Omon Ra

by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield (Translator)

Overview

"An inventive comedy as black as outer space itself. Makes The Right Stuff looks like a NASA handout."—Tibor Fischer.

Victor Pelevin's novel Omon Ra has been widely praised for its poetry and its wickedness, a novel in line with the great works of Gogol and Bulgakov: "full of the ridiculous and the sublime," says The Observer [London]. Omon is chosen to be trained in the Soviet space program the fulfillment of his lifelong dream. However, he enrolls only to encounter the terrifying absurdity of Soviet protocol and its backward technology: a bicycle-powered moonwalker; the outrageous Colonel Urgachin ("a kind of Sovier Dr. Strangelove"—The New York Times); and a one-way assignment to the moon. The New Yorker proclaimed: "Omon's adventure is like a rocket firing off its various stages—each incident is more jolting and propulsively absurd than the one before."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811213646
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/17/1998
Pages:	154
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Victor Pelevin is one of Russia’s most successful post-Soviet writers. He won the Russian Booker prize in 1993 Born on November 22, 1962 in Moscow, he attended the Moscow Institute of Power Engineering, and the Institute of Literature. He’s now been published throughout Europe. His books include A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, Omon Ra, The Blue Lantern, The Yellow Arrow, and The Hall of the Singing Caryatids.

Born in Yorkshire, England, Andrew Bromfield is a translator of Russian literature and an editor and co-founder of the literary journal Glas.

What People are Saying About This

Tibor Fischer

"An inventive comedy as black as out of space itself. Makes the right stuff look like the Nassau handout."

Editorial Reviews

"And in its final moments, about what happens when this poor boy actually finds himself rocketing toward the moon, are surely the most memorable passages I read this year."— Dwight Garner New York Newsday

"A freshly jaundiced view of a distorted world."— The New York Times

"Pelevin is a master absurdist, a brilliant satirist of all things Soviet, but also of things human: our corruptible dreams, petty squabbles, half-assed inventions and, above all, our tendency to allow the purer parts of our nature to be co-opted."— Spin

From the Publisher

"Witty, cleaver, and poetic...Pelevin has a freshly jaundiced vision of a distorted world." -- The New York Times

Richard Bernstein

"Omon RA tracks an aspiring cosmonaut to progress to a space system apparently designed by Escher. Pelevin is a brilliant satarist of things Soviet, but also of things human: our petty squabbles, half-assed inventions, and, above all, our corruptable dreams." -- Spin

George Saunders

A vigorous satire on the Soviet space program is combined with a thoughtful dramatization of the mixed human impulses to explore, conquer, and transcend in this memorable short novel by the author of The Yellow Arrow (see below).

Pelvin's narrator and protagonist, born Omon Krivomazov, grows up in a nondescript village, ignored by his drunken father and sustained by a rapturous "dream of the sky" that fills his being with the romance of celestial navigation. Omon—who adopts as his surname that of the Egyptian god of the sun—progresses with initially increasing enthusiasm, then gathering apprehension, through the stages of Soviet space training, the trials of Flying School, and the revelations of "Rocket Camp" with his best pal Mitiok, as the two eagerly prepare for a planned lunar flight. But what of those stories about space cadets who must have their legs amputated to fit inside their vessels' cockpits? Omon meets the dog Laika ("the first Soviet cosmonaut") and hears hilariously grim stories of the awful lengths to which humans will go to survive—like the Popadyas, father and son, who wear bulletproof vests and suit up as bears for the pleasure of hunting parties (the participation of Henry Kissinger in this subplot marks one of Pelevin's rare descents into theme-driven overstatement). In Omon, Pelevin creates a bright, observant central character who's appropriately fascinated by the way things work. Minor characters are sketchier, though the blind, wheelchair-bound Political Instructor Colonel Urchagin, who smilingly urges Omon and his comrades to make the ultimate sacrifice, will linger in the reader's memory—as will the sobering lesson imparted to Omon: ". . . becoming a heavenly body is not much different from serving a life sentence in a prison carriage that travels round and round a circular railway line without ever stopping."

This haunting tragicomedy was nominated for the 1993 Russian Booker Prize (which Pelevin won for a collection of short stories). It's the work of an exciting new talent, and one hopes his other fiction will soon be in English translation as well.

Kirkus Reviews