The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

De: Victor Pelevin

Narrado por: Cassandra Campbell

A. Huli, beautiful and curiously foxlike, has the appearance of a luscious 14-year-old girl, the mind of a sly Buddhist monk, and an endearing habit of name-dropping all the famous people she's met over the past 2,000 years. She works as a classy prostitute in Moscow's premier hotels, until one client goes inexplicably and fatally berserk at the sight of her and she has to leave in a hurry.

Forced to advertise on the Internet, she comes to the attention of an intelligence officer who also happens to be a werewolf.

Victor Pelevin's new work of fiction is both a supernatural love story and an outrageously funny satirical portrait of modern Russia. With all his characteristic humor and metaphysical ambition, Pelevin introduces us to an unforgettable cast of perverts, former KGB agents, oil tycoons, and amorous werewolves.

Translated by Andrew Bromfield.

©2005 Victor Pelvin; 2008 Andrew Bromfield (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Strange, frenetic and beguiling....Victor Pelevin (is) one of the most exciting writers to emerge from new Russia." ( The Guardian, London)
"Full of tour de force passages, and full of sex, the novel yet succeeds in not being one of those showy, sexy, cold-hearted books. The fantasy is fueled by passion, the humor by grief." (Ursula K. Le Guin)
"Pelevin belongs to one strand of the great Russian tradition that goes back as far as Gogol and Dostoevesky, in which metaphysical locutions about the mystery of existence clash with the grotesque banalities of life as it is actually lived." ( New York Times Book Review)

Victor Pelevin has written better books than this.

The problem with this book ISN'T that people want a titillating fantasy story and got a long philosophical text instead, those people are just uninformed consumers and their opinions are garbage. Do a quick Google search before you make a purchase, how hard can that be?

The problem with this book is that everything is delivered from the narrator's perspective, and Pelevin indulges far, FAR too much exposition and philosophizing. Having the narrator go on tangents explaining the rules of these fantasy creatures, or over-philosophizing about Daoist concepts gets obnoxious fast, in the way he writes the narrator's conversational voice addressing the audience. As far as my disappointment with the book, a quick bout of research on Google shows that this book is somehow well liked amongst people that like Pelevin, which I find baffling.

Homo Zapiens is better.

If possible, Audible needs to produce an audiobook of Homo Zapiens or Omon Ra, etc. I would enjoy those in a heartbeat.

Cassandra Campbell was alright, I have no intention to criticize her work. She seems to have played to the text exceptionally well, but I don't like the text so it's hard to separate her work as a narrator and be completely fair.

boring

very slow, cliched, I tried to lision to it but had to give up after 3 hr. It was missing so much to give it life.

Entertaining but to what end?

It's really interesting to see what people in other countries are reading. I realize we get a skewed perception because of what gets selected to market outside the home country. But what else can you do? It's also interesting when that foreign book taps into genres and themes already popular in the US. The trend of stories dealing with supernatural creatures coexisting with humans seems to be running rampant. But where did it originate? Is it all just part of a larger zeitgeist? And what does it all mean? In this book, I always felt there were a lot of in-references that I would have understood better if I'd been Russian. At the same time, I felt like I was being treated to a more intimate idea of what contemporary Russia is like than I would get from the news or any non-fiction analysis. It's a good story with intriguing characters. Pelevin has a great imagination and he has worked out a lot of details to make his parallel universe work.

I can’t deal with that awful fake Russian accent

This Russian accent that the narrator is doing is terrible, distracting and completely unnecessary. Ruins the whole experience.

All the classic pitfalls of a man writing a woman.

I've discussed this book with Russian friends who confirm this author has become progressively more misogynistic as time goes on. They say this is one of his less offensive works. He falls into all the classic pitfalls of a man writing a female character. He even punishes her with r^pe. It just dawned on me the misogynist wrote for himself a race of women physiologically incapable of orgasm. That's low key hilarious