Eleven Sooty Dreams

French writer Antoine Voldine (Bardo or Not Bardo), writing as Draeger, punctuates this bleak yarn of a leftist militia group’s misadventures in an unspecified post-Soviet country with fantastical stories and black humor. The author’s wry, uncanny writing reveals the central theme of the book: memory is the key to survival for those oppressed by state censorship and economic despair. The annual Bolshevik Pride festival is the only bright spot in the dreary setting—a landscape marked by “the musk of war’s bombs, barbed-wire fences, chemical dustings, still-smoking ruins”—but this year the event goes awry when a group of young leftists breaks into an arsenal to steal weapons and becomes trapped by a fire. There, they remember the outlandish stories of Marta Ashkarot, a talking elephant, told by Granny Holgolde, a mid-level bureaucrat in charge of reintegrating assassins and mercenaries into society. Characters such as Holgolde’s invention, Marta, who eats firecrackers and uses the Party’s agenda as toilet paper, and Holgolde herself, the steely maternal figure whom the leftists remember visiting as children, are drawn with wonderful specificity, and Draeger writes brilliantly of the leftists’ collective spirit. Stylistically inventive, heartfelt, and vivid, this shows a beguiling, talented author running on all cylinders. (Feb.)