Of Russia's feudal and Soviet eras, with abuse of serfs, mandatory Tolstaya's radioactive world is a cunning blend Since the Blast, and harbor memories of a lost culture that go unheededīy their descendants. Other inhabitants, called Oldeners, haven't aged at all Or 'Consequences' - a tail, a single eye, a head covered with fringed

World was destroyed as Benedikt puts it, 'People were playing aroundĪnd played too hard with someone's arms.' Citizens born after the BlastĮxist on a diet of mice and 'worrums' and bear frightening mutations, Two hundred years after 'the Blast.' No one knows quite how the old Named Benedikt, lives in a primitive settlement on the site of Moscow, 'The hero of this spellbinding futuristic novel, a government scribe 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. Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. 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. 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. 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. Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn't one to complain. 'A postmodern literary masterpiece.' - The Times Literary Supplement

The slynx book