Tolstaya, a noteworthy essayist and short story writer descended from the mighty Tolstoy, places her tale in a futuristic Russia and imbues it with a Russian's typically mournful optimism.Not for your average reader of futuristic tales, this belongs instead in all literary collections. This scenario may sound familiar, but what's new is the setting. It is impossible to communicate adequately the richness, the exuberance, and the horrid inventiveness of The Slynx. The Slynx, with its comical, tragical, post-nuclear holocaust setting, is a satirical blast, a linguistically inventive glimpse of a future nobody wants to see.

Tatyana Tolstaya, translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell 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.

The slynx book