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the complete review - fiction

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by
Victor Pelevin

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B- : messy mix of the fantastical and metaphysical

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, though a lot liked how fanciful he gets

  From the Reviews:

• "Werewolves ! Russia ! China ! Murder ! You would be forgiven for imagining, on the basis of the foregoing, that The Sacred Book of the Werewolf is a high-concept fantasy novel, one full of incident, since so much compelling narrative is laid out before us in the book’s early pages -- like a fine antipasto. And indeed, gussied-up SF/fantasy has been a reliable approach in Pelevin’s oeuvre. But were you to believe that the novel at hand were going to pursue the death of the Sikh and its moral consequences, or even to investigate the change in Hu-Li’s fortunes as a result of the murder, you would be quite mistaken." - Rick Moody, Bookforum
  
  
• "Philosophical discourse, epistemology, semantic and lubricious game-playing fuel this supernatural love affair with plenty of intellectual fun" - James Urquhart, Financial Times
  
  
• "Nur schade, daß Pelewins Assoziationssaltos und Kalauergirlanden, vom Werfuchsnamen A-Chuli, der auf russisch wie ein grober Fluch klingt, bis zum Staatsapparat, in dem eine Oberratte (upper rat) steckt, in der nicht nur zur Hälfte verlorengehen, sondern auch, jenseits des real existierenden Werwolfreichs, sich in Wortklaubereien verwandeln, die keine Bewußtseinssplittertheorie lebendig macht." - Kerstin Holm, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "Full of tour-de-force passages such as this, and full of sex, the novel yet succeeds in not being one of those showy, sexy, cold-hearted books. The fantasy is fuelled by passion, the humour by grief." - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian
  
  
• "Pelevin aficionados will glide joyously into the postmodernity of this supernatural love affair, which fuses philosophical discourse with lascivious and semantic game-playing. There's plenty of intellectual fun here, from the sport of hunting English aristocrats to the idea of howling a demonic plea into the night to summon oil from a near-spent field. (...) The recurrent metaphor of a society consuming itself snipes at Putin's tattered social fabric, but the core strength of Pelevin's writing is its unruly, suggestive energy." - James Urquhart, The Independent
  
  
• "Novels in translation are always collaborations among author, translator and editor, so it is difficult to know whose ear was out of tune on this one. But sadly, this one gaffe is symptomatic of a general dissonance. Although at times the novel comes off as a piece of erotica, more often it devolves into kitsch agitprop." - Jonathan Levi, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Inventive and playfully philosophical, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf pulls off a kind of magical realist balancing act. Pelevin's creatures are utterly bizarre, yet vividly so, because he gives them recognisable quirks of personality, as if to mock the reader's assumptions about reality." - Hugh Barnes, New Statesman
  
  
• "It’s an encyclopedic catalog of Pelevin’s philosophical and political thought wrapped in a fairy tale: imagine Nietzsche’s "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" as manga. (...) Racy, playful, thought-provoking and perverse, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf lends itself to both highlighting by the grad student’s yellow marker and under­scoring by the thrill-seeker’s red pen. (...) It’s a joy to read Pelevin’s phantasmagoria so brilliantly translated by Andrew Bromfield, a crowning achievement of the pair’s longtime association. Complex ideas are rendered simply and organically, never disturbing the narrative flow. Bromfield’s English text is fleet and magical." - Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Victor Pelevin, one of the most exciting writers to emerge from new Russia, is torn between nostalgia and nihilism as the best way to respond to his nation's corruptions." - Olivia Laing, The Observer
  
  
• "Pelevin’s dazzling vision and considerable gusto convey rare delight in his sexually charged, fecund world of self-made dreams." - Michael Pinker, Review of Contemporary Fiction
  
  
• "(E)equal parts biting satire on neo-Russian consumerism, drug-fuelled muckabout, sci-fi adventure, love story, literary in-joke and mystico-shamanic treatise on the nature of enlightenment. Disruptive, transporting and very funny, it's one of his best." - Tim Martin, The Telegraph
  
  
• "A sharp portrait of a corrupt and chaotic modern Russia." - Kate Saunders, The Times
  
  
• "Perhaps his latest novel, breathless in style, sounds better in the Russian. Certainly it is reliant on a variety of puns that don't translate well, despite the best efforts of Andrew Bromfield. (...) Buried amid all these words are some amusing and thought-provoking riffs on capitalist corruption, perverted Christianity, and human isolation. Zen Buddhism comes out of it well, as does love; modern life does less well, and women do better than men; Crowley remains a mystery; Murakami and Bulgakov are referenced; they come out of it better than Pelevin." - Toby Lichtig, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Pelevin doesn't seem to understand how his borrowing creates "bogus profundities." Or that his philosophical points would be more interesting in essay form. Or that his pacing is too slow to make the humor sparkle. Yet on the rare occasions that Pelevin dispenses with all the clutter, he demonstrates a remarkable talent that makes me want to read more of his fiction. (...) Ultimately The Sacred Book of the Werewolf fails because Pelevin just can't shut up long enough to tell his story." - Jeff VanderMeer, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       In The Sacred Book of the Werewolf Victor Pelevin once again offers a bizarre premise. But even before he gets to that there's a preface of sorts, suggesting that this text is, in fact: "a clumsy literary forgery" and not: "deserving of any serious literary or critical analysis". Whether he merely wants to lower expectations, or likes the idea of yet another layer of literary confusion, it's almost typical of what follows as throughout the text Pelevin explicitly undermines almost every step he takes.
       The manuscript is written by a were-fox named A Hu-Li -- a Chinese name that unfortunately turns out to be a Russian obscenity. Which is a problem, since A Hu-Li has settled in Russia for the moment. And, yes, this is the level of humour Pelevin is settling for -- a passable joke he makes far too much of.
       You might think A Hu-Li is getting on in years -- "For the sake of convenience I define my age as two thousand years", though she's not really sure (she doesn't have much of a long-term memory) -- but:

     Every fifty years or thereabouts, we select a new simulacrum of the soul to match our unchanging features, and that is what we present to people.

     The elite here is divided into two branches, which are called 'the oligarchy' (derived from the words 'oil' and gargle') and 'the apparat' (from the phrase 'upper rat'). 'The oligarchy' is the business community, which grovels to the authorities, who can close down any business at any moment, since business here is inseparable from theft. And 'the upper rat' consists of the authorities, who feed on the kickbacks from business. The way it works is that the former allow the latter to steal because the latter allow the former to thieve.

The super-werewolf is a metaphor. To call some individual creature the super-werewolf means to descend to a very primitive level.

     Nobody reads it, that Ulysses. Three people have read it, and then they live off of it for the rest of their lives, writing articles and going to conferences. But no one else has ever got through it.

Foxes have a fundamental answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, which is to forget this fundamental question. There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected cul de sacs created by language's inability to reflect truth.

     'Of course not ! The English expend all their spiritual energy on hypocrisy. There's none left over for intolerance.'
     'Is everything really as dismal as that ?'
     She waved her hand dismissively.
     'If I had my way, I'd introduce a new term to emphasize the scale of the problem: "Hippopocrisy".'
     I can't stand it when someone speaks badly about entire nations. In my opinion, such a person is either a loser or has a guilty conscience. There was no way sister E was any kind of loser. But as for her conscience ...

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Links:

• Faber publicity page

• Barnes & Noble Review
• Between the Lines
• Bookforum
• Bookreporter.com
• The Cavalier Daily
• Deutschlandradio (German)
• Financial Times
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• The Guardian
• Журнальный зал (Russian)
• The Independent
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• The Los Angeles Times
• New Statesman
• The Observer
• Pulp Fiction Reviews
• Rushthatspeaks
• Russia !
• Strange Horizons
• The Telegraph
• Three Percent
• Time Out (Москва) (Russian)
• The Washington Post
• X-Zine (German)

• Victor Pelevin site (Russian)
• Q & A at Bomb

• Empire V
• The Hall of the Singing Caryatids
• The Helmet of Horror

• See Index of literature from Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union

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About the Author:

       Russian author Victor Pelevin (Виктор Пелевин) was born in 1962.

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© 2008-2024 the complete review

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