Kangaroo

By Yuz Aleshkovsky

Book Overview

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: "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. Along the way, Fanych runs into seductive KGB agent (who's bent on convincing Fanych that he's a kangaroo), a camp full of old Bolsheviks desperately trying to believe in ruined revolutionary hopes, Adolf Hitler, and all three parties at the Yalta Conference (which didn't, as it turns out, go quite like we've been told). And all this phantasmagoria is faithful to reality, for--as Dostoevsky knew--it is impossible for realism to portray a society whose corruption is literally fantastic.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564782166
• ISBN13: 9781564782168
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 278 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.5"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

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.