Perversion (novel)
Perversion ( Ukrainian Перверзiя ) is a novel published in 1996 by the Ukrainian translator, poet and writer Jurij Andruchowytsch . It describes the story of the poet and artist Stanislaw Perfezki who, after a scientific conference in Venice, gets caught up in the intrigues and excesses of bohemian life. The novel touches on the topic of self-discovery of a person from the East in today's reality of Western life.
action
The novel is set in today's modern and mysterious Venice. The protagonist is Stanislaw Perfezki, a poet, artist, provocateur and hero of the Ukrainian underground movement . He is invited as a speaker to a symposium on the subject of “Post-Carnival madness in the world - what's on the horizon?” And thus begins his journey to Europe. However, fate still holds him in Poland , Austria and Germany on his way - and everywhere the hero experiences something new - in situations in which he can use his knowledge and charm . On the way he gets to know a woman who was assigned to work on him as a translator and probably as an informant. The love for Ada runs like a red thread through the whole novel. "Perversion" ends in Venice, in a hotel on the Grand Canal . After Perfezki's lecture, only two shoes were found on the windowsill of his room, but not his body. The open end doesn't tell the reader whether Stanislav died.
layout
"Perversion" is not a chronological novel - it is designed as a list of different situations. The author shows the reader excerpts from the life of Stanislaw Perfezki on his way to Europe - in the form of diary-like entries, dictations on the dictaphone , spy reports, invitations, programs, interviews and other fragments of "unknown origin". In addition to the mysterious story, the second strong point of the novel is the language - especially in the Ukrainian original. In the style of postmodernism , the text is full of collages , myths and theatrical allusions.
criticism
“But what is special is the author's narrative voice, which wanders through all the pitches: a captivating mixture of high-spirited hope and sadness, of fatalism, exuberant enthusiasm and defiant longing. Amazed and as lovably stubborn as Don Quixote, our Orpheusky wanders through the labyrinthine and stinking Venice ... "
“Yuri Andruchowytsch perverted me a masterpiece. Full of allusions, narrative cross wefts and excessive opulence of the material. A wondrous orgasm full of texts and digressions, a real perversion "
“Andruchowytsch plays with the readers, their expectations and knowledge, challenges, ecstatic, provoked and disappointed, in order to start all over again. You are drawn into a carnival that allows everything, in which everything is real and again not "