The Slynx

[Dave Monroe]

The Slynx
By Tatyana Tolstaya
Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell

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's The Slynx reimagines dystopian
fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride.
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.

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=6755

Read a chapter

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product-file/55/thes6755/chapter.pdf


       
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