The Helmet of Horror

“A psychedelic Nabokov for the cyber age.” Time Magazine

“Pelevin is one of the funniest novelists writing today” New Statesman

“One of the greatest pleasures of Pelevin’s writing is the perfectly pitched irony of his narrative voice, which pokes fun at his characters but never abandons sympathy for them…” Guardian

They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms which open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered a dialogue which they cannot escape – a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown.

Victor Pelevin has created a mesmerising world where the surreal and the hyperreal collide. The Helmet of Horror is structured according to the internet exchanges of the twenty first century, radically reinventing the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur for an age where information is abundant but knowledge ultimately unattainable.

Translated by Andrew Bromfield.

Victor Pelevin by Dick DonaevVictor Pelevin has established a reputation as one of the most interesting of the younger generation of Russian writers. He has degrees from Moscow’s Gorky Institute of Literature and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and Open City. His previous novels include The Victor Clay Machine and The Life of Insects.

Andrew Bromfield is a regular translator from the Russian, and has translated works by Boris Akunin, Vladimir Voinovich and Irina Denezhkina, as well as other titles by Victor Pelevin.

  1. Spencer (March 28, 2008 at 11:51 pm) :

    Wow. This book is great. I feel like there is a lot of symbology that I didn’t catch, and that I should have re-read the original myth before reading this, but once I started it I couldn’t put it down long enough to read anything else! The whole idea of this book is fascinating and challenging. I really enjoyed the way each character had a unique voice and that you were able to get a good idea of everyone just through their dialogue. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in this series, or even on it’s own!

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