Victor Pelevin’s latest fantastical satire is an occasionally delightful mess.

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
By Victor Pelevin
Viking, September 2008; Hardcover; 336 pages; $25.95

Is there a better way to understand the contradictions of post-Soviet society than through the philosophical musings of a 2,000-year-old werefox hooker named A Hu-li (whose name translates roughly to “So fucking what?”)? If so, Pelevin — whom Time has called a “psychedelic Nabokov for the cyber age” — has already explored it in his body of fantastical satire. But he manages to squeeze a few fresh gems out of his latest premise. He’s a master of the telling dystopian detail (a platinum credit card with a Che Guevara hologram), and also of a very Slavic brand of world-weariness. A (pronounced “ah”) may be of Chinese heritage, but she’s had a good few centuries to absorb the Russian soul, and her longevity has led to an overdose of otherwise healthy cynicism. Particularly bracing is an exchange with her two fox sisters — one in Thailand, the other in England — each wondering if things might be better in a different part of the world, each answering that no world (the first, the third, or the Russian) is any more advanced. “But what point is there in these universal generalizations that end up with fifty million people getting killed every time,” A asks in one letter, more out of disgust than concern. All along, a sinister tangle of prophecies begins to bloom post-modernly. But then, the Buddhist Pelevin begins, literally, to lose the plot. As A falls in love with a gangster werewolf (they have sex with their tails while watching Wong Kar-Wai films) and puzzles over chakras and koans, the growing morass of mystical blather starts to grate. Her lover possibly attains the quasi-Nietzschian state of “super-werewolf,” which would be very interesting to watch up close, but Pelevin prefers to focus on A’s excellent Taoist adventure. All that knotted nothingness has a way of draining the tension. None of this confused spirituality is very Nabokovian, nor is it the ideal entry point for Pelevin’s work. Still, the baked parts of this half-baked novel are a pleasure.

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Hardcover) [Amazon]