The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin

Book Overview

Paranormal meets transcendental in this provocative and hilarious novel. Victor Pelevin has established a reputation as one of the most brilliant writers at work today; his comic inventiveness has won him comparisons to Kafka, Calvino, and Gogol, and Time has described him as a apsychedelic Nabokov for the cyberage.a Pelevinas new novel, his first in six years, is both a supernatural love story and a satirical portrait of modern Russia. It concerns...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670019887
• ISBN13: 9780670019885
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 335 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.2" x 8.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

More than a novel

This book was well worth the investment in time and money, and you should definitely read it. I disagree with many of the other reviews posted here about this book about a number of things. For the sake of being concise, I will not re-hash most of the points covered in the other reviews, but instead will focus on pointing out what sets this book apart from others, and what makes it special. I would describe this novel as an absurdist masterpiece, and multi-level metaphoric excursion about the human condition. Pelevin's cosmic sarcasm is lacerating and unforgiving, but at the same time liberating. I would argue that this book is not actually postmodern, but may actually qualify as an actual POST-IRONIC work (I know - you don't beleive in such a thing, but let's not go there). I've read the majority of the English translated Pelevin books and this is my favorite, and I think the best one yet. I would like to further assert that this book may actually qualify as a legitimate sacred buddhist text. Pelevin has perfected the art of resonating within the readers mind, through description of events in terms of visceral and interoceptive description as well as emotional and other meaningful content, to the point of displacing the readers consciousness into a higher spiritual level. For the prepared mind, this book is an ultimate vehicle. Other than that, it's a bit of a shaggy-dog tale. Enjoy. One additional thing: The book's discussion of experiencing the world without language is a reference to Chan school (Zen) Buddhism and their epistemology which is a monism (non-dualistic). The idea of shapeshifting or were-creatures is a metaphor used in the book for a transpersonal psychological understanding of the world and being at one with the universe, as well as for human spiritual development in general.

Very enjoyable

Very entertaining, very thought provoking. Good overview of idealism in philosophy. All the way through I kept thinking "where is he going with this?", which kept me turning the pages.

Extraordinary Read

This is an extraordinary read. It starts a little slow but builds. I was happy to have read some of his short stories first so I was prepared for the ride. It's a good one!

The Meaning of Life* (if you are a werefox)

I don't think that this book reminded me of anything Nabokov wrote (as suggested in the blurbs); however this is an imaginative (maybe kooky) book that starts out as a sort of science fiction and ends up as a zen manifesto and with the discovery of the meaning (or lack there of) of life (for werefoxes, at least - the narrator simply didn't have the time to spell it out for humans). I think I may have missed a lot of the subtlety of this book because I know very little about Russia.

A baffling cultural collage

Victor Pelevin discards the basic novelists' creed --- to tell truth through lies --- as insufficiently complex for his aims. Instead, he tells lies through other lies, and those lies utter parables, and hidden in those parables lie bare and brunt truths, but only if you're willing to dig. Like his Russian comic predecessors (such as Gogol and Bulgakov), he is often impossible to pin down, but Pelevin takes this ambiguity to a new level in THE SACRED BOOK OF THE WEREWOLF, a baffling cultural collage in the service of a literary drug trip where philosophy meets erotica and everything in between. This multi-layered book demands to be discussed after reading to settle the stomach. Perhaps its best achievement is its multiple-voiced, near-contradictory koan-like structure, for much like more traditional Zen Buddhist exercises (and yes, this is one too), it requires some amount of dialogue and contradictory thinking to be understood. That being said, Pelevin may have jumped the shark with this book, as the different facets of the novel's warped prism never fully come together. It's up to the reader to decide whether this is a postmodern masterpiece or a mess. The plot (or what there is of one) centers on the millennia-old werefox A. Huli, who looks like a 15-year-old prostitute but possesses a fox tail that creates full-body hallucinations for her clients, allowing them to achieve erotic nirvana while she sucks their life force to sustain her immortality. She loves to allude to Nabokov (consider her Lolita-esque charade) and reads Stephen Hawking, who she confuses for/compares to Stephen King, when she's bored during clients' fantasy sessions. One of her clients, Alexander Sery, is immune to the powers of her tail, a mystery solved by his immediate transformation into a werewolf, after which he proceeds to rape her --- her first real sexual experience, which affects her as much as it does us "tailless monkeys." So begins a love affair that dabbles in philosophical meandering, a conspiracy involving Russia's oil industry, and sexual adventures that delve into the mysteries of our perception of the universe. Sounds heady and unmanageable? You'd be right. Unlike some of Pelevin's previous work, THE SACRED BOOK OF THE WEREWOLF fails to blend its disparate topics, allusions and ideas into a cohesive whole. This may be a sign of increasing ambition; HOMO ZAPIENS (his most successful import in America, which also involves conspiracy theories and Eastern metaphysics) feels like a complete novel, though its critiques and ideas are smaller in scope. Also, unlike HOMO ZAPIENS, we are rarely rewarded for our diligent patience with Pelevin's tangents, speculation and flights of fancy --- he teases but fails to deliver. A. Huli's intellectual meditations only sometimes bear relation to each other; her metaphysical discoveries are stand-alone statements for the most part, which may leave the reader asking "so what?" Her romance with Alexander is uninspiring in l