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Kangaroo (Russian Literature Series) by Yuz Aleshkovsky
Fiction. "KANGAROO is a novel of the most devastating, the most terrifying hilarity. It belongs in the genre of satire; however, its net effect is neither revulsion at the system nor comic relief, but pure metaphysical terror. This effect has less to do with the author's rather apocalyptical worldview as such than with the quality of his ear. Aleshkovsky, whose reputation in Russia as a songwriter is extremely high (in fact, some of his songs are part of national folklore), hears the language like a prodigy. The hero of KANGAROO is a pickpocket whose career spans the entire history of Soviet Russia, and the novel is an epic yarn spun out in the foulest of language, for which either 'slang' of 'argot' fails as definition' (Joseph Brodsky). "The stunning impact of a CANDIDE, a SCHWEIK, a 1984...Alehkovsky's special power is that he has a devastating sense of humor... Here, for the first time I know of, a Russian has stripped away the sonorities of Soviet history to highlight its absurdity from an ordinary, human point of view" (New York Times). 5/18/99
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First published March 1, 1986
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About the author
Yuz Aleshkovsky
37 books14 followersThe author was born in Siberia in 1929; he spent several years in a labor camp before he was able to emigrate to the West in 1979.
Aleshkovsky writes in the tradition of Fyodor Dostoevski and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Aleshkovsky writes in the tradition of Fyodor Dostoevski and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 10, 2018
Written in a wayward, oral style, the official term is Skaz --which to an American reader, which is what it might be if Holden Caufield was sent to the gulag and upon his release finds himself less concerned with the crummy than with the shitty lies at the core of the Soviet Experiment.
A career criminal/confidence man is hauled in by the KGB dragnet just after the end of the Great Patriotic War (WW II) charged with the rape and murder of a kangaroo sometime between 1789 and 1905. The satire escalated as the criminal receives shock treatment where upon his reality begins to fissure. He’s sent to the camps where his delirium finds him in detente with Hitler and Churchill before suddenly becoming aware that Stalin’s right foot is espousing counter revolutionary slogans. The criminal—upon escaping that contradiction— finds himself involved in a film production of his exploits, does this situation explain his previous experiences? Periodically point of view appears to surface, coming up for air before an ribald episode combusts in a shower of literary bewilderment. Kangaroo is a denouncement in the greasepaint of self criticism.
A career criminal/confidence man is hauled in by the KGB dragnet just after the end of the Great Patriotic War (WW II) charged with the rape and murder of a kangaroo sometime between 1789 and 1905. The satire escalated as the criminal receives shock treatment where upon his reality begins to fissure. He’s sent to the camps where his delirium finds him in detente with Hitler and Churchill before suddenly becoming aware that Stalin’s right foot is espousing counter revolutionary slogans. The criminal—upon escaping that contradiction— finds himself involved in a film production of his exploits, does this situation explain his previous experiences? Periodically point of view appears to surface, coming up for air before an ribald episode combusts in a shower of literary bewilderment. Kangaroo is a denouncement in the greasepaint of self criticism.
December 5, 2011
This is written in the style of Skaz, which is a Russian term for a "particularly oral form of narrative" I learned this from Wikipedia, which is always right of course (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skaz) and I couldn't help thinking: "Wow. Skaz is way cooler than Ska."
Anyhow, this is quite a satire and has an element of absolute absurdity to it but at the same time, because Aleshokovsky uses the names of actual political leaders, one does question how much of the text is based on reality with veiled metaphors (some more veiled than others). Aleshkovsky could have taken this the way of Kafka's The Trial but he is way more playful and creative than that, even though sometimes it's more difficult for the reader to actually follow what is happening in the text. One gets the sense that it's difficult for the protagonist to figure out what is happening in his real life anyhow and in that way, it has tinges of experimental fiction.
Basically, the jist is this-the main character (written in first person as if telling a friend Kolya over a series of drinks what his experiences were throughout the novel) is not such a bad guy but he does owe the cops a favor. It just so happens that there is a computer that generates random crime possibilities and, when forced to pick between the mundane and the common crimes and the most bizarre crime imaginable, he of course picks the crime in which the perpetrator rapes and murders a kangaroo at the zoo.
What follows is experiments on him in terms of the human psyche and film as the best device for propaganda. The police officer Kadilla goes through all manners of experiments to try to convince him he's a kangaroo, has truly committed this crime, and even is soaring through space. He even has to deal with his own turned clothes turning on him. Our protagonist also seems to have issues with time and his own sense of personal history as he remembers and even seems to experience all these interactions he had or witnessed with Hitler and Stalin during the second world war. Stalin's foot turning on him is particularly amusing. And of course, what would a prison camp assignment for killing rats in the dark be without discovering that dormant third eye in the back of one's head.
This is the kind of book you'll want to read again after you study Soviet history and read 100 more novels written by famous Russians.
Some memorable quotes:
pg. 3 "That year-1949-I was the unhappiest man on earth. Maybe in the whole solar system. Of course I was the only one who knew this, but then personal unhappiness isn't like being world famous-you don't need the recognition of all mankind for it."
pg. 26-27 "...and I guess we're not meant to untangle the skein of world history. We didn't pull it off the knees of that old granny, Life, and tangle it up. It was some little kitten. So let the kitten untangle it..."
pg. 97 "I guess men always envy anyone any kind of eternal existence, even an agonizing one."
pg 122-123 "I'm a weird strange kind of guy. I'm beginning to understand a whole lot about what's happened in my life, Kolya. But what I don't get is this deep, warm, quiet laugh at what you'd think would be the worst moments of your life. What does it mean? My soul's alive and well, undamaged by the devil's worst weapon, despair? It's alive and chortling over the forces of evil's frantic activity, safe, knowing it's invulnerable? Is that it or not?
pg. 143 "I told him if you subtract the enthusiasm of the twenties from the enthusiasm of the thirties, all that's left is ten years for counterrevolutionary agitation and propaganda."
pg. 150 "We got this epilepsy epidermic from Dostoevsky. I can't think why Belinsky and I didn't liquidate him them. None of this would have happened." (From the character Chernyshevsky who in real life died waaaaay before the second world war.)
pg. 159 "But what's a pretty girl with no money to do about stockings? Or shoes? She ages five years the first time they're reheeled and twenty the second. It's just no fun to walk around anymore. Don't even mention stocking runs. Those runs make a woman's heart bleed like real wounds in men's hearts."
pg. 169 "So I don't offend anyone, I'd like to be a farmer in the Antarctic, where they still don't have political parties."
pg. 173 "I tell you, Kolya, you should never turn anything. I certainly don't want to get to the Last Judgement to find me and Karpo Marx accused of trying to change the world. No thanks! The world doesn't forgive men who try to turn it inside out."
pg. 184 "I sing my favorite little ditty
The streetcar floats through the sea,
The phonographs sound sad,
Inside his little railroad car,
The tsar resigned. Too bad."
pg. 224 "In a word, pain strips a lot of superfluous stuff from a man."
pg. 237 "...believe me, Kolya-I can see you believe me by your sad eyes-you couldn't tell the two kinds of pain apart. Human suffering is no better by a single tear or scream or faint than a butterfly's or a cow's or an eagle's or a rat's. That's the only thing I'm sure of."
pg. 264 "Kids these days. There's no souls inside 'em, only tapeworms"
pg. 265 "Jesus, I get so pissed at all the people who can't believe in a higher reality, who deny or tragic, joyful existence, even if they're basically decent types."
March 26, 2019
Slipping into Yuz Aleshkovsky's novel is like sliding onto very thin ice. It is a giddy, clammy-palmed experience. The confusion, fortunately, dispells, as the essence of all the mad symbolism descends upon the reader's consciousness. In Kangaroo, the ice is fraught with cracks, and the cracks multiply as the reader progresses; the hero virtually begs for the cracks to give way, but they never do.
More than one Soviet author has done his or her utmost to convey the sense of living on thin ice that people from the USSR talk about--a sensation that has perpetuated itself into the Putin era. It is worth comparing a story published in the late 80s with present day thin ice.
On the surface, Kangaroo is totally unrealistic. The hero, Fan Fanych, otherwise known by a handful of aliases, is an international criminal who has an "understanding" with a KGB officer named Kidalla. The understanding is that Fanych should be saved for a very special day. Fan Fanych waits for years to be arrested, and he gets edgy as dozens of ripe moments pass by. The irony of his patient waiting is that he takes for granted that he will be dragged off for something he didn't do while he is allowed to go scott free from real transgressions.
The day finally arrives in 1949 and FF is asked to pick, out of 10 computer made-up cases. FF picks the "case of the vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789 and January 9, 1905." After FF chooses his crime, he learns that the case was generated to fit his personality. The detail of the computer (and political system) garbling the case description proves that the same must garble everything.
The choice of a kangaroo as victim elicits the concept of a kangaroo court, which is an illegal mock court run by criminals inside a prison to enforce domination. The metaphor works and the story is entertaining if insane. Each new scene in the novel is piquant and imaginative. FF, as it turns out, is one of those types of people who couldn't harm a fly, even taking bizarre pity on a bedbug. The reader never sees the protagonist commit a single crime.
As an interesting aside, Yuz Aleshkovsky, born in 1929, was drafted into the Soviet navy in 1949 and apparently broke the Soviet navy code, for which he subsequently had to spend four years in prison. He wrote children's books after that but moved to the USA in 1979, where he still lives. His adult novels never had a chance of being published in the Soviet Union. So it is with totalitarian regimes. (I reviewed his book in the Saudi press in the late 80s.)
More than one Soviet author has done his or her utmost to convey the sense of living on thin ice that people from the USSR talk about--a sensation that has perpetuated itself into the Putin era. It is worth comparing a story published in the late 80s with present day thin ice.
On the surface, Kangaroo is totally unrealistic. The hero, Fan Fanych, otherwise known by a handful of aliases, is an international criminal who has an "understanding" with a KGB officer named Kidalla. The understanding is that Fanych should be saved for a very special day. Fan Fanych waits for years to be arrested, and he gets edgy as dozens of ripe moments pass by. The irony of his patient waiting is that he takes for granted that he will be dragged off for something he didn't do while he is allowed to go scott free from real transgressions.
The day finally arrives in 1949 and FF is asked to pick, out of 10 computer made-up cases. FF picks the "case of the vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789 and January 9, 1905." After FF chooses his crime, he learns that the case was generated to fit his personality. The detail of the computer (and political system) garbling the case description proves that the same must garble everything.
The choice of a kangaroo as victim elicits the concept of a kangaroo court, which is an illegal mock court run by criminals inside a prison to enforce domination. The metaphor works and the story is entertaining if insane. Each new scene in the novel is piquant and imaginative. FF, as it turns out, is one of those types of people who couldn't harm a fly, even taking bizarre pity on a bedbug. The reader never sees the protagonist commit a single crime.
As an interesting aside, Yuz Aleshkovsky, born in 1929, was drafted into the Soviet navy in 1949 and apparently broke the Soviet navy code, for which he subsequently had to spend four years in prison. He wrote children's books after that but moved to the USA in 1979, where he still lives. His adult novels never had a chance of being published in the Soviet Union. So it is with totalitarian regimes. (I reviewed his book in the Saudi press in the late 80s.)
October 17, 2020
This entire book is a howl. A wail of despondency, dislocation, despair at a Soviet regime so lost in its own overheated rhetoric that everyone has long since stopped worrying about why nothing works. The only refuge left, short of madness, is to bury the whole mess in ribald, irreverent mockery. No aspect or personality of the era is spared, be it Stalin, Hitler, The FBI, KGB, party purges, gulags or the umpteenth five-year plan. ‘Socialist Realism’ is a bedraggled whore stumbling from delusion to reinstatement to condemnation.
Our protagonist (alias “Etcetera” because his list of assumed names is so lengthy) is a career petty criminal, who has been kept waiting for years for the authorities to conjure up a suitable crime to charge him with; something that will really resonate with the upper echelon, thereby elevating the career of his accuser Lt. Colonel Kidalla, a minor KGB operative with career ambitions. Over the years, facing a shortage of crimes to be prosecuted (especially a shortage of really unique and noteworthy crimes) the regime has struck upon a brilliant solution: A computer has been developed and specially programmed to invent new crimes and generate evidence to facilitate prosecution.
“The biggest plus, the most revolutionary one — we can say it fearlessly now — is that we can jump straight from the enemy’s sometimes unconscious criminal intent to the right punishment, bypassing the actual crime altogether, with its blood, horrors, cynicism, information leaks, pain, tears of relatives of those who’ve suffered, and damage to our military might. We’ve totally eliminated investigation’s indifference to the evolution of a crime, and we’ve thrown the notorious presumption of innocence on the garbage heap of history….”
As with everything else in this dysfunctional state, the computer runs amok. Etcetera, a known ‘enemy of the people’ is charged with having brutally raped a kangaroo at the local zoo — obviously a capitalist plot and an attack on the security of the state!
The dance of death enacted between criminal and cop is grotesquely reminiscent of that between Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert — but here it’s a mutual dependency combined with mutual contempt. There is hilarity here, but it’s the morbid laughter of a prisoner marching to the gallows.
But after all that, here’s the problem: As boldly creative as this tale may be, after a couple of hundred pages, its very absurdity begins to pall, like a tale told by a drunkard. What it really comes down to is that this stand-up comic has only one joke to offer and telling it over and over again only serves to emphasise how pathetic his situation is.
Our protagonist (alias “Etcetera” because his list of assumed names is so lengthy) is a career petty criminal, who has been kept waiting for years for the authorities to conjure up a suitable crime to charge him with; something that will really resonate with the upper echelon, thereby elevating the career of his accuser Lt. Colonel Kidalla, a minor KGB operative with career ambitions. Over the years, facing a shortage of crimes to be prosecuted (especially a shortage of really unique and noteworthy crimes) the regime has struck upon a brilliant solution: A computer has been developed and specially programmed to invent new crimes and generate evidence to facilitate prosecution.
“The biggest plus, the most revolutionary one — we can say it fearlessly now — is that we can jump straight from the enemy’s sometimes unconscious criminal intent to the right punishment, bypassing the actual crime altogether, with its blood, horrors, cynicism, information leaks, pain, tears of relatives of those who’ve suffered, and damage to our military might. We’ve totally eliminated investigation’s indifference to the evolution of a crime, and we’ve thrown the notorious presumption of innocence on the garbage heap of history….”
As with everything else in this dysfunctional state, the computer runs amok. Etcetera, a known ‘enemy of the people’ is charged with having brutally raped a kangaroo at the local zoo — obviously a capitalist plot and an attack on the security of the state!
The dance of death enacted between criminal and cop is grotesquely reminiscent of that between Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert — but here it’s a mutual dependency combined with mutual contempt. There is hilarity here, but it’s the morbid laughter of a prisoner marching to the gallows.
But after all that, here’s the problem: As boldly creative as this tale may be, after a couple of hundred pages, its very absurdity begins to pall, like a tale told by a drunkard. What it really comes down to is that this stand-up comic has only one joke to offer and telling it over and over again only serves to emphasise how pathetic his situation is.
November 9, 2009
One of the most hilarious and wicked satires of Soviet society available to English readers. The story is bizarre, a foul-mouthed, first-person narrative about a man who finds himself put in a Stalinist show-trial for the rape and murder of a kangaroo named Gemma, in a St Petersburg zoo sometime between 1789 (the French Revolution) and 1905 (the first Russian Revolution). The wicked language is a feat in itself. I kept bursting into laughter as I read this book in the student office, getting strange looks from fellow students.
The translation is excellent, giving the book almost a film noir vibe at times. Some background in the Stalin era of Soviet history, I think is essential in order to grasp the depth of the humour - it's uniquely Russian for much of the story. Might come off as sheer nonsense otherwise.
The translation is excellent, giving the book almost a film noir vibe at times. Some background in the Stalin era of Soviet history, I think is essential in order to grasp the depth of the humour - it's uniquely Russian for much of the story. Might come off as sheer nonsense otherwise.
May 22, 2008
After reading something... unfulfilling... it was nice to sink into something that is sort of like a homecoming for me, as I grew into literature under the guidance of essentially every novel and most short stories and plays from 19th century Russia. Despite being more recent than most of the 20th century Russian fiction I've had the chance to read, the voice is immediately familiar - a manifestation of an immeasurable debt to the likes of Gogol, Kafka and Bulgakov - and the imagination is there too. A great deal of the novel is devoted to underscoring the absurdity of Soviet life,
I thought the ending was just a tiny bit weak, but overall it was consistently what I wanted. thanks, comrade!
I thought the ending was just a tiny bit weak, but overall it was consistently what I wanted. thanks, comrade!
December 20, 2022
Aleshkovsky's greatest achievement, and one of the greatest satires in the history of literature
March 28, 2023
A ribald novel filled with menace and despair - like a bad Rabelaisian trip. That's what Aleshkovsky wrote in "Kangaroo." "Kangaroo" is a prolonged paean to freedom, and an at times hilarious indictment of the Communists who kill it. What Aleshkovsky shows is that political zealotry, an unshakable belief history is determined and that it points toward Communism, leads inexorably to a false reality, built of lies and reliant on terror. Solzhenitsyn argued that one of the problems with Communism - and this is true ultimately of all collectivist enterprises - is the lying becomes institutionalized, people survive only by lying and cheating. One sees how this spins out in "Kangaroo."
The novel is told in the first person, that of Fan Fanych, "an international crook," talking to his friend, Kolya. Fan is a Zelig-type character who at various times encounters Hitler in Munich and Stalin during the Yalta conference. All of this is wrapped up in his odyssey after he is tried and sentenced for a crime a computer devised, namely the "vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789, and January 9, 1905." I first read "Kangaroo" in the 80s, read it a few times over the next ten years, and now returned for the first time in the new millennium. It remains as scary and funny as ever.
The jokes start right away. For example, the constantly changing photographs in Fan Fanych's "No. 3 (Deluxe)" cell of the "entire history of the revolutionary movement in Russia." Examples: "So-called famine in the Ukraine," "Stalin crying bitterly over Kirov's corpse," "Zdhanov burning Anna Akhmatov's poetry," etc. (etcetera also being one of Fan's aliases).
- A recurring character is the woman who sells Fan beer on a Moscow street corner, always ripping him off so at one point he pretends he asked, "please, just foam."
- He apologizes to wolves, sharks and rats for calling Bolsheviks "wolves," "sharks," and "rats."
- Eventually, Fan is moved to a camp as he demanded with "those who stormed the Winter Palace" (a lie made famous in an Eisenstein movie) and some of Lenin's closest cronies. They remain committed Bolsheviks in their frozen prison where they must eat slop and spend their days killing rats. At one point he laments the old deluded Communists, "just wanted to get me interested in studying Party history, which was the equivalent of liquidating me, and maybe even more effective."
- Aleshkovsky describes the USSR as an attempt to "turn the old world inside out" based on the ravings of "Karpo Marx." "I tell you, Kolya, you should never turn anything. I certainly don't want to get to the Last Judgment to find me and Karpo Marx accused of trying to change the world. No thanks! The world doesn't forgive men who try to turn it inside out."
- He describes the USSR during the terrible time of WWII, and how the Bolsheviks on top never pay a price. "So I'm traveling through the length and breadth of our boundless motherland. I see some people suffering, burying their families, swelling up from starvation, searching for food in the fields and factories and camps twenty hours a day. And other people just stuff themselves, they swallow up sausages and bank notes and foreign currency and gold and diamonds. Now I can see the monolithic unity of the Soviet people: it's misery, Kolya, sheer misery. The whole thing's fucked."
- At Yalta, Stalin must deal with his right foot which, to the chagrin of the left, snipes at Stalin that "you're an asshole and a shit and soon you will die."
- It helps to know Soviet history, as Aleshkovsky makes jokes about that throughout. At one point he rejiggers a famous Bolshevik slogan from before their 1917 coup saying, "but here...I'm sorry, all power belongs to the soviets."
- In the end, freed from the camp after Krushchyev takes power, Fan has joyous, drunken days in Moscow where he seeks out Kidalla, the KGB man with whom he'd had a relationship and who supervised his case, and even the zookeeper. "Greed has finished off more than one crook, you know," he tells Kolya. "And one day it's going to do in Soviet power - sucking people's blood just for laughs, destroying innocent souls, wearing out their strength and keeping the human spirit humiliated for half a century."
Aleshkovsky taught me as an undergraduate and I've always had a soft spot for him. My Russian was atrocious but Yuz liked me and we would sit sometimes on the steps of the Russian House with a bottle of vodka. As our drinking progressed, Yuz would harmlessly ogle the coeds (who couldn't hear or understand him anyway) and eventually drift into despair for Russia. "Yata," he'd tell me, "you have it soooo good - you're young, there are pretty women all around....But, my God, oh, it's so awful, Yata, you can't imagine. Just nuke them."
That was the vodka talking, of course, but his pain struck home. As it does in "Kangaroo." Absolutely highly recommended.
The novel is told in the first person, that of Fan Fanych, "an international crook," talking to his friend, Kolya. Fan is a Zelig-type character who at various times encounters Hitler in Munich and Stalin during the Yalta conference. All of this is wrapped up in his odyssey after he is tried and sentenced for a crime a computer devised, namely the "vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789, and January 9, 1905." I first read "Kangaroo" in the 80s, read it a few times over the next ten years, and now returned for the first time in the new millennium. It remains as scary and funny as ever.
The jokes start right away. For example, the constantly changing photographs in Fan Fanych's "No. 3 (Deluxe)" cell of the "entire history of the revolutionary movement in Russia." Examples: "So-called famine in the Ukraine," "Stalin crying bitterly over Kirov's corpse," "Zdhanov burning Anna Akhmatov's poetry," etc. (etcetera also being one of Fan's aliases).
- A recurring character is the woman who sells Fan beer on a Moscow street corner, always ripping him off so at one point he pretends he asked, "please, just foam."
- He apologizes to wolves, sharks and rats for calling Bolsheviks "wolves," "sharks," and "rats."
- Eventually, Fan is moved to a camp as he demanded with "those who stormed the Winter Palace" (a lie made famous in an Eisenstein movie) and some of Lenin's closest cronies. They remain committed Bolsheviks in their frozen prison where they must eat slop and spend their days killing rats. At one point he laments the old deluded Communists, "just wanted to get me interested in studying Party history, which was the equivalent of liquidating me, and maybe even more effective."
- Aleshkovsky describes the USSR as an attempt to "turn the old world inside out" based on the ravings of "Karpo Marx." "I tell you, Kolya, you should never turn anything. I certainly don't want to get to the Last Judgment to find me and Karpo Marx accused of trying to change the world. No thanks! The world doesn't forgive men who try to turn it inside out."
- He describes the USSR during the terrible time of WWII, and how the Bolsheviks on top never pay a price. "So I'm traveling through the length and breadth of our boundless motherland. I see some people suffering, burying their families, swelling up from starvation, searching for food in the fields and factories and camps twenty hours a day. And other people just stuff themselves, they swallow up sausages and bank notes and foreign currency and gold and diamonds. Now I can see the monolithic unity of the Soviet people: it's misery, Kolya, sheer misery. The whole thing's fucked."
- At Yalta, Stalin must deal with his right foot which, to the chagrin of the left, snipes at Stalin that "you're an asshole and a shit and soon you will die."
- It helps to know Soviet history, as Aleshkovsky makes jokes about that throughout. At one point he rejiggers a famous Bolshevik slogan from before their 1917 coup saying, "but here...I'm sorry, all power belongs to the soviets."
- In the end, freed from the camp after Krushchyev takes power, Fan has joyous, drunken days in Moscow where he seeks out Kidalla, the KGB man with whom he'd had a relationship and who supervised his case, and even the zookeeper. "Greed has finished off more than one crook, you know," he tells Kolya. "And one day it's going to do in Soviet power - sucking people's blood just for laughs, destroying innocent souls, wearing out their strength and keeping the human spirit humiliated for half a century."
Aleshkovsky taught me as an undergraduate and I've always had a soft spot for him. My Russian was atrocious but Yuz liked me and we would sit sometimes on the steps of the Russian House with a bottle of vodka. As our drinking progressed, Yuz would harmlessly ogle the coeds (who couldn't hear or understand him anyway) and eventually drift into despair for Russia. "Yata," he'd tell me, "you have it soooo good - you're young, there are pretty women all around....But, my God, oh, it's so awful, Yata, you can't imagine. Just nuke them."
That was the vodka talking, of course, but his pain struck home. As it does in "Kangaroo." Absolutely highly recommended.
April 28, 2009
I was attracted by the idea of this novel. Then I was stopped in my tracks by the synopsis on the back. It says "metaphysical terror." I don't like metaphysical terror. But OK, I wanted to see what it was up to, so I decided to read it anyway. And I do have some friends who like metaphysical terror, so maybe I'd read it and even if I didn't like it, I'd be able to recommend it to them. But the novel is not at all terrifying.
The protagonist is a a petty crook, and proud of it. When faced with an alarming series of events that are so absurd they could only be stalinism, he employs a really very effective and ridiculous coping mechanism. He takes them seriously. He not only admits to a crime that he did not commit(raping and murdering a kangaroo in the moscow zoo, sometime between the years 1796 and 1904), but he finds a way to make himself culpable for it, thus effectivly keeping control over his life, squalid and humiliating though it may be. Sometimes the character almost seems crazy, but when looked at in the light of the absurd-but-true events surrounding him, he comes off as incredibly sane.
The protagonist is a a petty crook, and proud of it. When faced with an alarming series of events that are so absurd they could only be stalinism, he employs a really very effective and ridiculous coping mechanism. He takes them seriously. He not only admits to a crime that he did not commit(raping and murdering a kangaroo in the moscow zoo, sometime between the years 1796 and 1904), but he finds a way to make himself culpable for it, thus effectivly keeping control over his life, squalid and humiliating though it may be. Sometimes the character almost seems crazy, but when looked at in the light of the absurd-but-true events surrounding him, he comes off as incredibly sane.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 29, 2008
Kangaroo caught my eye in Chicago's Myopic books because it was published in Russian in Ann Arbor before being translated and published by FSG. The book takes a really cruel satirical take on Stalinism that's pretty spot-on, except that I'm reading it many years too late. The prose is a first-person stream-of-consciousness monologue—not my favorite style—and it seems pretty dated. I enjoyed the ending much more than the beginning, but I'm not sure I'll return to Aleshkovsky.
January 9, 2015
Eh. I don't know if it's a bad translation or what. It seemed all over the shop. Wasn't as amusing as I thought it was going to be and seemed like a bad version of The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of Window and Disappeared.
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February 14, 2012One of the greatest satires/farces ever.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews