Translated material
The literature of the new anxiety. Dmitry Bykov* reads modern fantasy
Why read bad literature about a bad life? Why was the most infantile genre of world literature the most sensitive? What does fantasy have in common with socialist realism and why do the heroes of Tolkien resemble Soviet party organizations? What are Rebecca Kuang, Ty John Skalzi, Yuan Kim and Rebecca Written about? And who is it at all? Meet: Dmitry Bykov Meets Modern Fantasy.
I never loved fantasy, but I must admit that it was this genre that pleasantly surprised me this year. There is such immediacy in it that is always inherent in stupidity (according to the long -standing definition of Sergei Pereslegin, fantasy must not be stupid, but has an increased chance of this). So, after all, poetry, according to Pushkin, should be stupid, but not foolish, the devilish difference, namely, is simple, musical, direct, free from the tripped minds. It was the fantasy that expressed the main feature of a modern person today, namely, loss.
The dominant genre was the description of the flight, the dominant landscape - a post -apocalyptic landfill.
On August 26, Katabasis will go out of the press-a new, sixth in a row, a novel of 29-year-old Rebecca Kuang (“Opium Wars”, “Babylon”), baking texts like pancakes, but very high quality. This recent student, an American Chinese woman, at one of the creative meetings (which I devotedly visited) promised to make every next book as much as possible to the previous one. Judging by the first reviews of those who read, “Katabasis” is an extremely gloomy and alarming wandering, and also according to the kingdom of the dead, not after a nuclear war, but after a descent to hell of the romantic couple of the main characters of Alice and St. Petersburg. They have to go down to Hades for almost the same purpose as once the Odyssey: he needed a prophecy from Tiresia, and they-a letter of recommendation and useful connections of the deceased scientific director.
The descent to hell is a detailed metaphor, since Alice suffers from chronic depression and falls into hellish abysses regularly, and in addition it is oppressed by universal misogynia. I will give it separately, I will write about this book - after Babylon, almost the most bizarre novel about the being and power of the language, Koang must be followed intently. But the fact that the genre of depressive wandering in the posthumous space begins to most adequately reflect reality is understandable now. And the most naive, we express this so, the genre coped with this challenge most honest. I must joyfully notice that I guessed about fleeing as the dominant plot of the twenties at the end of the tenths, but for this there is no need to be seven spans in the forehead.
Rebecca Kuang
No, traditional novels about princesses and fairy -tale empires, star wars and dragons, warlike clans and court intrigues dating back to school textbooks of medieval history, continue to go out and even make a swing, but they no longer do the weather. Rebecca Yarosos with his empire pentalogs continues to remain on the lists of bestsellers, her novel “The Fourth Wing” combines all the stamps of two main directions at once - the Saga about the education of a potential outcast in a magical school and a fighting tale about the riders. Its language is the synthesis of teenage jargon and a pompous military saga, which is based on the win -win plot “The heyday of the ugly”. From my point of view, the “onyx storm”, this year, the romance from the Empires cycle this year is an apotheosis of bitterness, but this is exactly what a certain category of readers should be: they themselves are in such a continuous internal anxiety that any novelty will be deadly for them.
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