^1 > H * I z * I < H ^ I HH QH I OI and werefoxes are hunting English aristocrats. This "double-decker" novel combines the mythologi cal realms of Chinese and Russian fairy tales,Nordic sagas, and Bud dhist symbolswith a grotesque and gloomy picture of modern Russia. Right-wing liberals metamorphose into FSB agents; FSB officers into werewolves; and the power struc tures ("apparat") and business com munity ("oligarchy") merge and form an ouroboros?not in the tradi tional form of a snake, however, but rather an "immense, fat rat trying to swallow itself."The Western world is also liable tometamorphosis, the wonderful surreality of a commer cial advertisement turning into a black hole in reality. What is leftof reality after all these metamorphoses? An insub stantial play of reflections?Eternal, all-penetrating nothingness? Or the very process of strivingforthe truth, an act of comprehending it"over and over again, second after second, con tinuously"? In the fox's conscious ness, all objects and phenomena, be they aspects of physical reality, Stephen Hawking's astrophysical theory, or Stephen King's thriller plots, assume the formof Buddhist symbols. At the end of the novel, the fox jumps from a bike ramp in Bitsevsky Park to enter theNirvanic Rainbow Stream and disappears. Yet thebook lives on and keeps impress ing the reader not only because of its dense interweaving of allusions and borrowings (theusual food for liter ary scholars), cliches of mass culture, and "pop-metaphysics." It is,more over, the ironic revelation of the con ventionality of cliches and common sense truthsthat impartsa largepart of the pleasure in Pelevin's books. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf is an unreal story made real,which, in the writer's own opinion expressed in his 1991 interviewwith Sally Laird, is a quintessential quality of "real" literature. Marina Grishakova UniversityofTartu Yves Ravey. Bambi Bar. Paris. Minuit. 2008. 91 pages. 9.80. isbn 978-2 7073-2028-5 Yves Ravey practices a stripped down, brief version of the contempo rarynovel, one in which theprinciple ofnarrative economy isdeployed in an effort to heighten the pungency of fiction.In termsof itsform, his lat est book is no exception: its eighty odd, sparsely furnishedpages testify to a minimalist aesthetic on Ravey's part. Yet on the level of thematics, those pages invoke a problem that is very complex indeed, one that is currently a burning issue both in France and inEurope ingeneral: the sexual exploitation of impoverished populations bywealthy ones. Ravey approaches thatquestion obliquely in the opening portion of his novel, putting on stage a shad owy figure named Leon Rebernak. He is a foreignerwith regard to the culture inwhich he resides, a marginal being, a loner.When he is interrogated by the police with regard to a traffic accident, it gradu ally becomes apparent thatmore weighty moral crimes are on the horizon, and itisdifficultto imagine Rebernak on the side of theangels. It is onlywhen the truevillains make their appearance, along with their victims, that Rebernak's equivo cal status is resolved; and at that moment, too, thequest upon which he is launched becomes clear. In the tale thathe tells,Ravey wagers on classic themes: power in its various and competing shapes (state power, economic power, fam ily power, sexual power), honor, vengeance, and the righting of wrong. As his narrative develops, its intrigue becomes progressively more ineluctable, jettisoning nuance along theway in order to progress more efficiently toward its goal. It becomes more familiar, too, exploit ing the conventions of popular genres like the adventure novel and the thriller. Clearly, Ravey isplaying on the boundaries of "serious" fic tionand thepotboiler, as domany of his contemporaries. Yet that game is notwithout itsdangers, chiefamong them being the danger of carica ture. The moral questions that Yves Ravey invokes inBambi Bar are both profound and profoundly slippery, after all?and they undoubtedly deserve a bit more reflection than theauthor affords themhere. Warren Motte UniversityofColorado Salman Rushdie.The Enchantress of Florence. New York. Random House. 2008. 355 pages. $26. isbn978-0-375 50433-4 The importance of stories in our lives has always been a central part of the power of Salman Rushdie's writing. Storytelling, Rushdie has argued in many places, is what makes us human; it is essential to our nature. Rushdie's tenth novel, The Enchantress of Florence, reexam ines the function of stories, as well as the significance of the storyteller, in what ishis firstattempt at histori cal fiction. The Enchantress of Florence is an intricately woven narrative that takesplace in sixteenth-centuryItaly and India. The scenes are neither European nor Indian, just as the characters are not quite historically accurate, nor would we want them tobe. It is at best awonder of inter textual thought, and, at worst, a im.i.miiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiimmiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiM .iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiini.iim^H 70 1 World Literature Today ...