Puck

A novel by Victor Pelevin

A Hu-Li is at least 40,000 thousand years old. She’s also a fox in both the literal and the vernacular sense of the word—a fox who happens to be a member of a species who morphologically resemble human women. And live a long time without growing old—or even, necessarily, mature.

A Hu-Li and her sisters are sexual predators. They are, in other words, a top-level crypto-predator species that happens to feed on human sexual energy. Obviously, then, a fox’s perfect disguise is as a high-class prostitute. What better character to skewer the norms of society than the prostitute who pops the bubble of every hypocritical prick along her journey to enlightenment? A Hu-Li and her sisters are not human and don’t care about our values. A Hu-Li has her own. She’s not a liberated sex worker, she’s a predator.

An enticing one, too: she wears her years of experience with cunning wit, style, pragmatic grace and imperial wisdom—most of the time. The narrative sweet spot Pelevin has found in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and the one that powers this character-driven novel, lies in the friction between A Hu-Li’s human enculturation and her animal instincts, a friction awash in a superseding assumption: all beings are searching for the levels of their souls. A Hu-Li manages to remain a haughty bitch while purporting a profoundly leveling philosophy. Read the rest of this entry »

According to an article in The Washington Post, the Centers for Disease Control has advised that all women “between first menstrual period and menopause” treat themselves as “pre-pregnant.” Pre-pregnant women “should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.” The U.S. has one of the highest infant-mortality rates of any industrialized country. But “forever pregnant,” as the Post’s title quips? Mother Jones notes “the incredibly offensive implication that all women are nothing more than incubators who should remain healthy not because it’s good for them, but because it makes for healthier babies. And note that even though the report’s first recommendation is that ‘each woman, man and couple should be encouraged to have a reproductive life plan,’ it never calls on the government to encourage contraceptive use. Which is, uh, pretty important for family planning.” And check out this June 7 article by Sunsara Taylor, “A Handmaid’s Tale”–from real life.