Kangaroo

By Yuz Aleshkovsky

Book Overview

Charged by the KGB in 1949 with an unusual rape and murder, Fan Fanych--alias Etcetera--enters a world of increasingly nightmarish adventures that take him to Siberia, Berlin, and Yalta.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374180687
• ISBN13: 9780374180683
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Length: 278 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Absurd and Hillarious!

An absurdist farce about the life of Fan Fanych, alias Etcetera; a thief in Stalinist Russia who is sent to the gulags for the supposed crime of raping an aging kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo. Narrated by the same criminal shortly after his release it begins with an elaborate interrogation and show trial where the prisoner begins to doubt his own memory. Followed by many years in the camps with a cohort of early Bolsheviks and his reminiscing of earlier escapades (Picking Hitler's pocket, and eavesdropping at Yalta, etc.)Yes, this is another story of a russian writer who has suffered through the senseless paranoia of Stalin's judicial system, yet the writing is original and the dialogue crude: I kept thinking of a Kathy Acker novel. The whole carries you along and definitely makes this an interesting companion to Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, etc.