âA postmodern literary masterpiece.â âThe Times Literary Supplement
Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isnât one to complain. Heâs got a jobâtranscribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybeâand though he doesnât enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least heâs 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 heâs happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And heâs managedâat least so farâto 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. Â
Tatyana Tolstayaâs The Slynx reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokovâs Pale Fire and Burgessâs 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 Russiaâs 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.