Perverzion - Yuri Andrukhovych

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Résumé :
What happened to Stanislav Perfetsky-poet, provocateur, and hero of Ukrainian underground culture? Some claim suicide. Some whisper murder. Some credit the grand Eastern European tradition of coerced suicide. But no one is sure. It may have something to do with those suspicious apartments he visited in Vienna . . . or that job as a dancer in a strip club for older ladies. Or it may not. PerVerzion reconstructs Perfetsky's final days using a mishmash of relics, from official documents to recorded interviews to scraps of paper. Perfetsky, the personification of a Ukrainian artistic superman (for example, he plays countless musical instruments so well he has collaborated with Elton John during the star's secret sojourn in Ukraine), is bound for Venice to participate in a seminar. On the way he becomes a Ukrainian Orpheus, descending into the sophisticated decadence of the West, navigating through surrealistic adventures and no less surrealistic seminar topics as he charges head up (and pants down) toward his fate. A work of sly, subversive humor and fantastic wordplay, PerVerzion is a look into the new Ukraine's post-Soviet literary culture by one of the country's foremost contemporary writers.