Monday starts on Saturday

Monday starts on Saturday

Arkadiĭ Strugat︠s︡kiĭ, 1925-1991

Book - 2017

Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving through the forests of Northwest Russia to meet up with some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of local hitchhikers, who persuade him to come work with them at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy, or NITWiT. The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional Institute involve all sorts of magical beings and devicesa wish-granting fish, a talking cat who can remember only the beginnings of stories, a sofa that translates fairy tales into reality, a motorcycle that can zoom into the imagined future, a hungry dog-size mosquitoalong with a variety of wizards (including Merlin), vampires, and petty bureaucrats. First published i...n Russia in 1964, Monday Starts on Saturday has become the most popular Strugatsky novel in the authors homeland. Like the works of Gogol and Kafka, it tackles the nature of institutionshere focusing on one devoted to discovering and perfecting human happiness. By turns wildly imaginative, hilarious, and disturbing, Monday Starts on Saturday is a comic masterpiece by two of the worlds greatest science fiction writers.

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Subjects
Satirical literature.
Fantasy fiction.
Genres
Satirical literature
Fantasy fiction
Published
Chicago : Chicago Review Press Incorporated 2017.
Language
English
Russian
Main Author
Arkadiĭ Strugat︠s︡kiĭ, 1925-1991 (author)
Other Authors
Boris Strugat︠s︡kiĭ, 1933-2012 (author), Andrew Bromfield (translator), E. Migunov (illustrator)
Physical Description
xi, 282 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781613739235
  • Foreword by Adam Roberts
  • Story no. 1: The commotion over the sofa
  • Story no. 2: Vanity of vanities
  • Story no. 3: All kinds of commotion
  • Postscript and commentary
  • Afterword by Boris Strugatsky.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The Strugatsky brothers are best known by English-reading SF fans for the novel Roadside Picnic, but this delightful 1964 fantasy-comedy remains their most popular work in Russia, and it's easy to see why. Sasha Privalov, a young computer programmer, visits the small town of Solovets for a holiday and gets swept into a new job at what turns out to be the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy (or NITWiT). His adventures are a charming and loving parody of both Soviet institutional culture and earlier fantasy and SF novels, including The Time Machine and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Merlin is the aggravating guy who has office seniority and keeps talking about his vacation, the managing director is discontinuous in time, and Baba Yaga's hut is part of the official state thaumaturgical museum. But this is a real fantasy novel as well as a satire, and readers will have no trouble believing that Koschei the Deathless really is chained up in NITWiT's basement. Bromfield's masterly translation manages to preserve layered language such as the joke in the Institute's acronym, and Yevgeniy Migunov's illustrations are witty, friendly, and allusive. This melding of bureaucracy and the numinous is highly enjoyable and impossible to compare to any other work. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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