The Slynx

<b><i>New in Paperback</i></b><br><br>“A postmodern literary masterpiece.” –<i>The Times Literary Supplement</i><br><br>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.  <br><br> Tatyana Tolstaya’s <i>The Slynx</i> reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokov’s <i>Pale Fire</i> and Burgess’s <i>A Clockwork Orange</i>, <i>The Slynx</i> 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.