Enjoy For Free Radiant Terminus By Antoine Volodine Released Through Text

una catastrofe nucleare e il crollo della Seconda Unione Sovietica un soldato fuggitivo si rifugia a Terminus Radioso, kolchoz contaminato guidato da mutanti immortali e immorali.


Un romanzo assolutamente all'altezza della sua fama, Un libro post tutto, creato per non offrire certezze, I personaggi narrati sono vivi o morti Si muovo in un sogno O nel Bardo una sorta di limbo E' tutto un gioco metaletterario sul processo di scrittura come nella scena dello stupro, "vissuta" da un personaggio e al contempo "inventata" in un racconto da un altro

E tutto questo magma concettuale e destrutturato è gestito da Volodine con assoluta maestria, rispettando e sublimando i topoi del romanzo di genere fantascientifico soprattutto, ma c'è anche spazio per altri generi: fantasy, western, guerra.
. , così da mantenere una grande leggibilità nonostante tutto, grazie a uno stile di scrittura davvero notevole, capace di rallentamenti prossimi alla stasi e accelerate da lasciare senza fiato come in un giro sull'ottovolante, oltre a una bella dose di ironia.


Un romanzomondo, o meglio, post mondo, dato che al suo interno tempo e spazio vengono dilatati fino a privarsi di un senso e fino all'estinzione totale.
Strange, thoughtprovoking/thoughterasing, and bleak, so so bleak, This won't be for everyone, but Volodine certainly sucked me into this world and into this form genre of post exoticism, Now I have to read his other books! Will think about this one further and will perhaps write a review as it gets closer to the American release! Thanks Open Letter for sending an advanced reader copy to my store Unabridged Bookstore! Uno di quei libri che compri, aspetti, e quando finalmente scopri quello che c'è dentro ti chiedi perché quell'esplosione non è avvenuta prima e hai atteso tanto.

Questa intro super emotiva per dire: sciamani, apocalissi, ragazze stregate, soldati sperduti,
Una scrittura stramba, viva, non è possibile mappare i multiversi e si sta bene così, Ma, per assurdo, una struttura super classica, un fantasy in pratica, ma con un immaginario che esplode,

Un film Ghibli, sfuggito di mano, This is Volodines masterpiece: a strange, bewildering, breathtaking, frightening, and spectacular postnuclear postexotic epic, rendered into exquisite English in this exquisite edition, Lists as mantras, rants and invocations/ incantations botany lessons Naming the Taiga poetry of decay, deterioration, detritus "everything crumbled, turned into humus and magma of humid sawdust" timestretching "time took its time flowing, but it flowed" olfactory writing "Resin, rotting peat mosses, decomposing trees, marsh gas.
Stinking wafts from deep layers of the earth, Scents of bark, viscosities stagnating beneath the bark, mustiness of larvae, Mushrooms. Moist stumps" uncertain, shifting narrators "he or I, doesn't matter" "she makes theater" "theater or poorly directed dream, doesn't matter" "that's the ambiguity of ubiquity and achronia" undead erotics "cock's language" Solovyei as Bad Coop, everyone else as Dougie Jones the Zone meets the Black Lodge in the James Turrell's Dark Space, "void of all markers", with hints of Jhorror, heroic bloodshed, naphtha western, film noir, Predator, Under the Skin, and The Birds empurpled impoverished prose that gets beautifully meta towards the end "we will forgive the mistakes, absurdities, and impasses in the narrative flow, as well as the longeurs, and sometimes, on the contrary, the inexplicable shortcuts or the refusal to exploit or enrich scenes that could have been, or interruptions in the recitative" permanent Bardox.
Prepare to enter parallel universes where time collapses on itselfit's circularthe future and the past are always the present, where a,year old Gramma feeds and talks to a nuclear reactor core, where you never know if a character is living, dead, or somewhere in between, and where the characters exist mostly in a dreamlike state.
The setting is a nuclear wasteland after the fall of the second Soviet Union, The antagonist Solvyei is much too powerful and it's not difficult to figure out what he is supposed to represent in Volodine's politically charged novel.


While dealing with time in a circular fashion so that those previously dead are alive again, and attempting to manipulate people's dreams so that the character never knows if they are in their own dream, someone else's dream, or awake is certainly difficult subject matter, several parts of the book were tedious and redundant.
Each time a character entered a different state, the author described it all over again, There were simply too many details, Do the readers really want to know exactly what is being fed to the nuclear reactor core each time Gramma feeds it

Volodine went to great lengths to ensure the reader doesn't confuse his writing with scifi or any other genre.
He wants it to be called postexotic fiction as one of his characters, a writer, makes clear at the end, and as he mentions throughout the novel.
Apparently, this is an emerging genre and it seems you must be one of the cogno senti to fully appreciate it,

It would be easy to write this novel off as the rantings of a madman, but Volodine is far too clever to be called a madman.
For those with the patience to enter this dreamworld, it's a fascinating place, Tra sogno e realtà, sempre ad un passo dall'incubo una pila atomica che vuole solo essere costantemente saziata,
Strani e desolati personaggi si aggiro in una Seconda Unione Sovietica collassata, venga essa rappresentata dall'immensa taiga o dai kolchoz spettrali,
A tratti si rischia di perdersi o è solo che si Viaggia, ma la scrittura di Volodine, efficace e visionaria, è una guida perfetta,

sitelinkCit. Folgorante! le primepagine da storia della letteratura, Sembra incredibile sia letto così poco,Reread. Either the flames destroy or build me, doesnt matter,
This wonderful novel appeared both more meaningful with an almost elastic world view upon the second reading, It is harsh meditation. Grim but upright, thank to either shamanism or revolutionary hope,
Ubiquity and polychrony had long been his fate,

Radiant Terminus is a stunning achievement, the hum of a damaged reactor deep in the taiga, where ancient animistic tropes are filtered through the ill fated Second Soviet Union.
Irradiated but ideologically pure, I truly loved everything about this novel, The novel is both lyrically transportive and fundamentally bleak, It is a visceral, a gloss over entire genres of invented literature and a paen to a possibility where perhaps our human concerns are best kept intact within the secure bosom of the Gulag.

As I sit here pondering the aftereffects of Radiant Terminus, I'm listening to sitelinkBardo Pond, an appropriate accompaniment given the liminal nature of this strange and disconcerting novel.
I can't say it was a particularly pleasant trip through the irradiated taiga, No, the dark sorcerer Solovyei, who works in plutonium like a sculptor handles clay, made certain that I would experience the slow stab wounds of immortality as closely as the written word would take me to the cold steel blade.
I can assign it no rating, except perhaps one symbolic red star,

There is a mythic quality to this postapocalyptic story, if one can call it a story, It is in fact a tightly coiled string of narratives, circling itself endlessly, smothering in its horrifying oneirism, Set in a vast irradiated zone following the fall of the Second Soviet Union, which spanned the globe, the narrative grows through the influence of Solovyei, a godlike figure inexplicably bestowed with immortality through early contact with nuclear radiation, which has flooded the taiga and its surroundings after an epic failure of the ubiquitous reactors providing energy to the towns and kolkhozes of the region.
Solovyei's headquarters is the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz in the Levanidovo, Solovyei wields his dark power in unpredictable ways, meddling in the dreams and minds of all around him, in particular his three beautiful mutant daughters, each born from a different unknown woman, to which he has passed on his immortality and with whom he has an unnatural obsession.
And up on a hill beyond the kolkhoz, inside a

vast warehouse, lives the Gramma Udgul, Solovyei's first wife from long ago, who shares his plutoniumfueled immortality, and now tends the sunken reactor core, periodically feeding it with offerings of irradiated materials.


Into or sprung from Solovyei's orbit comes the soldier Kronauer, another central figure in the book, He and his two comrades have fled the city, which has fallen to the counterrevolutionaries, He arrives in the Levanidovo, seeking aid for his sick comrade, in the company of one of Solovyei's daughters, whom he has rescued from neardeath in the forest.
Thus begins an often excruciating descent into Solovyei's world for both Kronauer and the reader, Violated at times by streams of Solovyei's dark hermetic poetry, the narrative weaves between the histories of the people surrounding Solovyei, It is most effective at conceiving of and communicating the passage of time for those who know no death, those solitary figures trudging through long, lonely centuries, characterized at times by a savage boredom.


At the center of the novel is the question of how much of what is happening is 'real' and how much is merely a creation of Solovyei's disturbed mind.
Who has free will, if anyone, Who can and will die, if anyone, Is it all happening in the Bardo or in Solovyei's mind or somewhere else, irreal, surreal, or real, These questions are perhaps not answerable, but they lead to much speculation nonetheless, .