Blast off with a Soviet cosmonaut who is informed he has been chosen for a one-way trip to the moon. Hey, can you blame the CCCP for wanting to reclaim the international spotlight as king of the hill in the space race? After all, the Soviet Union's space program boasted a batch of breathtaking breakthroughs:
1957 - Sputnik, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth (a beep, beep, beep, by the way, that sacred the living bejesus out of the US);
1959 and thereafter - Nine different probes of the Moon, including close up photos of the dark side and returning to earth with soil samples;
1960 - First animals (two dogs) orbit the Earth;
1961 - Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first person to orbit the Earth;
1963, - Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, orbits the Earth for three days;
1965 - Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov is first person to free-float in space. He famously reported that he felt "like a seagull with its wings outstretched, soaring high above the Earth.”
But then it happened: stinking Americans claim their own breakthrough in 1969 when Neil Armstrong became the very first person to walk on the Moon. And arrogant bastards that they are, those capitalist pigs even had the gall to leave an American flag on the Moon as the ultimate slap in the face to the great Soviet Union.
I can picture seven-year-old Victor Pelevin in his Moscow apartment watching the TV screen as Neil Armstrong took his one giant leap for mankind. And I can also picture young Victor along with millions of other youngsters in the USSR growing up with a love of rockets and outer space and envisioning themselves as a future cosmonaut and hero of the Soviet people.
But what becomes of your beautiful dreams when the space program fizzles out in the same downward spiral that turns your country, the USSR, into the former USSR? Oh, young comrades, I feel your pain.
Fast forward to 1992. I imagine Victor Pelevin, now age thirty, at his writing desk reflecting back on his boyhood dreams, dreams turned sour, dreams all gone up in smoke. What to do? Being an extraordinarily gifted literary artist, Victor knows exactly what to do. Narrated in the first person by Omon Krivomazov, Omon Ra lampoons the pride and glory of the USSR - its space program. Omon's story contains all sorts of titillating surprises I wouldn't want to give away, thus I'll shift my focus by linking comments to several direct quotes from the book:
“I think the first glimpse of my true personality was the moment when I realized I could aspire beyond the thin blue film of the sky into the black abyss of space.” ---------- Although our story begins with Omon as a boy and quickly moves to his enrolling in military school and training as a cosmonaut, much of the boy remains in Omon the man. This boy-in-the-man gives the entire tale an element of sweetness, even tenderness.
"The paradox - another piece of dialectics - is that we support the truth with falsehood, because Marxism carries within itself an all-conquering truth, and the goal for which you will give your life is, in a formal sense, a deception." ---------- Oh, you uniformed officials with your double-talk. Absurdity on a grand scale. Omon Ra is like the War Room from the film Dr. Strangelove mixed in with large doses of Mikhail Bulgakov and Vladimir Voinovich over-the-top craziness.
"Life always has room for heroism." ---------- This is the slogan spelled out all over the facility for cosmonauts in training. In other words, don't worry about the small things like permanent injury or loosing your life - what really counts is loyalty to the program and the state.
"I especially like Ra, the god the ancient Egyptians believed in thousands of years ago. Probably I liked him because he had a falcon's head, and pilots and cosmonauts and all sorts of heroes were often called falcons." --------- Victor Pelevin loves his mythology. He has Omon assume the name of the Egyptian deity of the sun. The art on the cover of the book is a perfect combination of cosmonaut and Ra the god.
"They gave Ivan a bulletproof waistcoat, a helmet, and a boar skin, and he went to work at his new job - a job which it would be no exaggeration to describe as daily heroism." --------- One of the novel's more hilarious bits. Rather than hunting real boars where there's an element of actual danger, when Henry Kissinger visits, the Soviet officials have Ivan and his son decked out as boars so the American official can rejoice in killing before signing an international agreement. But then the unexpected happens: after shooting the boar, Kissinger runs up (who would have guessed!) and stabs his prey with a knife. Sorry, Ivan. Oh well, your son died for a good cause. A true Soviet hero.
Omon Ra is Victor Pelevin's first novel. The Russian author went on to write fifteen more stunning works of imagination like Clay Machine-Gun, The Life of Insects, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf and S.N.U.F.F.. For readers unacquainted with his fiction, Omon Ra is the most accessible, a work I highly recommend.
Victor Pelevin, Moscow born and bred - coolest dude in town
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