In Pelevin's sharpest, most accessible, and most engrossing novel to date, A. Huli, a fifteen-year-old contemporary Moscow prostitute, is in truth a two-thousand-year-old werefox. After the death of a client, she is forced to work via ads placed on the internet. Eventually, she comes to the attention of Alexander, a Russian intelligence officer who, unbeknownst to her, is a werewolf. They fall in love and, many plot twists later, we discover that The Sacred Book of the Werewolf is A. Huli's memoir.
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
"Pelevin belongs to one strand of the great Russian tradition that goes back as far as Gogol and Dostoevesky, in which metaphysical locutions about the mystery of existence clash with the grotesque banalities of life as it is actually lived."-New York Times Book Review.
Victor Pelevin, the iconoclastic and wildly interesting contemporary Russian novelist who The New Yorker named one of the Best European Writers Under 35, upends any conventional notions of what mythology must be with his unique take on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms that open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered a dialogue they cannot escape - a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown. The Helmet of Horror is structured according to the way we communicate in the twenty-first century - using the Internet - yet instilled with the figures and narratives of classical mythology. It is a labyrinthine examination of epistemological uncertainty that radically reinvents the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur for an age where information is abundant but knowledge ultimately unattainable.
