SNUFF

"SNUFF" has everything that readers love about Pelevin's brand: jokes (which you still want to read aloud), and a paradoxically accurately captured and sugared "spirit of the times" (many passages concerning the orcish "holy wars" ominously echo the most recent events in Russia)... And the fact that each subsequent Pelevin text turns out to be invariably sadder, more piercing and more tragic than the previous one (in the current one, the heart sometimes breaks, like in some "Kashtanka") - this is probably a property of the writer himself, who with age migrates towards ever greater pessimism and anguish.