Кысь By Tatyana Tolstaya
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Prospero Kitaplığı dizimizin yeni kitabı. Çok yakında, BÖCÜ adıyla Eyüp Karakuş'un Rusça aslından çevirisiyle yayımlayacağız. Кысь Wow i don't think a book has ever made me laugh this hard before.
Endlessly clever writing. Extremely bleak but it's never too much so.
Really stands out in the post-apocalyptic genre. Кысь This exceptional little pearl should go straight atop your reading list, knocking off that willowy story collection, those fat-arsed historical doorstoppers, and that free verse thing carved into tree bark. Get rid of them all. Put them in a glorious bonfire and read this instead.
The granddaughter of Leo T has all the talent of her antecedent, cribbing also the mordant wit of Bulgakov, the lyrical euphony of Nabokov, the despairing glamour of Zamyatin. The Slynx is a first-rate novel on all fronts: original and captivating in its form, succulent and rib-tickling in its prose, dark and prophetic in its subtext, sutured together with sugary feasts of stylistic invention that would make even the illiterate smile.
A book about now, about the past, about the future—this book time travels, this book inhabits the fourth dimension. Read it now.
Кысь No matter which way you look at it, The Slynx is a strange and furtive creature. Concocted by an obscure descendant of one of the Greats, this beast possesses a significance we instinctively fear. We feel it lodged in our bones, we feel it slithering between the tiny hairs on our arms and on the back of our necks, we feel it gnawing at the base of our minds, we feel it cocooning in our hearts. Some brave readers set out on the expedition to find its lair. A few came back, wide-eyed with wonder and with many a tale to tell.
As a valiant voyager, I too wanted to glimpse this shadow. Hiding beyond the barren Siberian plains in a forest thick with thorns and teeth, it shrieked its name. Slyyynx. Slyyyynx. Ignoring my misgivings I set out to follow the cry that would lead me to its den.
My journey had a promising start. I found a guide, a quirky fellow by the name of Benedikt, who was as endearing as he was eccentric. His childlike candor was refreshing and as he pointed out the finer points of the dystopia he was living in I became enraptured by the sights and intrigued by this post-apocalyptic society. The mutants that inhabit it, some of them immortal firebreathing Oldeners from before the Blast, added colour to the grim painting of a fledgling economy based on dry weeds and rodents.
Unfortunately, Benedikt lost the way at some point. He got drunk on rusht, started uttering experimental jibberish disguised as meaningful metaphors and ran in circles, widening, but never going anywhere. I completely lost sight of him, got word that he married rich and developed an all-consuming passion for books, but couldn't make heads or tails of it all. The last thing I heard was that he was close to a fire that basically destroyed almost everything and everyone around him. The reasons for the fire remain unclear, much like everything else. Others, maybe more well-read russophiles, can perhaps make sense of Benedikt's ramblings, which probably have a significant connection with Russian history. I, on the other hand, find myself confined to a wonderment whether or not I dreamt it all.
And the Slynx? I never found it. Worse still, I can no longer hear its lonely shriek. Кысь i have a long and troubled relationship with the russians. for years i didn't want to read them because i felt that i wouldn't understand them with their troubled political history, their interchangeable names, their fucking ability to endure that is so intimidating and making-me-small-feeling. and then i read bulgakov. and i felt a little more confident...then i got a little older and i thought...maybe i'm ready for some dostoevsky...and then i wondered what i had been so worried about, because it was all so accessible. then in my twenties i read kurkov, solzhenitsyn, nabokov, makine, zamyatin, chekhov... i have been around the russian block, my friends...and yet...there's still this barrier between us. i feel like there is so much subtext i am just missing...that unless you are russian, there is something gently exclusionary about the writing - that you could know all there is to know about russia and its history and its peoples and still - this is not intended for you. anyway, this book was very good but i'm sure that a real russian would appreciate it in some more deeply personal way than i ever could.
come to my blog! Кысь
N-am obosit și nu voi obosi să recomand prietenilor acest roman fabulos, scris de stră-stră-stră-nepoata lui Lev Nikolaevici Tolstoi.
Mă bucur că a apărut o nouă ediție. Am profitat de ocazie și l-am recitit. Îmi păstrez părerea: un astfel de roman se publică o dată la un deceniu. Tatiana Tolstaia se înscrie în tradiția marilor prozatori ruși. Comparația cu Gogol s-a făcut de mult și este cît se poate de îndreptățită. Umorul cărții este demențial.
Tolstaia prezintă o societate post-apocaliptică (post-prăpăd, aluzia e la catastrofa de la Cernobîl), bîntuită de o pasăre malefică, nevăzută și obsedantă, al cărei nume se regăsește în titlul cărții. Nimeni nu cutează să pătrundă în pădurile din jurul orașului Fiodor Kuzminsk de teama de a nu-i sări Zâtul în ceafă. În al doilea rînd, locuitorii se tem de ceceni :) Oamenii trăiesc sub o despotism bezmetic, de comedie neagră. Își duc viața în condiții mizere și se hrănesc cu „foculeandri”, un soi de „curmale radioactive”, dulci și zemoase. La felul doi mănîncă o minunată „supă de șoareci”. Oamenii au suferit malformații grave, unii au gheare în loc de unghii, alții își poartă urechile subsuoară, unii au creste de cocoș. Nimeni nu crîcnește. Nimeni nu simte că este rob.
Mîrzacul suprem (Fiodor Kuzmici) are două ocupații principale: stabilește prin decret cînd începe anul nou (dacă vrea El, poate începe pe 1 martie sau pe 5 septembrie, depinde de inspirație) și compune cărți fără nici un înțeles, copiind la întîmplare din diverși autori. În rest, veghează zi și noapte, nu închide un ochi, fiindcă (zic supușii) își face griji din pricina lor: oare guguștiucii au mîncat, oare au dormit suficient, oare sînt mulțumiți, nu cumva au vreun necaz?
Protagonistul se numește Benedikt și iubește nespus arta cititului. Pasiunea lui îl va împinge la crimă. Seamănă cu lacheul Petrușka din Suflete moarte: citește absolut orice, fără să aibă vreo preferință anume și fără să gîndească la ceea ce citește. Citește ca să citească, așa cum alcoolicul bea ca să bea. Nu-i trece nici un gînd prin cap, cărțile nu-l împing la vreo reflecție. Nu judecă autorii. Toți i se par desăvîrșiți și, cînd toți autorii sînt desăvîrșiți, toți sînt perfect indiferenți.
Dar ce este terifiantul Zât? Iată doar una dintre descrieri:
„La nord sînt păduri dese... În aceste păduri, spun bătrînii, trăiește Zâtul. El stă pe ramurile întunecate și țipă sălbatic, jalnic: Zî-hîîîî! Zî-hî-hîîîîî! Nu-l poate vedea nimeni. Trece omul prin pădure și el hop! în ceafa lui. Și îl apucă de șira spinării cu dinții - hîrști! - și prinde cu ghearele vena cea mare și o sfîșie, și iese toată mintea din el. Și cînd se întoarce nu mai e același, nici ochii nu-i mai sînt la fel și merge la întîmplare, fără să știe încotro, de exemplu, ca somnambulii care merg în somn la lumina lunii”.
Negreșit, Zâtul este o capodoperă. Și e păcat să nu citiți acest roman.
Recenzia la prima ediție (din 2006) o puteți inspecta aici:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... Кысь
Few books terrify me to the depths of my soul as much as this postapocalytic tale full of bleakly-black humor and dark satire, set amongst the radioactive desolation of Moscow Fyodor-Kuzmichsk - which is sunk low in degradation and regression, with economy dependent on mice-hunting, with a lone half-finished statue of Pushkin pushkin stuck in between vegetable plots, with ignorance and superstition ruling it all. Welcome to the world of The Slynx!
What makes this book so terrifying to me is how accurately it captures the darkness that inhabits the souls of your everyday average humans, the darkness that makes us hang our heads in shame for our little pathetic human race. These traits are hidden right under the surface - naked power hunger, greed, xenophobia, extreme egoism, glee at others' misery, hatred of anything different... These are always there, lurking in depths of the human soul - individual and collective - just barely reigned in, barely forced underground by the influence of science and literature and medicine and technology and social conscience. But what if the social structures that contained these horrors of humanity collapsed, and resulting destruction of existing culture, regression, and ignorance allowed the worst to come out?
Tatyana Tolstaya brilliantly depicts the results of such destruction. It's been 200 years after the nuclear Blast, and what once was a city of Moscow is now a big village of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk (named after its current ruler, of course - until he is unseated). The effects of radiation are on the borderline between terrifying and outright comical. The economy is sustained on hunting mice, and as far as cultural life goes - well, the scribes make handwritten copies of a mishmash of books (supposedly written by Fyodor Kuzmich, of course) ranging from fairy tales to literary classics to logarithmic tables, and the dreaded red-robed Sanitars are omnipresent to take you away for the 'Healing' if you're found to be harboring a book from before the Blast.
Take out the radiation side effects, and this can almost be the world of deep Russia centuries ago - the world that is so remote to us and yet so uncomfortably close at the same time. People live in huts, burn candles, do a bit of agriculture and hunting (well, mostly mice, really), there are serfs, the wheel has been recently invented, as well as that new-fangled device for carrying buckets of water from the well (attributed, of course, to Fyodor Kuzmich), boats have been recently invented as well, men beat wives for fun and out of boredom, the strangers are feared and fought with, and superstition permeates every aspect of people's lives... This is the world in which Benedikt, a scribe and an innocent creator of pushkin monument, discovers that he loves reading books, and that there is only ONE correct answer to the 'burning' question (pun intended) - which item would you take out of a burning house first?
And this brings me to what I think is the most important theme in this otherwise entertaining but ordinary postapocalyptic story - the importance of MEMORY. People are nothing without it. Memory is what provides the framework, the context for our actions. Memory is what this ruined world lacks - even though there are people from before, belonging to a variety of Soviet social classes, almost magically prevented from dying. However, these 'former' people seem more concerned with reminiscing about the past and complaining about the present, and do little of value - unless you consider talking about social injustices and putting up signs with the names of long-gone streets and the half-finished monument to Pushkin, which the locals use for securing their clotheslines. With the memory of the past gone, there is no context to any of these. Pushkin is just, well, 'pushkin', lower-case, a random unnecessary statue, a symbol of something ungraspable, unneeded, un-understood; the sign for Arbat or Nikolskie Vorota is worth no more than 'Vitya was here' sloppily carved out below it, and any book is just a collection of empty printed words. They are nothing without the context of memory.
In the web of the streets, pushkin stood like a small black stick, and like a thin thread was from high above a clothesline, wrapped like a noose around the poet's neck.This is where I think Tolstaya is brilliant. The idea of a protagonist's world changing once he discovers the miracle of books is not new. What's great here is her approach to it - the idea that all the books in the world mean nothing without the context of memory, without which even Hamlet can be easily interpreted as, perhaps, the story of an unsuccessful mice hunt or something of the sorts. In order to beat the ignorance you need more than just ability to mechanistically read - you need to be able to understand and learn, otherwise reading can be quite dangerous, actually. In order to achieve any kind of enlightenment you need to first learn the 'alphabet' - which is not as simple and straightforward as poor naive Benedikt may think (by the way, I'm not sure how it was done in the English translation, but in Russian, the chapters of the book are titled with the names of the letters of the old Russian alphabet. I thought it was quite neat).
The language of this book is a treat (at least to those who read Russian). The medieval peasant-like feel of the language with some twisted and half-forgotten neologisms of 'recent past' is quite fun and unsettling at the same time. And almost on every page there are allusions to the classics of the literature, including, of course, Alexander Pushkin, creating wonderful, delicious subtext and context. I can only hope that the translation managed to capture the feel of the original, since otherwise it'd be a loss to the overall feel and message of the story. And let us not forget the constant references to relatively recent Russian politics, that give this story a sharp edge of political farce in addition to everything else it is.
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4.5 stars is the verdict. It fell just a bit short of absolutely loving it, perhaps because of the slow build up in the first half of the book that reminded quite a bit of the standard postapocalyptic/dystopian fare. Also, I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about the ending (is it the only possible way for it to end - or a cop-out? Time will, maybe, tell). I recommend it highly, however - it is a true gem of the genre.
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And special thanks to Jeffrey Keeten, whose excellent review prompted me to reread this book (and without the reread, I would not have understood nearly as much as I had the second time around).
...Как же нет? А чем же говоришь, чем плачешь, какими словами боишься,какими кричишь во сне? Разве не бродят в тебе ночные крики, глуховатое вечернее бормоталово, свежий утренний взвизг? Вот же оно, слово, - не узнал? - вот же оно корячится в тебе, рвется вон! Это оно! Это твое! Так из дерева, из камня, из коряги силится, тщится наружу глухой, желудочный, нутряной мык и нык, - извивается обрубок языка, раздуты в муке вырванные ноздри. Так гуняво гундосят заколдованные, побитые, скрюченные, с белыми вареными глазами, запертые в чуланах, с вырванной жилой, с перекушенной хребтиной; так, верно, и пушкин твой корячился, али кукушкин, - что в имени тебе моем? - пушкин-кукушкин, черным кудлатым идолом взметнувшийся на пригорке, навечно сплющенный заборами, по уши заросший укропом, пушкин-обрубок, безногий, шестипалый, прикусивший язык, носом уткнувшийся в грудь, - и головы не приподнять! - пушкин, рвущий с себя отравленную рубаху, веревки, цепи, кафтан, удавку, древесную тяжесть: пусти, пусти! Что, что в имени тебе моем? Зачем кружится ветр в овраге? чего, ну чего тебе надобно, старче? Что ты жадно глядишь на дорогу? Что тревожишь ты меня? скучно, Ни��а! Достать чернил и плакать! Отворите мне темницу! Иль мне в лоб шлагбаум влепит непроворный инвалид? Я здесь! Я невинен! Я с вами! Я с вами!(Sorry for the long Russian quote. I love it so much, but it was too much to translate while still preserving the beauty of the original. Usually, I translate the quotes from the books I read in Russian myself, but this one was too much for me to tackle.)
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Recommended by: Jeffrey Keeten Кысь Vreți o carte de un umor total, nebun? Vreți fantezie, ingeniozitate și inteligență? Într-un cuvînt, vreți să citiți o capodoperă? Atunci cumpărați negreșit Zâtul Tatianei Tolstaia (n. 1951), stră-nepoata lui Aleksei Tolstoi (cel care a compus Calvarul), fiul unui alt conte Tolstoi înrudit de departe cu Lev Nikolaevici Tolstoi.
Nu știu cum aș putea caracteriza mai bine acest roman. Este o distopie blîndă, o distopie-vodevil, în opinia criticilor anglo-saxoni, un basm grotesc.
Universul din Zâtul se reduce la o așezare de izbe mizeroase, cu cîteva mii de locuitori extrem de săraci, nu mai mare decît un cătun, numită Fiodor Kuzminsk, după numele Mîrzacului Suprem, Fiodor Kuzmici. Ocupațiile Marelui Mîrzac, slăvit fie numele lui, sînt două: compune decrete (de pildă, legiferează în ce zi începe Anul Nou, poate fi și în 1 martie, nu contează decît ceea ce-i trece prin minte, bunul lui plac complet arbitrar, adică oficial) și plagiază la întîmplare (fără să priceapă el însuși nimic) poeții, prozatorii și filosofii de dinainte de Prăpăd. Un atelier de scribi reproduce aceste broșuri. Protagonistul cărții, Benedikt, este unul dintre scribi.
Fiodor Kuzmici, slăvit fie numele lui, a inventat totul, așa se spune: roata de lemn, focul, blidele de piatră, sania, supa de șoareci, foculeandrul etc. Iată ce cred supușii despre Marele Mîrzac: „Zi și noapte, Fiodor Kuzmici nu doarme, tot merge încolo și-ncoace, mîngîindu-și barba stufoasă, făcîndu-și griji pentru noi, guguștiucii: sîntem mîncați, sîntem băuți, avem vreun necaz, vreo durere?” (p.18). Sună destul de familiar acest pasaj...
Societatea din Fiodor Kuzminsk s-a diferențiat de la sine: cei mulți (guguștiucii) muncesc fără să se întrebe de ce, abrutizați și pasivi. Cîțiva, mîrzacii, îi strunesc pe cei mulți, împart salariile și ridică impozitele. Oamenii sînt inculți, naivi, rudimentari, superstițioși. Medicina se rezumă la cîteva descîntece. Toți cred în legende. La sud, trăiesc temuții ceceni. În pădurile din nordul așezării, s-ar ascunde făpturi malefice și viclene, precum Zâtul. E foarte periculos să fii în preajma lui. Nimeni nu l-a văzut vreodată aievea, dar lumea vorbește înfricoșată despre el. Cînd cineva simte un gol în suflet, o sfîrșiere în măruntaie, se spune că i-a sărit Zâtul în ceafă. În realitate, îl chinuie „felosofia”...
Acțiunea romanului se petrece la 200 de ani de la Prăpăd. Aluzia este, desigur, la catastrofa nucleară de la Cernobîl, din 1986. Oamenii sînt niște mutanți, toți au urmări aberante, o anatomie stricată: unul își poartă urechile subsuoară, alții au nasuri pînă la pămînt, creste de cocoș, picioarele viitoarei soții a lui Benedikt, Olenka, fiica Sanitarului General, se termină cu gheare. Protagonistul însuși are coadă.
O minoritate citește cărți adevărate, nu se mulțumește cu broșurile Mîrzacului Suprem, copiate de scribi pe coajă de mesteacăn și schimbate la piață pe șoareci. De la pasiunea oarbă pentru cărțile „arhetipărite” pornește totul. Benedikt își descoperă patima pentru lectură, devine un bibliomaniac și vrea să-și procure tot mai multe cărți vechi. Inițiază o lovitură de palat. Fiodor Kuzmici, slăvit fie numele lui, este ucis de Benedikt și înlocuit cu Sanitarul General.
Nu am voie să spun mai mult... Кысь
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 Кысь
Tatyana Tolstaya was born into the Russian aristocratic family of Tolstoy. You might be thinking, as was I, would that happen to be the Leo Tolstoy family? Why in fact it is! I wasn't able to trace down exactly how she is related to Leo, but in several articles it mentions her relationship to the Russian literary giant. Her grandfather, Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi, was also a well respected writer who wrote the book Peter l. Tolstaya has a literary blue-blood heritage that gives her a leg up in the publishing world. The Russian publishers had to be wiping the saliva from their chins at the thought of having another Tolstoy to publish. But can the woman write, can she make Leo Tolstoy proud?
YES!!! In my humble opinion she delivered a masterpiece. A wonderfully inventive book that Leo would have read with awe and delight. The book is part of the New York Review Books classic series that are of such high quality I often wonder why I'm not reading more of them. Here is a link to their website. http://www.nybooks.com/books/
Our hero is Benedikt and he is living in a post-apocalyptic world where rabbits are toxic, food in general is scarce, and nearly everyone is exhibiting Consequences as a result of THE BLAST event that happened 200 years ago. Benedikt transcribes old books, written before the THE BLAST, and they are presented to the world as the writings of their leader Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe. The scribes begin to question that the writing style of their dear leader changes so much from book to book, but it is best not to have any association with Freethinking.
Anytime you feel different than you should you must be careful. When you growl through your teeth, grumble and grouse--the anger feels good, it kind of rolls around all prickly warm inside you. You wanna show off your strength. Kick a fence. Or a dog if you meet one. Or smack one of the guys around. Whatever. There are all kinds of things you can do. But sometimes you don't feel like getting mad. It's like there's a sadness inside. Like you feel sorry for someone. Must be feelosophy.
Bureaucrats control every faze of their existence. These are for the most part self appointed people who have taken over collecting taxes, rationing of script, and managing the distribution of goods. Most are corrupt and cut a fat hog while the rest of the population is near starvation. The main source of protein and bartering power comes from one little critter that most of us don't even want to contemplate adding to our diet, and certainly it makes me shiver to think of my survival depending on my ability to build a better mouse trap.
Trade is determined by how many mice something is worth. Benedikt carries them around in braces under his jacket to barter them for more variety in his food diet. When he goes to see the widow Marfushka he must have enough mice for the legs to part.
Benedikt went to see the widow woman Marfushka about the woman business: maybe once or twice a week, but he'd always go to see Marfushka. You couldn't exactly say she was pretty. In fact, her whole face was sort of crooked, like someone hit her with a battle ax. And one eye wandered. Her figure wasn't all that great either. She was shaped like a turnip. But she didn't have any Consequences. She was rounded out where she out to be and caved in where she out to be. After all, he didn't visit her to look at her, but to take care of the woman business. If looking's what you want--well, you can go out on the street and look until your eyes pop out.
Benedikt's life takes an abrupt turn when he decides in a moment of starry eyed lust to ask the beautiful Olenka to marry him. Her family is wealthy and part of his new father-in-law's job is to track down old books. It is illegal to own books printed before the blast and even though most of the population has been made afraid of being in the same room as a toxic book from the past there are still people brave enough to squirrel books away in old wells or hidden in walls. It is a life changing moment for Benedikt when he finds that his father-in-law has a room full of books, and once Benedikt gets over his inherent superstitions, and begins to read, he is absolutely lost to the world of books. He inhales them. He spends so much time reading that his wife complains that he isn't paying attention to her anymore. He begins helping his father-in-law to find more books. He becomes an insane (more than just gently mad) bibliophile. He becomes desperate when he realizes that he has...READ THEM ALL.
His father-in-law, a few cards short of a full deck, dangles the prospect of liberating the books held by Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe and what ensues is not only hilarious, but a wonderfully constructed piece of social commentary.
The world after the blast has slid backwards. Food is an issue. There is never enough of it and too much of what used to be a staple of the Russian table has proven to still be toxic from the blast. Half-human, four-legged Degenenerator's are used to pull sleighs, and the sarcastic word exchanges between one in particular and Benedikt elicited more than one snicker from me. The book receives high marks for originality, humor, and feelosophy. Don't you shake your beard at meeee! I with utmost confidence HIGHLY RECOMMEND this book.
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Татьяна Толстая — прозаик, публицист, телеведущая (Школа злословия), лауреат Премии им. Белкина (Легкие миры). Автор сборников рассказов На золотом крыльце сидели…, День, Ночь, Изюм, Легкие миры, Невидимая дева и др. Роман Кысь был удостоен премии Триумф и вошел в шорт-лист премии Русский Букер. Кысь