Author(s): Victor Pelevin

Novel | Humour & Satire | Russia | Translated fiction | New Directions

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

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.

Omon Ra is a pointed, dead-on-satire of the now-defunct Soviet space program, and a moving account of a cosmonaut's coming-of-age. The story is told in the beguiling voice of its young protagonist, Omon Ra, whose odd name combines a term for the Soviet special forces with the name of the sun god in Egyptian mythology. Ever since he was a boy, Omon has dreamed of flying in space. He enrolls in a training program for cosmonauts, only to learn that his first assignment will also be his last. For although the Soviet space program claims to carry out its missions with unmanned rockets, its scientists haven't yet mastered the necessary technology; so Omon is to drive a supposedly unmanned landing vehicle across the moon's surface, put in place a device that will emit the words of Lenin into space, and then remain on the moon, abandoned, until he dies. The voyage that results combines the absurdity of Soviet protocol with the wonder and pathos of space flight. As told in Pelevin's artful prose, the story of Omon's ill-fated trip to the moon has the nimbleness and buoyancy of the best contemporary Western fiction as well as the sting of great Russian satire.

Victor Pelevin's novel Omon Ra has been widely praised for its poetry and its wickedness, a novel in line with the great works of Gogol and Bulgakov: "full of the ridiculous and the sublime," says The Observer [London]. The New Yorker proclaimed: "Omon's adventure is like a rocket firing off its various stages-each incident is more jolting and propulsively absurd than the one before."

Review: "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 - New York Newsday
"A freshly jaundiced view of a distorted world." -- The New York Times
"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." -- Spin

Author Biography: Victor Pelevin is one of Russia's most successful post-Soviet writers. He won the Russian Booker prize in 1993 Born on November 22, 1962 in Moscow, he attended the Moscow Institute of Power Engineering, and the Institute of Literature. He's now been published throughout Europe. His books include A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, Omon Ra, The Blue Lantern, The Yellow Arrow, and The Hall of the Singing Caryatids. Born in Yorkshire, England, Andrew Bromfield is a translator of Russian literature and an editor and co-founder of the literary journal Glas.