cover image Kangaroo

Kangaroo

Iuz Aleshkovskii. Farrar Straus Giroux, $17.95 (278pp) ISBN 978-0-374-18068-3

The Soviet authorities made a dangerous mistake when they drove Aleshkovsky into exile in 1979 for being desperately unhappy in his native land; since then he has been writing in the U.S. In this, the first of his novels to appear in English, his narrator, smalltime criminal Fan Fanych, (aka Citizen Etcetera), is peremptorily requested by the KGB to appear at the Lubyanka in the year 1949. He is accused of the ""vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow zoo on a night between July 14, 1789 and January 9, 1905.'' In an acid-soaked monolog Fan addresses the KGB agent and beyond him the nation and the world, ranging up and down the dark corridors of Soviet history, allowing no one and nothingno prominent figure, no infamous event, no ideological peculiarityto escape his scalding notice. Not a novel in any conventional sense; this is a sustained cry of rage and despair delivered at the top of the lungsunremittingly foulmouthed, deadly, on-target, seditious and mirthlessly funny. (April 14)