The Hall of the Singing Caryatids

"The book's concluding pages are delightfully enigmatic, fogged over just enough with metaphor that it's impossible to say quite what happens. Likewise, we never really know if the mantis has empowered Lena or seduced her into shameful political violence. That's all toward the beauty of Pelevin's project: a satire sharp enough to score points against the malign, yet retentive of a fine negative capability that takes these very same targets and makes of them a document that shimmers with the evasiveness of art." -- Scott Esposito - The National
"If you’re familiar with Pelevin—his borderline farce, his taste for the supernatural, his merciless skewering of the social order—you’ll find, in this novella, a succinct recapitulation of his major themes. And if not? Fuck it. Who else can pack a spy school for prostitutes, fake quotes from Kate Moss and Vladimir Nabokov, a martial art based on curse words, and a guy called The Last Russian Macho into 100 pages? Pelevin’s writing doesn’t need to be analyzed. It’s a guided dream through all the stuff that gets redacted from Russia’s state-sponsored press releases. It’s the literature that Russia deserves." -- Fiction Advocate