The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Victor Pelevin (365 Books, Day 241)

Recommended at various times by rax, sovay, and eredien.

The protagonist of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf is not a werewolf. She is a fox, of the sort that would in Japanese be called kitsune, although she is not Japanese because she has lived in Russia for a very long while. She appears most of the time to be a stunningly beautiful girl somewhere between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. In fact she cannot remember how old she is, although she thinks that she is a relative of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King who came out of the earth in the distant past. As with all correct and virtuous foxes, she is a prostitute, a spinner of illusions and hallucinations, and an occasional predator, with a long family history of hunting both chickens and British aristocrats. (The chickens because it is fun. The British aristocrats in all seriousness.)

And her name is A Hu-Li, which gives her major problems in Russia, because the Russian transliteration of this name she brought from China before the Russian language existed now means something very obscene. (The link goes to an essay on the multi-layered obscenities and other allusions bound up in her name.)

This is one of those wildly alive, extremely exuberant novels that must have given the translator nightmares for months. It works as a straightforward fantasy novel, and it works as a novel set in contemporary Russia, and it works as an extremely peculiar riff on Nabokov, and it works as a Buddhist sutra (don't ask), and you should probably take the title literally, and there was a moment in there where it referenced Final Fantasy 8 and Wittgenstein on the same page before taking a bitchy and well-deserved swipe at Lukyanenko's Night Watch, but I think it would still work without any of the bajillion layers of allusion. It's the kind of book where you might want footnotes but you will not need them.

Also, it's a good novel containing werebeasts, which has three-dimensional characters. I was previously aware of only one of those, Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris, which is out of print and obscure. Were-anything well done is astonishingly rare. A Hu-Li is not human, and her viewpoint is not human, and she will tell you point blank about the ways in which she is not human and then surprise you with them anyway. She is also not what you think of when you think about kitsune. No matter what you are thinking about kitsune.

There is a fair amount of sex in this book, and a great deal of philosophy (sometimes they are the same thing), and it has a brilliant structure I would not dream of spoiling. And I am in the process of having a genuine argument with it about some things involving concepts of gender, because on the one hand I don't agree with A Hu-Li on some aspects, but on the other hand she's an unreliable narrator and the book knows that perfectly well. I am still trying to tease out which directions the narrative thinks she's wrong about, and also her viewpoint is sufficiently sideways that these are not the usual arguments one has with a book concerning gender stuff-- related but entirely different arguments, which is probably good for me.

I can't imagine why this isn't more widely known, but the only mentions of it I've ever encountered have been people I know recommending it. It deserves a wide readership. It's entertaining, mind-stretching, odd, and pretty brilliant.

And don't even get me started on the entire concept of how this book treats the boundary between human and animal, and the things that it does with that metaphysically. rax went to graduate school so that I don't have to write you a seventeen-page essay about that, is what I say, because I know I would not cite the correct theory, and she can. But wow. I have never seen anything else like that in fiction. I just haven't. It is extremely cool and you should read it.

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Victor Pelevin (365 Books, Day 241)

Recommended at various times by rax, sovay, and eredien.

The protagonist of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf is not a werewolf. She is a fox, of the sort that would in Japanese be called kitsune, although she is not Japanese because she has lived in Russia for a very long while. She appears most of the time to be a stunningly beautiful girl somewhere between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. In fact she cannot remember how old she is, although she thinks that she is a relative of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King who came out of the earth in the distant past. As with all correct and virtuous foxes, she is a prostitute, a spinner of illusions and hallucinations, and an occasional predator, with a long family history of hunting both chickens and British aristocrats. (The chickens because it is fun. The British aristocrats in all seriousness.)

And her name is A Hu-Li, which gives her major problems in Russia, because the Russian transliteration of this name she brought from China before the Russian language existed now means something very obscene. (The link goes to an essay on the multi-layered obscenities and other allusions bound up in her name.)

This is one of those wildly alive, extremely exuberant novels that must have given the translator nightmares for months. It works as a straightforward fantasy novel, and it works as a novel set in contemporary Russia, and it works as an extremely peculiar riff on Nabokov, and it works as a Buddhist sutra (don't ask), and you should probably take the title literally, and there was a moment in there where it referenced Final Fantasy 8 and Wittgenstein on the same page before taking a bitchy and well-deserved swipe at Lukyanenko's Night Watch, but I think it would still work without any of the bajillion layers of allusion. It's the kind of book where you might want footnotes but you will not need them.

Also, it's a good novel containing werebeasts, which has three-dimensional characters. I was previously aware of only one of those, Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris, which is out of print and obscure. Were-anything well done is astonishingly rare. A Hu-Li is not human, and her viewpoint is not human, and she will tell you point blank about the ways in which she is not human and then surprise you with them anyway. She is also not what you think of when you think about kitsune. No matter what you are thinking about kitsune.

There is a fair amount of sex in this book, and a great deal of philosophy (sometimes they are the same thing), and it has a brilliant structure I would not dream of spoiling. And I am in the process of having a genuine argument with it about some things involving concepts of gender, because on the one hand I don't agree with A Hu-Li on some aspects, but on the other hand she's an unreliable narrator and the book knows that perfectly well. I am still trying to tease out which directions the narrative thinks she's wrong about, and also her viewpoint is sufficiently sideways that these are not the usual arguments one has with a book concerning gender stuff-- related but entirely different arguments, which is probably good for me.

I can't imagine why this isn't more widely known, but the only mentions of it I've ever encountered have been people I know recommending it. It deserves a wide readership. It's entertaining, mind-stretching, odd, and pretty brilliant.

And don't even get me started on the entire concept of how this book treats the boundary between human and animal, and the things that it does with that metaphysically. rax went to graduate school so that I don't have to write you a seventeen-page essay about that, is what I say, because I know I would not cite the correct theory on why this is awesome, and she can. But wow. I have never seen anything else like that in fiction. I just haven't. It is extremely cool and you should read it.

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