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The Sacred Book of the Werewolf: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Victor Pelevin
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 91451
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.4
ISBN: 0670019887
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.7344
EAN: 9780670019885
ASIN: 0670019887
Publication Date: September 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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 psychedelic Nabokov for the cyberage. Pelevins new novel, his first in six years, is both a supernatural love story and a satirical portrait of modern Russia. It concerns the adventures of a hardworking fifteen-year-old Moscow prostitute named A. Huli, who in reality is a two thousand-year-old were-fox who seduces men in order to absorb their life force; she does this by means of her tail, a hypnotic organ that puts men into a trance in which they dream they are having sex with her. A. Huli eventually comes to the attention of and falls in love with a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer named Alexander, who is also a werewolf (unbeknownst to our heroine). And that is only the beginning of the fun. A huge success in Russia, this is a stunning and ingenious work of the imagination, arguably Pelevins sharpest and most engrossing novel to date.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
A Meaty Read January 5, 2009
A love story that formulates into a personal velocity. A book told from the female, were-fox perspective. A unique supernatural world developed with strong philosophical exploration.
What I liked....
Fantastic lines like "...a man's weak spot is the fantasies that fill his mind." So much of this story made me stop and really focus on the meaning of what was being transcribed. The philosophical points of view can be followed easily with this main character. I can argue with most of them, but I was really just trying to enjoy the story.
The funny sexual inuendos kept the sometimes meaty reading light. I loved the idea of the two main characters hypnotically enjoying the comforts of one another with intertwined tails while adding subjective roll playing from any other movie except porn.
What I hated....
The Russian political references that seemed endlessly boring, lost in a story that centers around love and self fulfillment. I love a good ending but this one was sadly off key.
Ingenious combination of philosophy, metaphysical speculation, mysticism and fantastic fiction December 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A Hu-Li is a Chinese werefox, in appearance like a young girl, but in reality nearly two thousand years old, with a hidden magical tail she can use to project fantasies into the minds of those around her. For centuries, she has lived in Russia as a prostitute, using her tail to provide her clients with a Lolita-like fantasy while she feeds upon their sexual energy. She has, herself, never really loved or been loved - until she meets a werewolf who allows her to discover something about herself she'd never discovered on her own.
The story itself is quite fun and intriguing but that's only the half of it. A Hu-Li is seeking enlightenment, is steeped in Buddhist traditions and in literature and philosophy, and her story is as much about ideas as it is exciting. Pelevin's wittiness does not all translate (the name of the heroine, "A Hu-Li" may seem Chinese, but, apparently, in Russian sounds strikingly similar to a bit of crass Russian slang), but his playful tone throughout, his numerous casually insightful reflections on contemporary life and literature and politics and art are unmistakeable and enjoyable. The story works as an allegory of contemporary Russian consumerism, an engaging meditation on the nature of sex and gender, on the relation between the human and the animal in all of us, and a complex reflection on the nature of experience and reality. If that sounds heady and boring, it's not. It's a lot of fun, and the comparisons with Murakami (and others like Saramago and Phillip K. Dick) are quite apt. Definitely worth checking out for those who like inventive speculative fiction and fantasy.
 Oh, how I wanted to like this one December 9, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The present text, which is also known under the title of 'A Hu-Li' is in fact a clumsy literary forgery".
So begins "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf", in a faux 'Commentary by Experts', which goes on to describe the strange events surrounding the discovery of the present manuscript, and to place a rather official sounding stamp of worthlessness on the whole business. This short introduction was all I had time to read in the bookstore, but it set its claws in me, and I ordered the book through Amazon, prepared for a post-modern romp (or perhaps lope) through Russia and the mind of Victor Pelevin.
I've been behind the Pelevin curve, apparently - it's only recently that I even heard of him. It was my Dad, over Thanksgiving, that clued me in by recounting the events in Buddha's Little Finger, and had me laughing out loud while he did it. I decided I'd get out in front of the crowd with 'Werewolf', and catch up with the rest of Pelevin's catalog later.
For a relatively short book, it's difficult to disect 'The Sacred Book of the Werewolf', as Pelevin has crammed a lot of thought in here. Perhaps the easiest to name, but not necessarily the easiest to digest, is his illustration of transcendence, and how the main character, A Hu-Li searches for an end to the world of woe as she comprehends it. But Pelevin is looking for other types of transcendence beside the personal. He's also urging Russia herself to rise out of its fallen status among nations, to leave off syphoning her life blood in the form of oil, and to tell the West to take a hike. Before that can happen though, the people will have to rise too, and find a way to interupt the parasitic feeding of the authorities (apparat, or upper rat), and business (oligarchy, or oil and gargle) on each other and on the natural resources of the country.
I wonder though, if Pelevin's biggest gambit with this book is his argument against the usefulness of language - which could be a post-modern practical joke, or a truly frustrated author hemmed in by the limited effectiveness of words. For example, the name of the main character; she was named well before the Russian language even existed, but in time, A Hu-Li came to mean, more or less, 'So F***ing What'. As a reader, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from this. Is Pelevin angry, defeated, or just having fun?
Throughout the course of the book, there is a dedicated sniping at language and the inherent problems of approximations (words) standing in for the truths they so poorly represent. I agree with Pelevin in this case, and I think that using the framework of a novel to elicit the truths involved in a spiritual evolution that, by its very nature, cannot be defined is a bold undertaking. Except by the time we reach the last quarter of the novel, where the author gets to the heart of the matter, he must resort to extremely elliptical explanations. If we pay attention, we are rewarded with the key to transcendence, though I thought the _key_ somewhat cliched.
This is a layered novel, with page after page of nuanced references that underpin Pelevin's viewpoints almost subconsciously, and support his arguments like the microscopic minutiae the police collect when preparing a murder case. That element of the writing is a rich vein, to be mined again and again. However, his characters are merely mouthpieces for the expository question and answer periods he has to use throughout the book to get his ideas across, or else they are impersonal archtypes and symbols. This is Pelevin's greatest flaw, and it undermines the novel's ability to communicate the unknowable by destroying the willfull suspension of disbelief. That's fatal for a book full of werewolves and werefoxes.
One more note: The protagonist is prostitute that appears to be a young teen. Pelevin dips into this lifestyle too deeply in my opinion, and some of the details he brings up seem needless and tasteless to me. Perhaps they serve some ulterior purpose, but if so, I missed it the first time around. I nearly laid the book down in the beginning because of it, but I eventually stuck around because I was interested his explication of Buddhist teaching.
I still am. Even though I thought this book had major flaws, I look forward to trying more by this challenging author.
"Finally, and above all, my dear friends, may there always be room in your lives for a song of joy!"
 The Meaning of Life* (if you are a werefox) December 5, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
The book of the super-werewolf November 24, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The Sacred Book of the Werewolf" is one of those rare books that truly and completely defies classifiation.
Rather than a straightforward fiction or genre story, Victor Pelevin's symbolism-crammed book hops from one style to another -- Eastern mysticism, Russian urban fantasy, inhuman love story, wildly funny satire and postmodern exploration of Russia's place in a post-Soviet world. Despite the wealth of symbolism and a heavy dose of Buddhist philosophy woven in,, it's not stuffy or boring -- instead it's a wickedly funny personal journey that slowly slips into a bittersweet pathos as our shapechanging heroine learns some truths of the universe.
A Hua-li is a werefox -- an ancient, genderless creature with a hypnotic tail, a currently obscene name, who feeds off the energy emanated by humans during sex. She's also a virgin, and is starting to get an "old maid complex."
And to stay energized, she works as a prostitute in Russia -- she doesn't have actual sex with her clients, but manipulates them with her tail. But after some disastrous encounters, she finds herself being investigated by the Russian authorities -- and particularly by the handsome Alexander, a werewolf who transforms and molests A Hua-li. She's shocked but captivated by the young werewolf, and soon they're in the middle of a passionate affair. Yeah, great message to be sending.
The subject of the super-werewolf prophecy comes up when A Hua-Li's older sister and her flaky English aristocrat hubby come for a visit, with said hubby intent on becoming the super-werewolf himself. And A Hua-Li sees the werewolves being used to call oil from a dry well. But when a shocking change comes over her werewolf paramour, A Hua-Li must reexamine their relationship as she keeps her lover safe -- and reveal what the prophecy of the super-werewolf truly means.
Buddhism, wereanimals, aristocrat/chicken-hunting, mass media, Rainbow Streams, Nabokov, DVD sex games and hypnotic tails who contain all the truth of the universe. Victor Pelevin has a knack for bizarre postmodern fiction that is rarely seen outside a Haruki Murakami book -- and "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf" is like a brightly coloured mosaic of randomly sized and shaped pieces, which nevertheless manage to fit together. It's a weird and sometimes confusing ride, but somehow it all clicks at the end.
Along that ride, we're privy to A Hua-Li's intricate meditations on everything from sex to watermelons -- often described in carefully numbered lists. Pelevin fills his meandering storyline with literary allusions (hello, Nabokov!) and infuses it with plenty of wry humour ("We foxes are keen hunters of English aristocrats and chickens"). There's even a hilarious scene where Alexander and A Hua-Li contemplate what DVD movies they should play out as their sex games ("Listen, how old are you, twelve?" "Okay, let's forget the Matrix").
Yet he has a knack for hauntingly memorable scenes as well. Any creature as ancient as A Hua-li will have a sense of bittersweetness in their life, and her view of her lover's shocking transformation and his subsequent fear and confusion are striking. And as the book winds toward its esoteric end, Pelevin unrolls a heavy swathe of Buddhist philosophy that finally explains who/what the super-werewolf is, and what the prophecy means. Let's just say that it's not your average "chosen savior of Group X" prophecy.
And modern Russia, as Pelevin paints it, is all grimy cold urbanity speckled with American products and foreign businessmen. He injects a lot of symbolism (Alexander, the oil well, the super-werewolf, the hypnotic tails that can reveal the true nature of things) as well as a mocking satirical edge (a doomed aristocrat's nonsensical ramblings about how HE can become the super-werewolf without any enlightenment).
The one thing I didn't like? A Hua-li being raped by Alexander and immediately falling for him.
But A Hua-Li is a pretty oxymoronic character -- she can be ruthless and manipulative yet loving and sweet, has the enthusiasm of the young nymphet she pretends to be yet is ancient and experienced beyond even her own measure. And Alexander is her total opposite -- rough, brash, traditional yet modern, and possessing a straightforward mind that struggles with the more unusual spiritual paths of the "super-werewolf." And then there's A Hua-Li's sister -- merciless and wickedly funny, especially since she marries British aristos in order to "hunt" them.
"The Sacred Book of the Werewolf" is a bizarre crazy-quilt of genres -- a sort of symbolic Buddhist urban-fantasy satire, with a mingling of bittersweet and hilarious. Definitely a memorable read.
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