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A review by hux
Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin
3.0
A bildungsroman novel about a young Soviet boy named Omon Ra who has dreams of becoming a cosmonaut. He meets a fellow space obsessed boy called Mitiok and together they bond over their shared ambitions and interests. As the story goes along, they both attend an academy for cosmonauts and begin their training for a mission to the moon.
I was enjoying the book is as a rather straight-forward story about a boy's dreams coming true amid a satirical landscape of soviet incompetence. But as it builds, there is a sense of the bizarre and surreal, culminating in an experience at the reincarnation test which results in (what appears to be) a drug induced rant form Mitiok where he reveals that, among other things, he was a Nazi in a past life. From here on in, the strangeness continues and the increasing sense of uncertainty is palpable as Omon Ra prepares for the final stages of the moon mission where he (and a handful of others) will have a leading part. All the while you can sense a blind devotion to the cause and a bleak, over romanticised craving for the heroic.
The ending contains what most certainly would be described as a twist but which was not entirely unexpected. It's the manner in which it's presented that gives it more impact, the stark, almost blunt conclusion leaving a bad taste in the mouth. Perhaps a metaphor for the magic bean socialist experiment gone wrong that the USSR so strongly represents.
I was enjoying the book is as a rather straight-forward story about a boy's dreams coming true amid a satirical landscape of soviet incompetence. But as it builds, there is a sense of the bizarre and surreal, culminating in an experience at the reincarnation test which results in (what appears to be) a drug induced rant form Mitiok where he reveals that, among other things, he was a Nazi in a past life. From here on in, the strangeness continues and the increasing sense of uncertainty is palpable as Omon Ra prepares for the final stages of the moon mission where he (and a handful of others) will have a leading part. All the while you can sense a blind devotion to the cause and a bleak, over romanticised craving for the heroic.
The ending contains what most certainly would be described as a twist but which was not entirely unexpected. It's the manner in which it's presented that gives it more impact, the stark, almost blunt conclusion leaving a bad taste in the mouth. Perhaps a metaphor for the magic bean socialist experiment gone wrong that the USSR so strongly represents.