Omon Ra - Softcover

Pelevin, Victor

3.9

8,790 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571177980 ISBN 13: 9780571177981

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2002

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Victor Pelevin's unforgettable first novel, Omon Ra, is the story of a young man who always dreamt of becoming the ultimate Russian hero, a cosmonaut in the mould of Yuri Gagarin. Enrolling as a cadet at the Zaraisk flying school, it is not long before he is chosen to be the sole pilot of a mission - to the dark side of the moon.

'An inventive comedy as black as outer space itself. Makes The Right Stuff look like a NASA handout.' Tibor Fischer

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Review:

A freshly jaundiced view of a distorted world.

A freshly jaundiced view of a distorted world. "

And in its final moments, about what happens when this poor boy actually finds himself rocketing toward the moon, are surely the most memorable passages I read this year.--Dwight Garner

Pelevin is a master absurdist, a brilliant satirist of all things Soviet, but also of things human: our corruptible dreams, petty squabbles, half-assed inventions and, above all, our tendency to allow the purer parts of our nature to be co-opted.

About the Author:

Born in 1962 in Moscow, Victor Pelevin has swiftly been recognised as the leading Russian novelist of the new generation. Before studying at Moscow's Gorky Institute of Literature, he worked in a number of jobs, including as an engineer on a project to protect MiG fighter planes from insect interference in tropical conditions. One of the few novelists today who writes seriously about what is happening in contemporary Russia, he has, according to the New York Times, 'the kind of mordant, astringent turn of mind that in the pre-glasnost era landed writers in psychiatric hospitals or exile'.$$$His work has been translated into fifteen languages and his novels Omon Ra, The Life of Insects, The Clay Machine-Gun and Babylon, and two collections of short stories, The Blue Lantern (winner of the Russian 'Little Booker' Prize) and A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, have been published in English to great acclaim.$$$Victor Pelevin was selected by the New Yorker as one of the best European writers under the age of thirty-five.

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