Book details

Kangaroo

Author: Yuz Aleshkovsky; Translated by Tamara Glenny

Kangaroo

Kangaroo

$11.99

e-Book

About This Book

Kangaroo is a savage, cleansing satire in which Yuz Aleshkovsky confronts the hypocrisy, the cruelty, and the tragic failure of the Soviet regime. His phantasmagoria is faithful...

Page Count
300
On Sale
04/01/1986

Book Details

Kangaroo is a savage, cleansing satire in which Yuz Aleshkovsky confronts the hypocrisy, the cruelty, and the tragic failure of the Soviet regime. His phantasmagoria is faithful to reality, for--as Dostoevsky knew--it is impossible for "realism" to portray a society whose corruption is literally fantastic.

One morning in 1949, Fan Fanych, alias Etcetera, is summoned from his Moscow apartment to KGB headquarters, where he is informed that he will be charged with a crime more heinous than any mere man could ever devise. Comrade Etcetera will be tried for "the vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789, and January 9, 1905."

Every moment in the nightmarish and hilarious account that follows lives up to the absurdity of this accusation. A seductive KGB agent attempts to convince Fan Fanych that he is a kangaroo; he finds himself in the dock at a spectacular show trial; is sent to a camp full of dedicated old Bolsheviks pathetically attempting to maintain their beliefs in the face of every new atrocity; encounters Hitler in Berlin and Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta, where he is privileged to witness the famous conference as it was really conducted.

Imprint Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN

9781466807990

In The News

"'Kangaroo,''' which Mr. Aleshkovsky completed in 1975, will be called an absurdist satire by many, but anyone who has read Mandelstam and the others will know that it is in truth a realistic novel about the prison world that straddles the vast land between Leningrad and Vladivostok." - The New York Times

About the Creators

Kangaroo

Kangaroo

$11.99

e-Book