The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

A Hu-Li is a 2000-year-old werefox from China who has lived in Russia for the past couple of centuries. Although werefoxes are as sexless as angels, they appear to be human females and make their living by prostitution. Or rather by posing as prostitutes. Once alone with a client, A Hu-Li and her kind briefly expose their tails, the one fox attribute that never goes away. The client is instantly bewitched, and while A Hu-Li reads a book he enacts whatever sexual scenario he has in mind. A Hu-Li gets the cash but more importantly the energy he releases upon orgasm.

A Hu-Li has read a lot of books, and she has opinions on everything. She loses her control when a flagellation client criticizes Vladimir Nabokov, who is one of her heroes. Her avatar enacting the client's sexual fantasy bears down too hard and draws blood. He's well-connected, and brings her to the attention of Alexander, an officer in the Federal Security Service, the post-Soviet incarnation of the KGB. Alexander, being a werewolf, recognizes A Hu-Li for what she is.

Werefox and werewolf meet and lots of hot weresex ensues. But the core of Pelevin's novel is the endless roundsof philosophical, literary, and political discussions A Hu-Li engages in. Pelevin can usually weave these seamlessly into the action, although some readers might think the novel bogs down at times. (It does.) To keep things lively there is the crucial role werewolves play in the Russian natural gas industry, a raid on a hen house, and the murder of an English lord who heads up the pro-fox hunting contingent in the House of Lords.

I suspect that some of the satire of Russian society that has made Pelevin's novel an enormous bestseller back home was lost on me. But A Hu-Lui, whose name sounds in Russian like the slang term for "Go fuck yourself," is an engaging narrator. She is funny, erudite, and yet at times surprisingly naïve for a 2000-year-old.