If you’ve read Tolstaya before, you’d recognize that she’s primarily a short story writer. And this book more or less suggests why. Like a lot of writers who write short stories as their main form, she plays around a lot with what to do with longer fiction, and this book was completed over the course of 14 years. There’s many other writers, Donald Barthleme comes to mind, Ann Beattie, Lorrie Moore, whose long fiction feels like the departure from the short fiction and not the other way round, and like this one, their novels tend to be a little more avant garde and strange.
This book imagines a post-apocalyptic Russia some two hundred years after the “boom”. The focus here is not on the apocalypse, so much as what would happen to the essential qualities of Russian life, were this to happen.
We follow along Benedikt, the scribe of a self-appointed dictator who loves collecting the physical objects of books, but cannot fathom their meaning or really get much from them. In on long section he’s creating a library record and his organization system seems so squarely based in facile (and hilarious) connections among the books and not any kind of their content.
The book spends a lot of time focusing on how life would be lived and what remains. It also deals with the current Russian question of how do we deal with a deeply cursed government amid a thriving and rich literary and cultural history. It’s post-Soviet, but also Soviet, and it’s post post-Soviet as well.
The tone and writing style feel like more convoluted (for good and less good results) of Vonnegut, with more depth and entrenched silliness throughout.
(https://www.amazon.com/Slynx-Tatiana-Tolstaia/dp/0618124977/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+slynx&qid=1554987006&s=gateway&sr=8-1)
