The Hall of the Singing Caryatids

by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield (Translator)

After auditioning for the part as a singing geisha at a dubious bar, Lena and eleven other “lucky” girls are sent to work at a posh underground nightclub reserved exclusively for Russia’s upper-crust elite. They are to be a sideshow attraction to the rest of the club’s entertainment, and are billed as the “famous singing caryatids.” Things only get weirder from there. Secret ointments, praying mantises, sexual escapades, and grotesque murder are quickly ushered into the plot. The Russian literary master Victor Pelevin holds nothing back, and The Hall of the Singing Caryatids, his most recent story to be translated into English, is sure to make you squirm in your seat with utter delight.

Genres: Fiction, Russia, Novella, Russian Literature, Science Fiction, Magical Realism, Satire

105 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Victor Olegovich Pelevin is a Russian fiction writer. His books usually carry the outward conventions of the science fiction genre, but are used to construct involved, multi-layered postmodernist texts, fusing together elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies. Some critics relate his prose to the New Sincerity and New Realism literary movements.

RU: Виктор Пелевин

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

The general themes of this book are similar to the ones Pelevin covers in his other books. The absurd nature of post-Soviet Russia and the weird predatory version of Capitalism that now rules the land there and Buddhism. There are other themes too, and I'm probably being unfairly reductionist, but, whatever.

Parts of this long-short story I enjoyed, and parts I thought could have been cut or shortened. I think as a medium/long-short story this would have worked better. Is this a novella? I guess, but it feels more like a long-short story so I'll go with my hyphenated clumsiness.

The basic premise is a young woman is hired to work in a club catering to the whims of Russia's super-rich and powerful. Her job is to be a singing caryatid (a human statue that sings) in a room with three other women. They are high paid decor in an almost always empty room and are barely noticed by anyone when a visitor enters the room. They are like those gold flakes in expensive liquors, just something to up the cost for those who can afford it but not something they even taste or notice when drinking, but it must feel good to have the money to just throw away on expensive incidentals. The girls are injected with an enzyme from praying mantises, which allow them to stand in one position for hours with no ill-effects, and while performing as immobile singing decorations the woman begins to communicate with a timeless metaphysical praying mantis. In between shifts at the club, the woman is exposed to the nonsense that passes for entertainment and journalism in an intellectually debauched society with rampant semiotic dissonance where everything from corporate slogans, dead genocidal tyrants and intellectual theories mash up into an over saturated cesspool of mumbo-jumbo that would be appear to be expressing something but is really just a post-modern masturbation game. Mix into this some uber-aggressive versions of NLP (the science douche bags and losers the world over can really get behind) and you sort of get the world this woman finds herself moving around in while finding most everything to be nonsense that she blames her limited intellect on not being able to understand.

The story took things to just a radical extreme that it felt like reading some of the excess writers of the 1980's/90's style zeitgeist, sort of like reading Bret Easton Ellis's excessive detailing of what people were eating, wearing, drinking, listening to, ingesting and fucking with one eyeball while reading some Will Self with the other and having an audio versions of Douglas Coupland and Mark Leyner in separate ears from headphones. And I'm sure this overkill was intentional, but it felt so unreal and absurd that it was like getting whacked over the head repeatedly with a cartoon mallet. When the satire would let up a bit the story read better, and again with Pelevin, it's when he starts to blend Buddhism into the story is when I think his work succeeds and moves past the surface hipness that I feared was all he had to offer before I had ever read him.

If you've never read Pelevin before, I'd recommend him. But I wouldn't start here. This is my third Pelevin book, and I think it's the weakest of the three, or it's the most overwhelming, or something. I'd recommend The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and not just because the main character is an immortal cute girl who happens to be half-fox.

[Yuri Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Politically savvy, funny, off the rails and travelling too fast to be safe – Pelevin knows how to pack the punch into a novella. For anyone not familiar with this important and increasingly influential (albeit secretive) Russian writer, this work is as good a place as any to dip your toe in the water ... but look out for something that’ll bite it off.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

If we in America have another 1960s Beatles/British invasion but this time it's an all-girl group who sing Tchaikovsky (yea, I know, sounds groovy) while standing still like a statue, let's think twice before handing them the key to the White House. No, wait, didn't that already happen (the key thing, not the girl group.) Anyway, this quirky satire (I know so little about Russian literature that I must assume it is a political satire....or maybe it's a comedy about Tchaikovsky and his gay lover/driver who pack 600 pieces of luggage for a trip to Italy) is very strange, and with every page it gets stranger, with a fantastic denouement. (Yes, absolutely, try to impress your friends the nex time you're all together and say, "I knew it all along.") Pelevin belongs (if we are to group books by "odd" at the library) on the same shelves as Palahnuik, Murakami, and others. I especially liked the part about the Russians trying to clone Elton John (but isn't everyone in the world working on this as a global project?), but I still want to know what was in those 600 pieces of luggage. A huge THANK YOU to New Directions publishers, as without these kind of publishing houses, we who speak English only would probably, and very sadly, never have the opportunity to experience these types of books. This doesn't feel like a Russian novel at all, and as much as I like Dostoevsky and other well know Russian authors, this book by Victor Pelevin is refreshing, unusual, funny, but most importantly this is solid, thought-provoking entertainment.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

victor pelevin's the hall of the singing caryatids is a slim work brimming with satire and imagination. the russian novelist and short story writer's appeal seems to be growing with english readers ever more steadily (thanks, in no small part, to wonderful translations by andrew bromfield). singing caryatids takes aim at present-day russian politics, consumer culture, and exploitative male dominance with an inventive tale that manages to incorporate an injectable serum that allows its users to remain motionless for extended periods, a seemingly omniscient praying mantis that communicates subconsciously as a result of said serum, and an ornate underground entertainment complex catering to the whims of the nation's elite. often humorous and delightfully bizarre, the hall of the singing caryatids is a brief, hip piece of fiction from one of russia's most exciting and unique writers.

we are creating an entirely new type of personal pleasure zone. its fundamental, distinctive stylistic element will be the naked female body. of course, that doesn't mean a room full of naked broads. no one nowadays is interested in some neapolitan tarantella, the kind of thing once mocked so viciously by the writer averchenko. no... what we are doing here will outdo anything that even the decadent roman emperors ever witnessed.

[Oriana · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I saw on Facebook or Twitter or somewhere that New Directions had proofs of this -- a new fucking Pelevin, ZOMG I love him so much -- that they were giving away to reviewers. So I wrote to them and was like "I write reviews for the illustrious CCLaP, here is a link to some of my work, would you be so kind as to send me a copy?" AND THEY DID. I have arrived, baby!

***

I'm sad I never made the time to do a review of this. But it was really really really short, and left little in the way of a lasting impression (ladies dosed with drugs to make them still as statues, so they could be living decorations at a rich dude's party? I think?), so I'll have to re-read it one of these days if I ever want to have something smart to say about it.

[Monica Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The situation is rendered particularly acute," the young man continued, "by the fact that in the course of a predatory and criminal process of privatization, the wealth of our country fell into the hands of a bunch of oligarchs specially selected by agents operating in the dark wings of the international stage, on the basis of their spiritual squalor. Not that they're irredeemably bad people, no, you shouldn't think that, papa mama nuthouse eighteen. They are more like little children, incapable of striving for any goal except satisfaction of their constantly shifting desires. Hence all those soccer clubs, giant yachts, twenty-thousand-Euro bottles of wine and other ghastly aberrations, about which I think you have already heard more than enough..."

The Hall of the Singing Caryatids is literary sci-fi postmoderntist one-night stand. Weighing in at just over one hundred pages, Pelevin manages to blend humor, political commentary, and the more ludicrous aspects of current society into a superb read. Pelevin incorporates hilarious parodies of name brand shirts and the people we hold up as celebrities which isn't done often enough in literature as far as I'm concerned.

The story begins with Lena, a young woman who is auditioning for a position as a singer in a club. It turns out that after being requested to sing her song on top of a desk with one leg lifted in the air, she lands the job in this prestigious underground club that caters to Russia's wealthy and powerful men. Lena and eleven other women are specifically chosen to round out the group of performers:

Lena looked around at the gathering. In all, there were twelve girls in the small conference room - they were all gorgeous, but so assorted, so different, as if specially chosen to play up the contrasting types of physical appearance - just to drive home the beauty. There two black girls, one cocoa, two dark girls from Central Asia, two Japanese-looking ones with small, narrow eyes (Asya was more beautiful than the other one) , five generally European-looking girls: three blondes (Lena included herself), one brunette, and one with chestnut hair.

This group comprises the Twelve Singing Caryatids of Malachite Hall. After a bizarre orientation meeting that leaves the women with more questions than before about whom they are working for and what exactly they are hired to do, they are led down a long hall into a dressing room where they smear themselves with malachite paste and wear wigs in order to resemble a caryatid. They are told they are to sing and stand without movement for hours like a caryatid which their boss, Uncle Pete, explains via the Russian dictionary, "tells us that the word 'caryatid' signifies a sculpture of a woman that acts as a support for a roof or appears to perform this function..." Uncle Pete also explains that to maintain immobility during their shifts, the women will be injected with a serum called Mantis-B. Once injected and made up, the women are led to Malachite Hall where they are placed on twelve pedestals and stand motionless while purring two pieces without using any of the lyrics. With their eyes closed, they purr the theme from Swan Lake and the song Mondo Bongo. They are told to open their eyes only when spoken to by one of the rich clients.

After a couple of shifts, the injections of Mantis-B Lena begins to enjoy them because her "body felt like a light glass flask, with some invisible flame of life burning inside it,"and she develops a sense that there are two Lenas. The second Lena is visited by a huge praying mantis with five eyes that has the ability to read her mind and allow them to communicate with each other without language. Her interactions with the praying mantis are enlightening:

It could be described approximately as follows: whereas the last time Lena had thought that the world around her turned into something like the visualizer in Windows Media Player now she herself became the visualizer. the world disintegrated into a host of discrete aspects that seemed absurd, astounding, impossible and terrifying taken separately, but together they somehow balanced each other out in a calm and happy equilibrium that settled into her head.

As her experiences with the praying mantis become more compelling and involved, it's becomes more difficult for her to leave the world she enters after taking the injection. She looks forward to working, despite the hierarchical system that even exists in this secret underground club that specializes in attracting the high-power men of Russia with 'USAs' - units of sexual attraction. In their lunch cafeteria, the quoted maxims about beauty by people ranging from Larry Flynt to Kate Moss are plastered on the walls for inspiration. The girls are looked down on by the mermaids who inhabit another hall because the mermaids are more beautiful than the caryatids. Besides the presence of Uncle Pete, the only other man that garners attention by Pelevin and in turn by Lena, is the famous Russian oligarch and eligible bachelor, Misha Botvinik. The story of Lena, the underground club, sex and murder come to a humorously horrifying conclusion when Botvinik enters the hall and choose Lena as the girl for him.

Pelevin takes on the culture of beauty and the dynamics of power in this incisive novel as well as touching on the politics of consumerism. It also wouldn't be a too far of a stretch to say that Pelevin is, in some parts, using satire to mock the current patriarchal society and to make the point that beautiful, silent women are thought to be the only avenue that will unleash the secrets of these powerful men. The usurpers may then gain control of their motherland and recalibrate the country so that abuses of power by the rich are stopped and the disparate gaps between the rich and the poor are eradicated. But in the end, it's who uses whom first.

I particularly enjoyed the satirical takes on the brand name shirts that Uncle Pete wears like "D & G" for "Discourse and Glamour." It's this kind of humor that grounds the reader even more in Pelevin's imaginative and seedy world. The excesses that exist in the nooks and crannies of our culture are exploited by Pelevin to perfection, at times mirroring the excesses to drive the point home. With Andrew Bromfield's excellent and lively translation, this is a novel definitely worth a look, especially if you are wondering what author to read after Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Praying Mantis updating of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, only with a different outcome.

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbgPS...

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

It strikes me as being very much of interest that two of Russia’s key contemporary writers of literary fiction, Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin, can be said to have made their names writing imaginative and often quite daring postmodern stories and novels with science fiction underpinnings. This doesn’t necessarily mark a break with tradition, Russian literature (and cinema) of the Soviet era having been replete with sci-fi. Certainly Stanisław Lem (a Polish writer, incorporated into the broader Warsaw Pact aggregation) and the Strugatsky brothers would have to be considered precursors. I have recently written about the preponderance of writers in the greater Russian satellite system with educational backgrounds in science, engineering, and polytechnic, how this might tell us much about why science fiction would come to enjoy a major Slavic renaissance, noting also that, though socialist realism was always the officially mandated standard, Soviet apparatchiks possibly tended to be permissive as regards sci-fi on account of a general sense that the U.S.S.R. was supposed to be a technological behemoth, on the cutting-edge of human progress. The space and arms races might be said to have had an analogue in the science fiction cultures of America and the Soviet Union. Writers like Lem and the Strugatskys also came to make use of science fiction in order to offer cloaked social critique, which would have been all but impossible were they to have been realist writers—not that they didn’t have to be careful. Vladimir Sorokin, born in 1955, studied at the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow, graduated in 1977, and briefly assumed the determined role of engineer. He became a key figure in the underground culture of the 80s, his work having a tendency to get itself banned, though he would publish stories (primarily in France) and his first novel (in France) before glasnost, perestroika, and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Pelevin, born in ’62, earned a degree in electromechanical engineering in ’85, having also served in the airforce. Publishing his first story in 1989, the commencement of Pelevin’s literary career is essentially concurrent with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. Pelevin is a notorious recluse, and there has been scuttlebutt over the years, even journalists of officialdom having been known to partake, suggesting that there is no such person as Victor Pelevin, that the literary output corresponding to the name might in fact be the product of the collaborative efforts of some underground cabal of savvy subversives. It doesn’t take much more than a cursory assaying to establish that any such ruse would require a network so vast and capable as to stretch credulity well past the breaking point. New Direction provides us with a curious bio of Pelevin that would also like us to know that the author prefers to spend his downtime lying low in Buddhist monasteries. One might attribute to the seven years of comparative youth Pelevin has on Sorokin the sense we (or at least I) have of the former’s being a little more plugged-in, a little more in his natural element navigating the hyper-connected 21st century, more keenly hip to Paul Virilio et al. That Pelevin studied electromechanical engineering seems noteworthy, as his work focuses a great deal (in up-to-the-minute fashion) on tech and the uses/abuses thereof, he himself having proven an early adopter, cannily making use of the internet to disseminate his work and fortify his reputation. In many ways his fiction has commonalities with writers like William Gibson and with cyberpunk. I recently read Tijuana-based activist-theorist Sayak Valencia’s GORE CAPITALISM, in which the author in the course of her transversal analyses addresses Paul B. Preciad’s work on “pharmacopornographic” capitalism, the terminology in question referencing the ways in which drugs, pornography, and dystopian cityscapes can come to possess a certain dystopian, cyberpunk chic. I detect in both Sorokin and Pelevin currents of the pharmacopornographic. Sorokin’s ribald and astringent fantastical novels DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK and THE BLIZZARD, for example, each feature outrageous, speculative means of getting high. Pelevin’s novella THE HALL OF THE CARYATIDS does this to an extent also. I had cause to regularly reflect upon revered journalist Masha Gessen’s book THE FUTURE IS HISTORY: HOW TOTALITARIANISM RECLAIMED RUSSIA whilst reading the compact New Directions edition of CARYATIDS. There is what we might call a heady amount of thematic overlap. Gessen looks in part at the way “Homo Sovieticus” and the old Soviet nomenklatura became repurposed into the gangster state (and sate of mind) of Putin’s Russia, a nation positing itself in ideological opposition to the "open society" of the West, but taking the form of a predatory capitalist oligarchy overseen by syndicalist enterprises, thoroughly enmeshed with global markets. A pharmacopornographic 21st century Russia is going to be distinct in any number of ways, but its competing orthodoxies and its general institutionality intersect with broader transnational tendencies. THE HALL OF THE SINGING CARYATIDS presents us with a number of young women in central roles. We come to discover that they were apparently born in the 1990s, a half-decade or more after some of the key “post-Soviet” personages in Gessen’s text, and Pelevin explicitly parallels the period in which they came of age with the genesis and partial maturation of emergent forms of renegade governance germane both to statecraft and free market enterprise (the two naturally bound up in one another). The novella was originally published in Russia as part of a 2008 Pelevin collection, so we are forced to conclude that the piece, in no small part speculative fiction or science fiction, takes place in something far more like an alternative or exaggerated present than in any kind of imagined future, the young women at its centre, born in the 1990s, clearly not much more than teenagers. THE HALL OF THE SINGING CARYATIDS begins with a young woman named Lena going to an audition where she is tasked with singing in the nude, assuming an unnatural and somewhat uncomfortable physical stance as per the requirements. The audition is overseen by a man named Uncle Pete who does not at first voice either approval or disapproval, Lena suspecting that she was not judged satisfactory. Alas, a week later Uncle Pete calls and tells her she has the job. Lena is instructed to go to the Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel and make contact with somebody brandishing a sign reading “semiotic signs.” Lena and a compliment of young women are escorted into a boardroom and subjected to a kind of boilerplate employee training seminar. A premium is placed on a young a woman’s capacity to blush, there is talk of a culture beholden to the “dictatorship of McDonald’s,” only “leavened with a correct spiritual principle” (apparently basic fatuous Russian Orthodox claptrap). You girls are about to embark upon a job “as important as a tour of duty in a nuclear submarine.” There is, amusingly, some business having to do with “the transcendental extralinguistic imperative.” A younger man kicks off the seminar with his public relations jargon and not-super-helpful layout, then Uncle Pete shows up to elaborate: you will be working in a “complex […] close to Rublyovskoe Chaussee. It is located a thousand feet underground and can withstand a direct hit by a nuclear bomb. The complex will act as a bomb shelter for the national elite in the case of war or terrorist attacks. In peacetime it will be an exclusive recreation center that the elite can visit confidentially, without even leaving their own neighborhood.” Oligarchs will be fiddling underground if and when Rome should happen to burn (it is indicated that this will be a matter both of orgies and of shareholder meetings), extremely convenient, because already underground, they will not have to flee there. The girls on hand are not to become full-fledged USAS—Units of Sexual Attraction—but rather Singing Caryatids, “a decorative element in one of the auxiliary areas.” Part sex worker, part commodity, part décor. (As for the specific classification of this sort of sex work, Lena will later reflect that since there is singing involved, the caryatids are sort of a kind of geisha.) A caryatid, specifies Pete, is a statue of a woman incorporated into a building’s design in such a way as to perform a vital utilitarian function at the level of basic structural integrity. We might at this point pause to meditate on the possibility that no person or thing part of any structure or system is without some kind of nebulous function at the level of overall systems/structural integrity. Perhaps even the nominally decorative is never purely so. Everything has some part in the totality of the whole, as in grammar, as in semiotics. The caryatid girls are required to work forty-eight hour shifts, remaining for the most part still, assuming physical stances for extended periods that one would presume uncomfortable (even impossible) to adopt for so much as thirty second. Worry not girls, firstly, because you will be paid extravagantly and, secondarily, there is a techo-scientific breakthrough that shall make this possible: “a complex protein, a rather distant analog of a toxin, or, rather, repressor, consisting of a dual-domain globule of bonded disulphide …” The girls will be injected with a secret stolen from the glands (or whatever) of the praying mantis. They will, in fact, we might say, come to be inseminated with the cosmic feminine secret of the praying mantis … chalk it up to “side effect.” To get some kind of idea of the power of stillness, the young women are encouraged to consider ninjas (obviously, as such, inane genre movies). Lena will quickly come to find herself allied with three other young women—Vera (a Slavic blonde like Lena), Asya (Japanese), Kima (black)—with whom she conspires to form a four person crew, on account of their all living in close proximity, thus facilitating a more easeful commute. On the first day of work the girls discover that the entry to their underground Pleasure Palace is situated inside a kind of military instillation. The world of THE HALL OF SINGING CARYATIDS involves elements of the military, oligarchy (political and business elements), and the communications industry. Also, of course, any number of Russian gangsters in tracksuits. Also, of course, the labour pool or precariat. This world is overstuffed with public relations personnel, many apparently freelance contractors, as well as political/managerial technologists and at least one didactic corporate ideologist. A concealed journal called COUNTERCULTURE alerts us to the presence of an alternative press, doubtlessly some kind of possibly incendiary underground culture. Well … maybe not so fast. Asya insists that “counterculture” refers to the “aesthetic of anti-bourgeois revolt, expropriated by the ruling elite …” Kima connects the word’s prefix to the checkout counter. They are not at all wrong. COUNTERCULTURE is very much just more communications industry product, so much PR malarkey. The new workplace features a “Soviet-style wall newspaper with underground news and drawings by the staff” called “Kthulhu and the Bear Are Listening!” One piece in said “paper” extemporizing on “pussyness,” a term synonymous with “elite hyperconsumption.” (How do we avoid thinking about Pussy Riot and what can only be called their show trial?) Another theorizes that behind the word “electorate” there “lurks a sinister grin, not to say a malicious lie …” The communications industry, PR, and private enterprise are linked to semiotics, as foregrounded by Uncle Pete’s various t-shirts, ubiquitously appropriating brands in superficially subversive fashion, such as one in which the the double s at the end of “Hugo Boss” is replaced with the twin bolts of the Nazi Schutzstaffel. It can be “chic” for a person of means to come off as a “pocket dissident.” Go Pussy! A professional ideologist will address a national tendency, perhaps merely human nature, “a furious desire to restore justice and lose everything in the process.” This reverberates in 2019, during our prolonged post-truth nightmare of right-wing populism, folks like Fran Lebowitz commenting on the abundance of duped volk apparently more interest in serving their animosities than their actual self-interest. The instrumentalists of governmentality in their relatively good sense seem aware that such hate-cultivation ain’t good for THEIR own self-interest. The actual workday(s) of the caryatids involves injection with the mantis serum and a smearing with malachite paste, enhancing the general statuary effect. The serum produces “somatic hallucination” and, ultimately, what Deleuze and Guattari might call a process of becoming-mantis. The girls work both frozen and under the influence. I thought of the intersection in Philip K. Dick’s UBIK of themes of both the postmortem beyond and the beyond of higher consciousness presenced in the form of characters suspended in cryogenic half-life. The young women in their half-life stupor will come to commune regularly with a phantasmic praying mantis: it “didn’t think in terms of words or images at all. It simply was. It was a drop in an infinite river that flowed from one vastness to another. Every drop in the river was equivalent to the entire river as a whole, and so the mantis had no concerns about anything. It knew all about the river, or rather, the river of life knew all about itself. It flowed through the praying mantis which, by becoming Lena, had allowed her to catch a brief glimpse of this miracle forgotten by man.” Communion with the mantis provokes a new consciousness of “the black abyss of nonexistence,” recalling to Lena her early childhood, the pre-mirror-phase experience of encompassing homeostatic/symbiotic unity. A vision oriented toward futurity reveals Uncle Pete in a red t-shirt featuring the letters of the ubiquitous brand DKNY, the letters intuited to signify “Divine Koran Nourishes You.” Kima suggests that new occult capabilities may be available to those aware of a pervading condition of irreality, the fact that “life is a dream.” This is consonant with what Lena is herself coming to apprehend. As the mantis serum precipitates a becoming-mantis that progressively unleashes a destabilizing, universal, feminine consciousness of the “river of life” and a concomitant Aldous Huxley-like insistence on spiritual transcendence as the real frontier of the revolutionary, it comes to be clear that Pelevin’s vision in less about revolutionary feminist praxis of the street-level activist variety than it is a kind of speculative eschatology, though hardly less perversely gleeful for all that. You may be able to guess how some of this eschatology plays out should you have the cursory familiarity with basic entomology.

[Ben Bush]

I was at a crowded New Directions party of a type that is hard to imagine now in the COVID era. They were giving away copies of books and I picked this up a) cuz it was small and would fit in my suitcase and b) before I left for Bulgaria, I'd asked a Russian translator friend that you always heard people talking about Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky but who was writing interesting literature in the new Russia? She mentioned Vladimir Sorokin and Pelevin. Having read a Sorokin, I'd say Pelevin is the better of the two. Though maybe Omon Ra is the one to read. This was witty and retrograde. A satire of oligarchs, secret police, call girls, and semiotics. Pretty sharp sentences.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, rounded down.

A strange little novella that occasionally gets bogged down in philological/philosophical diatribes, but is well worth the limited time it takes to read it. One thing is for sure - you'll never look at praying mantises in quite the same way ever again!

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short satirical novel from Pelevin is an amusing take on the post-Soviet era. Coming in at just over a hundred pages it is ideal for New Directions publishing, who specialise in such novella length, but may have worked better as a shorter piece. Despite its brevity, it feels a bit drawn out at times.

The story follows Lena, who at the start of the novel is attending an audition for a type of nightclub, though not sure of the details, but she is aware she will have to sing naked.
She gets the job, and it materialises that it is in a very exclusive club,

a recreation center that the elite can visit confidentially

which is actually located in a nuclear proof bunker, a bomb shelter for the national elite, should that ever be needed.

[Ace Rockman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know how to describe this book it's just so maniacally strange

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second Pelevin work I have read, and as with The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, I was aware that much of the satire of contemporary Russia was slipping by me. But as with the previous read, I enjoyed it page by page. Pelevin is a very good and very funny writer. In this novella, Lena, a young woman in Moscow who needs a job, signs on to be a naked, singing caryatid in an exclusive private men’s club, a newly formed establishment that combines the stately elegance of a high-class geisha house with the more down-to-earth services of a brothel. Lena will be among the performers in the Malachite Room. There she will hold her position on a pedestal for several hours, smeared with a cream that makes her skin match the polished stone surroundings. Along with her co-workers, she will provide a musical background ranging from Tchaikovksy to the Russian national anthem. The Malachite Room is seldom visited by club members, but its offerings are somewhat on the dull side. In the billiard room, oligarchs play on a table that comes equipped with legs modified to perform oral sex.

Lena and her co-workers can hold their poses thanks to daily injections of a serum derived from praying mantises. The serum has an unexpected side effect. While posed on her pedestal, Lena receives visits from a giant praying mantis and finds that she can fuse with its consciousness. After fifty pages that mix satire and philosophical discussion in the Pelevin manner, Lena discovers that she has a mission. The conclusion, which is not hard to see coming, is funny, bloody, and satisfying.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Victor Pelevin's 'The Hall of the Singing Caryatids' lies at the unique intersection of pulp fiction, retro cheese, and dystopian sci-fi. If it were a film, it would be a sexy (sexier?) version of Austin Powers meets The Matrix and would be as much fun, confusing, and enjoyable as you could expect.

The story revolves around Lena, an aspiring model and actress who auditions and is awarded a role as an agent in the sexy spy agency Semiotic Signs. Her assignment is to entertain the exclusive clientele at a nightclub's special Malachite Hall.

Each agent works her 72 hour shift under the influence of a serum called Mantis-B that allows the girls to pose motionless for hours and yet remain alert and unfatigued. The plot unfolds as Mantis-B allows the girls to transcend reality and engage in conversation with the prophet Mantis who guides Lena and the other girls into a higher plane of existence and encourages them to assist others in their journeys.

Stylistically, this short story is quite odd and contains a frequent pop-culture references. The pacing and story coherence pick up as the story unfolds towards a single, enlightened conclusion. Definitely a book to appreciate in retrospect and demands to be re-read.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an intriguingly odd little book. It set out a map at the beginning and then walked right off into the forest. As it should, it left many questions for me to ponder when finished. However, I think I might have liked just one or two more answers than I got. That's just personal taste, but I was fairly befuddled for such a short work. I was definitely impressed, just not completely sure what I should make of it.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is brisk, smart, and a disturbing ride. My brain is on fire and it is only a 2 hour read. This author is smart and onto something extraordinary. I need to read more, but was able to "get" the Schopenhauer/Wittgenstein jokes readily. Amazing text.

[Chad Post · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of fun packed into 105 pages . . .

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's like the female version of the Metamorphosis because people become bugs! I think.

[Melos Han-Tani · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story about the capitalist/patriarchal order of 2000s(?) Russia trying to win soft power against the West by carrying out an absurd scheme of 'next-generation' women-fueled entertainment, aimed at getting oligarchs to keep more of their money in Russia. Located in a nuclear bunker deep beneath a rich Moscow neighborhood.

Picking the perspective of a woman having to work within this experiment worked well - there was some spiritualism with the Mantis drug metaphor I didn't really grasp, but it was interesting as the story shifted between this seedy nightclub space and the "Windows Media Player" spiritual mantis realm.

The way in which male characters or written media are portrayed give some insight into late 2000s Russia - rich oligarchs and their self-justifying weird little philosophies, views towards the USA and the patriarchy's aspiration of dominance over it. I get the sense of a climate of competing inner/actual and exterior/marketed ideologies (like in the promotion of "Diversity!" as a company goes on to fund war in another country)

Notes -

Reading other reviews was good here as I'm not super familiar with Russia's history or its literary and political trends, outside of what I can gleam from a few Russian mutuals, my knowledge on the Russian game industry, and the obviously distorted view of Russia in the USA media.

Read this as it was recommended as similar to Kobo Abe in some random Reddit thread. I don't think the two authors are that similar but I see where the recommendation was coming from because at a surface level they're both 'quite strange'.

[besteady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Очень крутая повесть, очень плотная по смыслу и даже лиричная (в силу возможностей В. Пелевина, конечно).

Больше всего мне понравилась речь идеолога, конечно, это реально мем.

В повести очень много образов. Тут и отношения России к народу, отношение России к олигархам, олигархов к народу и под каким соусом подается и как это используют "внешние враги". Пелевин расписывает всё это не только остроумно/стёбно, как обычно, но и с толикой грусти. Каждый действует исходя из своей выгоды, и искать тут правды негде.

Ну и конечно, самый лиричный образ: иллюзорный мир людей, иллюзорный мир богомолов, которые пересекаются и над ними всеобъемлющая нирвановская река. Лена пообещала дать Ботвинникову самое лучшее, что может. Но что есть это лучшее в нашем иллюзорном, отвратительном мире? Мир богомолов дает ответ: уход из этого мира. Ложь спецслужбы оказывается буддисткой моделью мира и это становится слишком убедительным для Лены. Что тут: ложь, оказавшееся "правдой" (в контексте Пелевинской модели мира), или "правда", решившая проявить себя, как ложь? Это неопределенность даёт дополнительную привлекательность этого образа.

Дополню забавной цитатой, показывающей неконвенциональность представления Пелевине о романтике:
"Красота есть то неуловимое и почти невыразимое в словах свойство, которое позволяет женщине немного побыть сукой перед тем, как ее вывезут на помойку".

Хотя конечно, эта тема больше раскрыта в "Священной книге оборотня".

[Dylan Moses · Rating 4 out of 5]

Viktor Pelevin is one of my favorite authors for a reason, this book touched on so many modern day issues with a sometimes overwhelming backdrop. Imagine watching a fringe political news broadcast while eating acid dipped chips as a snack and the entirety of Koko by Miles Davis is being blasted in your ear. the feminist, anti-capitalist, overconsumptions, bourgeoise hating rhetoric is found mainly on the side, in T-shirt logos, posters, and art written on walls. It is impressive how much Pelevin fits into the novella and it all goes by too fast. Here, we have a short , funny, confusing retelling of modern life in Russia and the greater Western world.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Crypto-Speak's greatest secret was the specific technology Combat NLP--but all information on this subject had been hidden away so securely that the author of the article didn't even try to guess at the meaning of the term. . .
The praying mantis appeared in front of her soon after she climbed up on the pedestal and set her hands against the upper block of malachite."

[Bryce · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is not a bad book, but it just didn't grip me. Reminded me a bit of Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49: short, strange, but ultimately an airy trifle. The story is straight forward, the imagery is reminiscent of French surrealism (more Breton than Bataille), but kinda sorta reminds me of a side story to Eyes Wide Shut. Still, I will read more books by Pelevin and see how I like those.

[Andrew Sare · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this novel is more a novela, Pelevin pumps up a fun short story with psychology and philosophy asides which were once common in great works, but are now increasingly rare. He also continues his take on Russian science fiction using manipulation of the mind and perceptions in place of technology.

[Jen Warner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird and fucked up and suuuper fun

[Simón · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Nathanflynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whoa

[mako · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly one of my favorite books that I've read in the last decade.

[Ish · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this in one day after randomly picking it off the shelf at desperate literature in madrid. a silly short story to escape reality. the characters were fun. lowkey a crazy story tho like what 😭 want to think more about the commentary in this… so strange

[Mina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bizarre and excellent stuff. Gotta love me some bug metaphors