Kangaroo     by Yuz Aleshkovsky, Translated by Tamara Glenny Original title: Kenguru Published by Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: March 1, 1999 Format: Paperback, 290 pages ISBN: 1564782166 List Price: $13.50 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

Click on image to see enlargement

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. Comrade Etcetera will be tried for "the vicious rape and mur der 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. A seductive KGB agent attempts to convince Fa n Fanych that he is a kangaroo; he finds himself in the dock at a spectacular show trial; is sent to a camp full of dedicated old Bolsheviks pathetically attempting to maintain their beliefs in the face of every new atrocity; encounters Hitler in Berlin a nd Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta, where he is privileged to witness the famous conference as it was really conducted.

Kangaroo is a savage, cleansing satire in which Yuz Aleshkovsky confronts the hypocrisy, the cruelty, and the tragic failure o f the Soviet regime. His phantasmagoria is faithful to reality, for—as Dostoevsky knew—it is impossible for "realism" to portray a society whose corruption is literally fantastic.

"Kangaroo will stand as a landmark for literary historians and Russian writers of the future. . . . This is both a funny novel and a novel with a serious message about the evils of totalitarianism."— Washington Post

"A torrent of scatological satire that leaves few targets in Soviet history or society untouched."—Los Angeles Times

"Aleshkovsky's special power is that devastating sense of humor. . . . Here for the first time I know of, a Russian has stripped away the sonorities of Soviet history to highlight its absurdity from an ordinary, human point of view."— New York Times

"Kangaroo is a novel of the most terrifying hilarity."—Joseph Brodsky

"As obscene a book as I have read in years. . . . It is so hilarious that even someone ignorant of Soviet history and personages will laugh out loud."—New York Times Book Review

Born in a Siberian hospital on Dictatorship Street in 1929, Aleshkovsky emigrated to the United States in 1978 to avoid censorship.

Other translated works by Aleshkovsky included The Hand (1990) and A Ring in a Case (1995).