I am out of my depth among Russian were-creatures

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin ***

I have written about post-Soviet magical realism before, and with some trepidation; what does an American who was middle-aged when the USSR dissolved in Boris Yeltsin's vodka glass (left) know about post-Soviet culture? So I have no idea whether this is a good book or not; for me, it's like listening to a lecture that is given half in English and half in some unknown language. It may have interesting moments, but the whole won't hang together.

At the surface, the book is about a 2,000-year-old werefox who makes her money turning tricks as a 17-year-old Chinese prostitute. A Hu-Li's tricks, however, are tricks of the mind, pure figments of her clients' imagination from which she derives psychic energy needed to survive. Ideally it works like this: A Hu-Li arrives looking like a demure, underage prostitute. She goes into the bathroom, transforms into a fox, and quickly whammies the client with her tail before he sees her in her fox form.

While the client lives his sex fantasy in a dreamlike state, A Hu-Li reads an improving book by the bedside, keeping an eye on the client, transforming before he wakes up.

Occasionally, however, the client wakes up before A Hu-Li transforms from her werefox state, and the client is so horrified he jumps to his death. After one such accident, A Hu-Li is forced to troll new territory for johns, and that's where she meets Alexander, a menacing officer who's a holdover from the Soviet era's secret police. He's also a werewolf. They find they can psychically and sexually satisfy each other. They even love each other after a fashion, but their politics, values and goals are at odds. They are, perhaps, the yin and yang of Russia itself. A Hu-Li is ancient, Asian, cerebral. Alexander is younger, European, materialistic, boorish, even. Their doomed love affair and A Hu-Li's eventual "moving on" to a new state of existence may say something about the imbalance Pelevin sees in the new Russia, but this is just my guess.

More interesting are A Hu-Li's frequent observations about Russia:

Russia is a communal country, and when the Christian peasant commune was destroyed, the criminal commune became the source of the people's morality. The proprieties of the underworld occupied the place where God used to live--or, to put it more correctly, God Himself was incorporated into the notional rules as a top c rominal authority. And when the final religious prosthesis, the Soviet "internal Party committee" was dismantled, a cheap guitar tuned for prison songs set the musical range of the Russian soul.

Pelevin's book has a kind of dark humor and makes lots of allusions to popular culture,which A Hu-Li observes in her dispassionate werefox way. But there is a sadness and sense of loss. Take A Hu-Li's riff on the Russian version of Cinderella, in which Khavroshka is helped by a brindled cow instead of a fairy godmother. When the cow is slaughtered, an apple tree with golden fruit and leaves grows from them, which makes Khavroshka's fortune:

The fairy tale contained a strange truth about the very saddest and most mysterious side of Russian life. How many times that brindled cow had been slaughtered. And how many times it had returned, either as a magic apple tree or an entire cherry orchard. Only where had all the apples gone? You couldn't find them anywhere. Except maybe by calling the office of United Fruit. But no, that was nonsense. "United Fruit" was the last century, but now any call would get lost in the wires on its way to some company in Gibralter that belonged to a firm from the Falkland Islands that was managed by a lawyer in Amsterdam in the interests of a trust with an unnamed beneficiary owner.

Ultimately, Pelevin's book seems to ponder a culture whose memory of czarist Russia has all but faded into the mists of history and that still defines itself by--in some way even yearns for--the now-gone Soviet era. How (or whether) Russia can rebuild itself, or whether it has run out of "apples" is the question. Liesl Schillinger's interesting feature on author Pelevin from the "New York Times" is worth a read for more info.