Radiant Terminus

December 12, 2016
Volodine rips readers away from the solid natural laws of our world and makes them confuse centuries for days in this strange postapocalyptic novel. After the fall of the Second Soviet Union and the meltdowns of multiple nuclear power plants, Kronauer and his two comrades leave the loyalist resistance army to wander the steppes. He treks into a forest to find help for one of his companions and encounters a community run by Solovyei, a man made immortal by the radiation. Kronauer soon learns Solovyei likes to creep into the minds of his three daughters. They hate their father’s intrusions but are susceptible to his influence, which has caused them to scorn men, including Kronauer. It’s not at all clear whether each character is dead or alive or merely part of Solovyei’s dream. The characters, though equipped with backstories, are little more than fodder for the novel’s intellectual musings. This tale lures readers into believing they’re on solid narrative ground, only to dissolve into a vortex of uncertainty.

Starred review from January 1, 2017
French "post-exoticist" Volodine (Bardo or Not Bardo, 2016, etc.) returns with a dark view of the near future, where science fiction meets a certain kind of horror.It's fitting that in Volodine's latest, a corpse should figure as one of the first characters we meet--well, not quite a corpse, not yet, though 30-year-old Vassilissa Marachvili is passing on quickly enough that Volodine refers to her as "the dying woman." Perhaps, as the post-Heideggerians would say, she is always already dead, but what does it matter? In the remote Siberian outpost that is the setting for Volodine's yarn, a kind of Chernobyl on steroids in a post-apocalyptic time, following the fall of the Second Soviet Union in a nuclear shootout, the living envy the dead. But, that said, there's not much distinction between the categories in this hell, a place of "machines constantly humming. Fuel rods regularly sizzling as they tried to get several degrees hotter....The radioactivity at its peak puffing almost silently." Overseeing this domain is Solovyei, a kind of Col. Kurtz for our time (think Marlon Brando with even more of a glow), who certainly has a godlike complex and maybe even some godlike powers and who does what he can for Vassilissa: "She's gone into a dark tunnel. She's neither dead nor alive," he explains, helpfully. That's one of his easier-to-comprehend statements; as our hero, Kronauer, reflects, Solovyei is a master of conjuring "images of shadowy eternity and worlds with indecipherable rules of existence." Indeed. There can be no Kurtz without a Marlow--or a Capt. Willard trying to terminate his command, though deposing a man half dead is easier said than done. Volodine himself is a master at painting grim, infernal scenarios that seem fit for a neoarctic retelling of Mad Max, and with just the right atmospheric touches: can there be, after all, a Russian story without its wolves? A landmark of modern dystopianism, portending a time to come that no one would want to live in.

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December 1, 2016

Winner of the 2015 Prix Medicis, this latest exercise in imagination from the prolific Volodine (he's written 42 novels under various pseudonyms) is set hundreds of years in the future after the fall of the Second Soviet Union, which covered much of the globe. With their home base overcome by enemies of the proletariat, idealistic Ilyushenko, Kronauer, and Vassilissa Marachvili head out on a "communal march toward death," entering territory rendered toxic for ten millennia by nuclear meltdown. All three succumb quickly, and when Kronauer stumbles forth to find water for nearly dead Vassilissa, he comes upon a rare remaining kolkhoz called Radiant Terminus, run by the tyrant Solovyei. Evidently immune to radiation, which seems to have bequeathed him scary powers--he can speak resoundingly in people's heads--Solovyei is protective of his three tough if emotionally stunted daughters and profoundly suspicious of Kronauer. What follows is a power struggle involving the entire kolkhoz, told in apt and surprisingly poetic language. VERDICT Readers of both literary fiction and high-end sf can sink into Volodine's absorbing tale.

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