Thursday 13 December 2007

New Pelevin Work on Horizon

From Dalkey Archive Press article, Letter from Russia by Dmitry Golynko-Volfson. Full article here from which I've extracted the following:

For many established writers or for their younger colleagues, the attempt to find “territories of freedom” becomes not only a cultural mission, but also a major ethical responsibility...The new novel by Victor Pelevin, Svyashchennaya kniga oborotnya (The Sacred Book of the Werewolf), came out exactly a year after his previous outing, Dialektika Perekhodnogo Perioda iz Niotkuda v Nikuda (The Dialectics of the Period of Transition from Nowhere to Nowhere).
In each of his new novels, Pelevin works a miraculous transformation: turning vulgar Soviet anecdotes into wise, instructive parables.

In The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, all spheres of Russian life are portrayed as being a veritable werewolf-orgy, but the way out of this nightmare is not through silver bullets and the like, but through an elevated love. Werewolves in contemporary Russia are by no means just characters out of folktales. The mass media regularly draws attention to new unmaskings of so-called “turncoats” in the high ranks of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Federal Security Service, connected to criminal organizations and “grazing” off of these government institutions on behalf of the mafia. According to Pelevin, all the agents of political power—including law enforcement, the oligarchy, and the Kremlin—are either secretly or openly werewolves, diabolical creatures from the underworld. Thus, for these ruthless, modern-day monsters, love has changed from a positive, everyday value into something revolutionary.

Pelevin’s novel tells a moving story about love between two werecreatures, a little fox and a big wolf. The fox works as a prostitute in Moscow hotels, and becomes a mistress of the wolf Alexander Seryi, a lieutenant of the Federal Security Service, who with his magic wand has invigorated the Russian oil industry.

The intensity of his emotional experiences makes the wolf lose his supernatural abilities. Love transforms him into an ordinary dog, nicknamed Pes “Pizdec,” an ordinary State Security bureaucrat. But the fox achieves mystical enlightenment, dissolving in an iridescent luminescence right over Bitssevskiy Park, where Pelevin likes to ride his bicycle. The fox’s opinions on life are very close to the author’s: for Pelevin, even a contemporary author is a clever kind of werewolf, transforming himself to better adapt to the global market in order to win the right to an independent opinion.


It sounds well-suited to Pelevin's strengths, and hopefully will show the relative paucity of The Helmet of Horror to have been more due to the constraining nature of its framework, both in structure and theme, rather than any sign of a decline in his powers.

5 comments:

BrdlyHys said...

I hope so too. I didn't finish Helmet. I think either he has spent a lot of time in online chats (this from someone who has entered a chatroom once or twice, hasarded a comment, and then fled under a barrage of insults) or hasn't read Huis clos/No exit. Or, given the terseness of the genre, it is very possible the translator erased all subtlety. I'll send you something written by a friend (anglophone) who doesn't even have a buddha's little fingernail of Pelevin's talent so you compare the advantage of the native tongue.

Anonymous said...

Cheers, Brad. The chatroom framework was much too limiting to really overcome as a work of art, all right. Be glad to read the piece you mention.

AxmxZ said...

Having read The Sacred Book of the Shapeshift in its original Russian, I must say that it doesn't measure up to anything Pelevin wrote before 1999.

Andrew said...

Sorry I only just noticed your comment, Ax; and sad to hear of your opinion. Do you think Pelevin's candle has been burnt out?

AxmxZ said...

I don't know. He hasn't unlearned how to write well, that much is clear. But his earlier books were somehow more than they became after "Generation 'P'". Perhaps he is spending too much time thinking of politics now; perhaps he's lost some of his youthful enthusiasm for the infinite variety of the world and the joy of randomness and esoterica. Perhaps he's being rushed by his publishers. Perhopas it's just a factor of his getting older and more bitter.

Or maybe it's just my perception of his books that changed - I emigrated from Moscow in 1995, and it may well be that the farther Moscow realities remove themselves from the realities I knew, the more alien and unappealing his books seem. Then again, I never read them for the sake of reconnecting myself to the Moscow realities of late 80s-early 90s. I read them for everything *else.* And it's that everything else that seems to be shrinking from his books into nothingness - to use one of Pelevin's phrases, like a fly dot on a windshield.