The Slynx

Boy, and I thought I was 'out there'. Better yet, I had thought that Jasper Fforde was loony-tunes. This book is wild. I can manage only one chapter at a time. The writing is brilliant. The 'world' depicted is even stranger than the ones I can imagine (post-apocalypse).

Published a mere 6 years ago, Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx has already been dubbed a 'classic' by the New York Review of Books; perhaps with good reason since the book, a dystopian Russian fable depicting peasant life post nuclear blast, seems timeless in its political and social themes. Tolstaya, great grandniece of Leo Tolstoy and a frequent contributor to the NYRB, sets a darkly comic tone in this her first novel. As... Read Full Review

The review from Publishers Weekly is wrong saying that the world described in The Slynx is the world of permanent winter. The reviewer obviously have not read the book. The book is a masterpiece of Russian language. I suppose it is equally hard to translate to English as to translate Shakespeare from English. Tolstaya's language is not a simple Russian, it is a colorful, rich literature language. Note that the book is written... Read Full Review

"The Slynx", the debut novel by Tatyana Tolstaya, the granddaughter of the Russian writer Alexey Tolstoy, is worth reading. There are many reasons to recommend this book. The first and perhaps most important one is the language - funny, full of neologisms and contrasts, bursting with life; the novel is an excellent satire on the contemporary changes in the language, its simplifications and slang. The second is the atmosphere,... Read Full Review

I would reccomend reading some of Russian history (around the time period when Stalin was president) otherwise it would be difficult to understand some parts and what Tolstaya is talking about. I read this book in Russian and English, and of course the english translation is not nearly as good as the original Russian. However, the story is still amazing, and I love how she uses irony, and makes fun of certain concepts-it's... Read Full Review