'The Yellow Arrow' by Victor Pelevin

“It is the most difficult thing in life. Riding on a train without being a passenger.” A train without beginning or end rushes onwards through Russia, never making a stop or reaching a destination. The passengers live their lives on the train (until they die and are pushed out through the windows) and know no other life, though a few dream of leaving the train (some of these experience something of being outside by riding occasionally on the roof). Although the text as a whole is metaphorically resonant, the writing is spare and sharp, and Pelevin manages to be both savagely satirical and bleakly metaphysical at the same time (à la Gogol), and the book can be read on several different levels simultaneously. When everything is rushing on, on-track, predetermined, and the freedom to which most aspire, if they aspire to freedom, is the freedom to move about within an on-rushing prison unaffected by the ‘freedom’ within it, what will be the fate of Andrei, who says, “I want to get off this train while I am alive”?

April 2016