Complete review at following URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/29/AR2008102903626.html

Too Much Bark, Not Much Bite

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By Jeff VanderMeer,

who is a guest editor for "Best American Fantasy 2"
Thursday, October 30, 2008; Page C02

THE SACRED BOOK OF THE WEREWOLF

By Victor Pelevin

Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield

Viking. 335 pp. $25.95

Rough werewolf-on-werefox sex.

Were-creature philosophy that doubles as satirical content.

Plucky underage Russian prostitutes who are actually millennia-old supernatural beings.

Nonstop references to iconic authors, philosophers and pop culture.

If you enjoy having all these elements in your fiction, you'll love Victor Pelevin's "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf." The rest of us, though, might come away from this novel feeling bitten. There's something distinctly unholy going on here, something Vladimir Nabokov might have labeled "poshlost," or "philistine vulgarity," for all the times Pelevin tries to use the old butterfly collector to prop up his own words, citing everything from "Lolita" to "Ada."

[ ... ]

In an interview in the Paris Review, Nabokov defined his made-up word "poshlost" as, among other things, "Corny trash, vulgar cliches . . . imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudoliterature." Pelevin is neither crude nor moronic, but his personal Rubicon is a seeming inability to stop using others to shoulder the burden of writing his novel. Thus the reader must endure Bulgakov sightings, silly doubled-up references ("I suddenly understood that Pushkin was killed by a homonimic shadow of Dante"), and stultifying snippets of dialogue in question-answer form about various movies. Many readers will realize they are bearing witness to an odd kind of abdication of responsibility on the part of the author.

[ ... ]

Near the end of the novel, Alexander and A Hu-Li hole up in a bomb shelter, in a scene that displays much-needed tenderness. A Hu-Li says to Alexander, language is "the root from which infinite human stupidity grows. And we were-creatures suffer from it too, because we're always talking."

Ultimately "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf" fails because Pelevin just can't shut up long enough to tell his story.

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