The Slynx [Paperback]

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“A postmodern literary masterpiece.” –The Times Literary Supplement

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’sThe Slynxreimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokov’sPale Fireand Burgess’sA Clockwork Orange,The Slynxis 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.“The hero of this spellbinding futuristic novel, a government scribe
named Benedikt, lives in a primitive settlement on the site of Moscow,
two hundred years after the Blast. No one knows quite how the old
world was destroyed; as Benedikt puts it, People were playing around
and played too hard with someone's arms. Citizens born after the Blast
exist on a diet of mice and worrums and bear frightening mutations,
or 'Consequenl33