The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, Houghton Mifflin, 278 pages, 2003. Tolstaya's novel, The Slynx, is a smorgasbord of dark delights. No matter what angle a reader approaches this story, they'll find something provocative to confront & challenge their thinking about narrative, genre, & storytelling. Tolstaya teases out allusions to the Bolshevik Revolution and other slivers of Russian history, toys with linguistic evolution in a dyspotic future or the “mutilation of language”; she shifts voices with disorienting effect and unleashes her titular "Slynx" as symbol of Existential Angst--among other things; she employs irony & farce with barbed ferocity as it's linked to memory & art. The novel also showcases the macabre “consequences” of rigid class stratification & retrogressive bureaucracy, recurrent citations of Russian authors, & contemplations of philosophic themes like Censorship, Authority...
Ephemeral Lacuna, Inchoate Liminality, & Phantoms of the Vox Populi: musings, ramblings, reviews, speculations, bibliographies, effusions, and full-blown cerebral hemorrhaging.