Omon Ra. (Red Star).(Review)

Omon Ra By Victor Pelevin, translated by Andrew Bromfield, 1992

There's a rich strain of the absurd in Russian literature--which is appropriate, given the host of absurdities the Russian people have had to endure. What makes that nation's surreal canon special is its universal resonance, even when it responds to the more specific inanities of local regimes--be they Czarist, Bolshevik, or the present coalition of native kleptocrats and Harvard-trained advisers.

So it is with Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra, a satire of the Soviet space program that seems, by the book's conclusion, to have hit a much larger target. Written in 1992, when the USSR was still a fresh memory, Pelevin's novel invokes a world in which Soviet technology was an enormous fraud. The titular hero volunteers to be a cosmonaut, only to learn that this will mean secretly serving as the pilot of a supposedly unmanned high-tech space probe. Omon's role is to steer the moon rover, a vehicle covered with complex mechanical apparatus whose only purpose is to camouflage the fact that the rover is actually a modified bicycle. Once he has completed his mission, Omon is supposed to shoot himself, leaving his corpse on the moon, unknown to the world.

The book is a corrosive assault on those who would sacrifice human lives for a propaganda coup on behalf of "national greatness"--and not just in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the book's wittiest and most disturbing sequence features a key cameo by Henry Kissinger.

As the book progresses, it grows more delirious, with turns toward reincarnation, secret underground tunnels, and even a "Marxist theory of the moon." This rather non-materialist thesis holds that the earth once had five moons, with all but one falling from orbit over a period of centuries. "The fall of each of the moons has been accompanied by social ...