Rick Moody

• Fiction January 1, 1
• Fiction January 1, 1
• Fiction January 1, 1
• Fiction January 1, 1
• Culture January 1, 1
• Fiction January 1, 1
• Fiction January 1, 1
• Fiction January 1, 1
• Fiction January 1, 1
• Fiction January 1, 1

  The Russian-literature allusions in Victor Pelevin’s novel begin right at the beginning. Not with the Lolita epigraph at the head of chapter 1—though that is anything but timid—but in the preceding “Commentary by Experts.” Here is the kind of textual apparatus that Nabokov so enjoyed, in which the voice of authority comically enhances the simulated nonfictional status of the text. And it’s not only Nabokov who classes up the joint in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, the tenth offering from Pelevin, himself Russian (and still only in his mid-forties). The author parcels out a dense array of references to