Don't Feed and Don't Touch the Pelicans

In Andrey Astvatsaturov’s new novel, the hero is the same as before. A city neurotic, a literature teacher, not especially lucky in love—someone we already know from the books “People in the Raw” (“Люди в голом”), “Skunksamera” and “Autumn in Pockets”—arrives in London, where he is pulled into a comic detective intrigue.

“The world is absurd, strange, irrational, anecdotal—just like the creatures that inhabit it. We all are a little pelicans: beautiful in the flight of our fantasies, and funny on the ground” (ANDREY ASTVATSATUROV).

“This bespectacled intellectual loser, the eternal victim of street bullies—funny, broke, pathetic—evokes genuine sympathy in the reader. Exactly this kind of bungler is extraordinarily relevant to our time: today, when it’s shameful to be a loser, he seems to be asserting a person’s right to fail.”

“In the times of universal forced happiness, it defends the freedom to be sad and angry” (Galina Yuzefovich about the novel “People in the Raw”).