Nalo, thanks for response._Master and Margarita_ was my favorite book as a
teenager. It's about Satan visiting Moscow in early 30's, where official
policy was atheism, so no one believes in God or Satan altogether. He causes
quite a bit of trouble, but authorities either try to ignore him, or explain
everything as magic tricks.
Another story line is about a woman who sells her soul in order to rescue her
lover, a writer locked up in a mental institution for writing a book about
Christ. It was probably the first book I read where a woman rescued a man,
not vice versa. The cat you remembered was part of Satan's suite, he was
swinging on a chandeliere while shooting at KGB agents who came to arrest
the whole crowd. They were shooting back, but nobody got hurt, so the
incident was declared a case of mass hypnosis and hallucination.
Zamiatin's _We_ is about an anti-utopical future society, where
everything is strictly regulated, so even when people want to have sex, they
need to get a special coupon for that. The straightforward, law-obiding
main character meets a woman that introduces him to underground world of
rebels.
_We_ is often compared with _The Great New World_. However, it's
interesting that in _We_ men and women are equal, and in the other one --
well, alpha (highest rank) males are all engineers and scientists, and alpha
females turn bottles with fetuses on the conveyor line.
Marina
On Thu, 26 Jun 1997, Nalo Hopkinson wrote:
> Marina, I read this in university, oh, 16 years ago. Read it in
> translation and took a stab at reading some of it in Russian (which was
> my major along with French). I loved it, but the memory's gone very
> dim. I only remember some pointed and funny humour and (can this be
> right?) a cat in boots swinging from a chandelier. I also read Yevgeny
> Zamyatin's _We_ but my memory of that is even dimmer.
>
> -nalo
>
> "He walked so far/On stilts of songs, of masqueraded story, that the
> stars/Were near."
> -Kamau Brathwaite, "Jou'vert"
>
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