V is for vampire; according to Victor Pelevin, satirical chronicler of post-Soviet Russia, vampires run everything - pretty smoothly, really - and have done for all of history. We discover the vampire world through the eyes of a young, contemporary Russian man who gets envamped right at the start, and spends the rest of the book progressing through multiple levels of revelation about his new world, and what vampires actually feed on. Blood? No, use the euphemism "red liquid"; no, it's money actually; no...

Pelevin was much more fun in the 1990s than in this 2006 novel (translated and published in English in 2016). I get the impression that he had to be more careful about whom he mocks in Putin's Russia. Mikhail Khodorkovsky's downfall is referenced once or twice, but not the big man. Maybe that's why this book feels sadly claustrophobic to me, as it leads us to a vision of a sealed, airless universe of vampirism.

Worth reading for the Pelevin fan, lots of good bits here, but for the newcomer to this author I recommend [The Sacred Book of the Werewolf] for an earlier, lighter work. ( )

A very unique interpretation of the vampire mythology from Pelevin. Imagine a world where vampires feed on not blood but the essence of money... A great satire of the modern russian (and generally human) society... ( )

Das erste Kapitel liest sich sehr interessant. Ein Mann liest eine kryptische Anzeige und sucht einen Treffpunikt auf, um dort zum Vampir initiiert zu werden. Was dann beginnt, hat mit herkömmlichen Vampirgeschichten allerdings herzlich wenig zu tun. Auf den folgenden 100 Seiten Vampir-Unterricht hätte ich fast schon aufgegeben, dann wurde es wieder etwas spannender, nur um sofort wieder in gesellschaftspolitisch-existentialistische und reichlich krude Debatten zu münden. Nach 200 Seiten habe ich aufgegeben - sorry, maybe for somebody, but not for me! ( )

Купила Лена в Калининграде