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The Hall Of The Singing Caryatids (2011)

by Victor Pelevin(Favorite Author)

3.74 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0811219429 (ISBN13: 9780811219426)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

New Directions

review 1: I should stop giving stars altogether because I'm realizing there's no coherence to my system. GR could help us all out by allowing half-stars, I feel, though they'd probably mess up their averages quite a bit. 3.5A little too much of the random weirdness of Sorokin's Ice Trilogy thrown in, it feels like to me. But it's short and fairly painless to read and so blackly hilarious in places, it's well worth anyone's time, particularly if you know anything about Russia and Russian lit and Russian/Soviet history. The collision of this legacy with our own Western marketingese, between thuggery and oligarchy--Pelevin's view of this is just wonderful (and horrible) to watch.The sloganeering on the TV-shirts of the pimp, for instance--priceless. (One of them is particularly amusing... more in light of the recent Russell Brand/Hugo Boss debacle). In one especially terrific passage, the girls who have been selected to sing as caryatids in a hall that is literally underground--serving the beneficiaries of the formerly underground Russian Mafia who have become the new elite, but who must hide their wealth and excess from the public, who have begun to resent them (resulting in all kinds of PR gyrations--including some rehashing, "like a Mobius strip," observes the main character, of Soviet-style propaganda about how the West is trying to undermine Russia. In this case, Western oligarchs are trying undermine Russian oligarchs by fostering resentment among the masses and keeping capitalism from finding its true expression in Russia...) .... anyway, these girls must kneel to receive an injection at the base of their skulls in order to perform at their best. "Just pretend you're at Katyn," says the pimp.That's so dark. And kind of... well, funny, if you're inclined to the darkest of dark humors. Katyn is a forest in the Ukraine, where thousands of captured Polish officers were executed one by one, with a shot to the base of the skull, over rather long period of time. It was someone's job to do this, using a pistol. Shift work, you know. They filed in; he shot them.What the girls are injected with is some kind of extract of praying mantis that enables them to stand for long periods of time immobilized, as though holding up the ceiling of their underground room, decoratively. While so positioned, they hallucinate conversations with a mantis, and Lena, our main character, is induced to change her outlook on her society and her humanity. But here is a passage (from the same page as the Katyn line) on how the serum affects them, which I think says a lot about the state of being human, perhaps in any society, certainly in any modern society, and probably in either form of surveilled and thuggified capitalism--theirs or ours: "The fountain ...washed away the seething mass of anxieties and thoughts that Lensa hadn't noticed until they revealed themselves by disappearing."It was strange. After the injection nothing drastic occurred. It simply became clear that before it Lena had been in a state of extreme agitation--a kind of fidgety, frightened panic for which there was no reason except that it was her usual condition. But as soon as this internal commotion passed off and tranquility descended, the nervous trembling of her body, which Lena hadn't noticed before, either, came to a halt. Everything became calm and very clear."Sounds like Versed. :)I might have liked the book to go a little deeper overall, but it's okay. There was something to think about, which is more than many books offer. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf was loose in places as I remember, too, but it too had its terrific moments. I have a feeling Pelevin is just that kind of writer. You hang on for the ride. The translation is pretty good. I only noticed a couple of phrases where I found myself searching for the back-translation, and I wasn't even sure if there would be a better way to do it (my Russian is beyond rusty). ****Note on Epub edition...Nothing to do with the author, but I like to comment on this because publishers should take note. WHY don't publishers just standardize on a format, and while they're at it, pick the best one? 2 stars for this one. At least it said what page you were on, but when you underlined a section for highlighting, it would deselect as soon as you told it to highlight. I know that's a function of the software and not of the device because with other books this works just fine (and because I've seen this behavior with other similarly formatted books, like Infinite Jest). This one has the blank line between paragraphs, like a blog, rather than the indented paragraphs with no breaks, like a normal book (preferred, and classier).
review 2: I was very happy to accidentally come across this book on the front shelves at St Mark's Books in NYC during a summer trip there -- it's a slim volume, more of a novella than a novel, but I'll take any Pelevin I can find. I've read all of his other books that have been translated, and they're always enjoyable. He's a bit like the Russian equivalent of Haruki Murakami, one of my other favorites. This novella is as odd as any of his works, enough so that a summary seems simply bizarre: our protagonist, a young woman named Lena, auditions and is hired for a job as an immobile, singing decoration in a weird club for the rich oligarchs, aided by daily shots that enable her and her co-workers to remain completely motionless as needed. A side-effect of the shots grants Lena visions of and communication with a super-intelligent praying mantis, which may or may not be real. As the story progresses she learns more about another world and how to go there, and it gets progressively more odd. At the end it's difficult to tell whether what seems to have happened was real or not. For Pelevin this is a slight bit of work, though it touches on a number of the criticisms of modern Russia which are common to his stories. Definitely worth the read, it's sort of a pleasant filler while waiting for his next full novel. less

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