| The Sacred Book of the Werewolf | |
| Author: | Victor Pelevin |
| Country: | Russia |
| Language: | Russian |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Release Date: | 2004 |
| Media Type: | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages: | 336 pp |
| Isbn: | 0670019887 |
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Russian: «Священная книга оборотня ») is a novel by Victor Pelevin first published in 2004.[1] [2]
This book is in the great Russian tradition of social satire running from Gogol through to Bulgakov, according to the journalists of The Guardian. In this satirical, erotic allegory of the post-Soviet and post-9/11 world, Victor Pelevin gives new meaning to the words "unreliable narrator", according to the journalists of The New York Times.
This novel is the story of a former fox-woman called A Huli. The female model she represents is one of the few in Pelevin's novels to escape her usual sarcastic irony. The narration is conducted from a feminine point of view, that of A Huli. Her feelings of love are described with tenderness. She is smarter and more sensitive than her male partners. The mystery of her attraction to Pelevin remains intact, despite the differences she presents in comparison to the heroines of her other novels.[3]
The motif of the animal-woman is frequent in Pelevin's novels. The short stories in The Life of Insects and the present work The Sacred Book of the Werewolf are two examples. This motif does not devalue the gaze towards the woman but makes it more original. It also helps to translate the idea that woman is never what she appears at first sight, that she has a double nature, that she is a mystery. Pelevine likes in Buddhism and oriental mythologies the role of the female deities rivaling the male deities but possessing more power than the latter.[4]
The fox-woman also evokes the Chinese mythology in which she is called Huli jing (in traditional Chinese: 狐狸精). In the traditional tales and legends of Japan she is called Kitsune.
She is still, in Pelevin, an immortal spirit who reincarnates into a luxury prostitute, in Moscow, for example, in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the USSR. Always precise in his details, the writer lends both human female and animal features to his heroine. She wears stiletto heels, but gives free rein to her instincts as a hen-hunter. She is asexual, without a reproductive system. But her clients are deceived mainly because she manages to suggest, in the form of a hallucination, a sexual relationship that does not take place. She is of a rare beauty, with very small breasts, because of her delicacy, the color of her hair. But its main attribute is its red tail which can become more or less large in the same way as the phallus of a man, depending on the sexual hallucination to be provoked. At times during the story, we can see androgynous characteristics in his image, but it is rather, as Isabelle Després notes, a superior form of human being that allows him to use his beauty to achieve a form of hyper sexuality. We can still see the superman of which Nietzsche speaks, realized in a woman.[5]
Victor Pelevin's most tender, simple and sad novel, devoid of acute relevance and therefore almost impervious to the current of time, according to some literary critics the best love story in his oeuvre. The relationship of the main characters - a foxy werewolf named A Huli and a "werewolf in uniform," a young FSB general - unfolds against the backdrop of a pinching impoverishment of the Russian land, the collapse of the usual (though far from flawless) way of life. Lyrical and musical (not by chance that the first edition of the book in Russia was accompanied by a disc of music tracks played in the novel) and truly touching "Holy Book of the Werewolf".[6]
The feminine principle of wisdom, of the soul of the world takes the form here of the sexual energy on which A Huli feeds to live eternally. Published in English in 2008.
The first edition of the novel in Russia was accompanied by a disc with a soundtrack of songs, which throughout the book hears the main character of the novel A Huli.[7]