4 By Pelevin; Author: Pelevin, Victor; Author: Translator Bromfield, Andrew; Paperback

Author: Pelevin, Victor; Author: Translator Bromfield, Andrew
Paperback
110 pages
Published: September 2001
W.W. Norton & Company Ltd
ISBN: 0811214915

Hermit and Six Toes; Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream; The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII; and Tai Shou Chuan USSR are four characteristic 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 comicPresents four satirical short stories exploring the anxiety of a nation brought out of a repressive regime and trying to deal with a new reality, illustrating the despair, disillusionment, and corruption currently occupying Russia.