Pelevin writes in a hallucinogenic fever and I'm not out on him completely but this was not exactly the sweet spot.

Dark, sharp and funny. This book had me laughing so hard in certain parts, and gasping in surprise at others.

Omon and his best friend Mitiok have dreamed of flying since he was a young child and as soon as the time comes, the two enlist in a flying school and soon enter a Space Program as cosmonauts where they are expected to first and foremost serve the motherland. This is used to satirize the Soviet government and mentality.

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.

This novel is a satire of the Soviet space program. Essentially, the plot is the ‘we never landed on the moon’ conspiracy theory but in the USSR. Since I’m not Russian, I’m sure there are jokes and references that I missed.

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.

[...] 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.