Victor Pelevin "Cool" Moscow: Eksmo, 2024

Long a hallmark of autumn, along with the birds flying south, the release of Viktor Pelevin's new novel set the tone for readers this year at the beginning of October. The mood is cheerful yet perplexed, as the cult author sounds increasingly bizarre with each new work. The king of dinosaurs and the evil spirit Achilles intend to bring about the end of the world, while a severed brain, a policeman, and a killer neural network are tasked with preventing him. It sounds absurd, but only at first glance. "Kruti" fuses a multitude of allusions, varying in their propriety, to the news agenda and its characters, with a didactic, dictating instruction on how to perceive reality, which, as is well known from every other text by Viktor Olegovich, does not exist. It's no coincidence that this latest novel is set in the universe of the previous three. Anyone else would have assembled a mediocre cyberpunk from them, but not Pelevin, for whom the pop setting turns out to be the most suitable bait, allowing him to once again point out to the reader the limitations of his perception.
"Even a forester doesn't know what happens in the forest at night. And the brain isn't just a forest. It's a mysterious jungle. And it's not necessarily ours."

