeping anxiety of a long-suffering nation awakened from a century of numbing repression, only to find the new reality is hardly an improvement. In his first story, a refugee named Six-Toes, cut off from his original "community," staggers around in a kind of mute despair, vainly awaiting some transformative nova called "The Decisive Stage." In the eerie allegory "The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII," a disembodied life force trapped within a utility shed struggles against the shackles of surrounding utilitarian objects (despite its bizarre metaphors, this story demonstrates the author's uncanny ability to project a literary Slavic gloom onto the most ordinary stage-settings). Pelevin pulls no punches with the metaphor woven into "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream," in which a public toilet attendant finds her world transformed into a giddy commercial paradise, only to have a fountain of sewage plunge that world into a kind of septic Tartarus. "Tai Shou Chuan USSR" provides a sort of resigned look at Russian and Chinese Communist bureaucracy and the foul brew of propaganda, deception and corruption that they've showered on their citizenry. Pelevin's allegories are reminiscent of children's fairy tales in their fantastic depictions of worlds within worlds, solitary souls tossed helplessly among them. But the dark undercurrent the saga of a people lost between a doomed ideology and its floundering replacement is anything but simple.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
A psychedelic Nabokov for the cyber age.... The brightest star of the post-Soviet generation. -- Time
Is the dark-comic fabulist Victor Pelevin Joseph Heller's heir? He, along with various critics, thinks so. -- The New Yorker
Pelevin's raw, bold voice makes a welcome addition to the literature of a soul-searching Russia. -- Publishers Weekly
The literary voice of the post-Soviet generation. -- The New York Times
[A] master absurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of things human. -- Spin
[A] writer whose imagination dances on the heads of the rustiest pins in history, while maintaining a likeably zany manner. -- The San Francisco Bay Guardian
Is the dark-comic fabulist Victor Pelevin Joseph Heller's heir? He, along with various critics, thinks so. -- The New Yorker
Pelevin's raw, bold voice makes a welcome addition to the literature of a soul-searching Russia. -- Publishers Weekly
The literary voice of the post-Soviet generation. -- The New York Times
[A] master absurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of things human. -- Spin
[A] writer whose imagination dances on the heads of the rustiest pins in history, while maintaining a likeably zany manner. -- The San Francisco Bay Guardian
Book Description
Four stories by one of the most popular—and critically controversial—young writers to emerge from post-Glasnost Russia. "Hermit and Six Toes"; "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream"; "The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII"; and "Tai Shou Chuan USSR" are four characterstic stories by the young Russian virtuoso Victor Pelevin, here collected in a New Directions Bibelot edition. With a deadpan and cooly ironic voice that speaks of the phantasmagorical, the surreal, the grotesque and the absurd just as affectingly as Gogol did in his day, Victor Pelevin writes of the dark chaos of the New Russia. In one story, a public toilet attendant discovers in her tiled hovel the entranceway to an alternate reality; in another, a man walks through a city at night with a companion he isn't entirely sure isn't his own shadow. This slim volume offers first-time Pelevin readers a compelling taste of his bleakly comic genius.
