Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by buddhafish
Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin
4.0
115th book of 2023.
A great, short read. It's humorous in a sly way, surreal and a little terrifying. Omon (pronounced, I hear, as 'Amon') dreams of being a cosmonaut as a young boy. That slowly becomes a reality as he joins a Soviet space program. Naturally, it's deeper than that. Before joining, others are required to have their feet amputated in honour of an old Soviet hero who lost his legs. Pelevin writes with great beauty, capturing Omon's loneliness and confusion throughout the novel. There's a plot-twist of sorts at the end so I can't discuss the plot so much but I can say that there's no reason not to read this bizarre and well-written little book at just 150 pages or so. It did remind me a bit of Sorokin, which was how I got here in the first place. Plus bonus points for the random conversation two characters have about Pink Floyd and talking about one of my favourite PF songs, Echoes.
A great, short read. It's humorous in a sly way, surreal and a little terrifying. Omon (pronounced, I hear, as 'Amon') dreams of being a cosmonaut as a young boy. That slowly becomes a reality as he joins a Soviet space program. Naturally, it's deeper than that. Before joining, others are required to have their feet amputated in honour of an old Soviet hero who lost his legs. Pelevin writes with great beauty, capturing Omon's loneliness and confusion throughout the novel. There's a plot-twist of sorts at the end so I can't discuss the plot so much but I can say that there's no reason not to read this bizarre and well-written little book at just 150 pages or so. It did remind me a bit of Sorokin, which was how I got here in the first place. Plus bonus points for the random conversation two characters have about Pink Floyd and talking about one of my favourite PF songs, Echoes.
[...] we don't know anything about stars, except their life is terrible and senseless, since all their movements through space are predetermined and subject to the laws of mechanics, which leave no hope at all for any chance encounters. But then, I thought, even though we human beings always seem to be meeting each other, and laughing, and slapping each other on the shoulder, and saying goodbye, there's still a certain special dimension into which our consciousness sometimes takes a frightened peep, a dimension in which we also hang quite motionless in a void where there's no up or down, no yesterday or tomorrow, no hope of drawing closer to each other or even exercising our will and changing our fate; we judge what happens to others from the deceptive twinkling light that reaches us, and we spend all our lives journeying towards what we call the light, although its source may have ceased to exist long ago.