The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

I figured I would enjoy a literary novel about werewolves, but almost from the start Victor Pelevin's The Sacred Book of the Werewolf was a disappointment. Not because it isn't a horror novel, although I'm sure many who pick up the book will be let down that not one throat is ripped out by incisors, but that it reads like a grad student's thesis on a jumble of philosophy and religion that in the end doesn't add to up to anything.

Our narrator is A Hu-Li, who is a Chinese werefox over two-thousand years old. She is currently taking the form of a teenage prostitute in Moscow, although she doesn't have sex with her clients--instead she is able to hypnotize them into thinking they do. How does she do this? With her tail, of course. She meets her match when she whips out her tail for Alexander, an officer in the Russian secret police, who not only doesn't get hypnotized but displays that he can turn into a wolf. A romance is born.

Much of the problem I had with this book may be with the translation by Andrew Bromfield, although he may have had a Herculean task, as much of the writing is a mixture of languages. To start with, A Hu-Li tells us that her name in Russian is a swear word, but I'm sure that works much better with someone who actually speaks Russian. The syntax of the book sometimes doesn't feel right (at one point Alexander says, getting out of a car, "Out we get.") I was never quite sure what was going on, and there is no real plot to the book.

Much of the book is dialogue, with A Hu-Li showing off her intellect, which is supposed to be considerable but instead comes off as someone trying to pass for wise. She mentions things like Kant's categorical imperative and the films of Wong Kar-Wai, but then will make allusions to such low-culture detritus as Moonraker (probably the worst James Bond film) and the film version of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. I just can't believe a two-thousand-year-old shapeshifter would waste their time with bad movies.

Still, Pelevin displays some creativity. A Hu-Li and Alexander have sex by joining their tails while watching movies, which has the effect of inserting them into the movie, I guess kind of like Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Junior, but with erotica. Human beings, which are referred to in the book as "tailless monkeys," will never be able to experience that sort of thing. Pity, it sounds like fun.