The Slynx
Ratings8
Average rating3.5
Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn’t one to complain. He’s got a job—transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe—and though he doesn’t enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he’s not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he’s happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he’s managed—at least so far—to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond.
Tatyana Tolstaya’s *The Slynx* reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, The Slynx is a brilliantly inventive and shimmeringly ambiguous work of art: an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia’s past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now
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This was really bizarre, but I liked it. Lately I've just been diving into books figuring that if I bought them, I thought I'd like them, so why need the synopsis again. I remembered that this was a Russian dystopia but that was about it.
It's a sort of future/post-apocalyptic Russia, where people have mutations (Consequences) and eat and use mainly mice. Books are sort of forbidden? But the leader passes things off as having written them himself. It's super bizarre but a love letter to books and knowledge and against authoritarianism, I think? Its not really about the Slynx though! I wanted a threat from without, but I guess the point is of the threat within. The writing is really interesting and really funny at some times and beautiful at others. I enjoyed it but I feel like I didn't quite get it. I'll keep saying it, you can't go wrong with NYRB Classics.
The protagonist of this novel becomes addicted to reading books while lacking the intelligence to properly understand them. This novel itself is foremost wild, incredibly smart, imaginative, hilarious and overall constructed on so many layers, that I no doubt missed a lot of meaning as well :)
It's a dystopia set in a Russia after a blast, where society progressed backwards into superstituion-driven poverty that runs on trading and eating of mice, and more resembles a pre-industrial age than a future.
There's brilliance in this novel, and yet it felt hard to read it in that ‘enlightened' state. I felt like drifting in and out of appreciating all the wondrous things it does.
