I have made a goal of reading at least one book per each letter of the alphabet this year. It remains to be seen whether I'll accomplish this goal, but making it in the first place is the first step. The list of books already exists but I won't publish that in full, as it's more suspenseful to reveal it one by one as I finish and review a given book.
The first book I'm reviewing here is a novella by Victor Pelevin, originally published in Russian. I wanted to see what contemporary Russian fiction (available in an English translation) existed out there and this is one of the first books I came across. The original Russian version was published in 2008, and the English version was published in 2011 (translated by Andrew Bromfield).
Apparently the author is very popular in Russia. I had never heard of him before this week, so he isn't particularly well known in the US. In fact, I can only think of two contemporary authors (21st century, let's say) whose translated works became very popular in the US: Haruki Murakami (1Q84) and Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and subsequent books; originally published in Swedish with a different title). And even those aren't all that recent.
I didn't know much about what I was getting into with this book at the start. I was aware of the basic premise: the main character, along with a number of other women, are recruited to become singing models ("caryatids") in a secret underground club for Russian oligarchs. It is about that, but it also has a surreal element that was a bit of a surprise to me. I don't think I realized it would be surreal until I read far enough into the book where the surreal things begin to appear.
I don't want to spoil how it's surreal, but I did find the surrealism quite intriguing. I wasn't expecting it to have the type of surrealism I enjoy, but it did. It reminded me a bit of how Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 is surreal. It also reminded me a bit of the music video for the song Lights by the band Interpol.
It ends in a bit of an abrupt way, which isn't my favorite, but it does come to a neat climax with the ending. I'd be interested in reading more books like this one and/or by this author, if there are any others available in translation. Personally, I quite enjoyed this novella although I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to everyone, since it is somewhat bizarre in its surreal elements. If you like surreal things, such as 1Q84, I would recommend this novella.
On a mildly related and tangential note, I read something interesting the other day about the current state of the Russian publishing industry and censorship of authors who write about topics the Russian government doesn't approve of: ‘The number of words you can say keeps shrinking’ Meduza investigates how wartime censorship has (and hasn’t) reshaped Russia’s book industry
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