Monday Starts on Saturday
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4.7 • 7 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving north to meet some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of hitchhikers, who persuade him to take a job at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy. The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional institute involve all sorts of magical beings—a wish-granting fish, a tree mermaid, a cat who can remember only the beginnings of stories, a dream-interpreting sofa, a motorcycle that can zoom into the imagined future, a lazy dog-size mosquito—along with a variety of wizards (including Merlin), vampires, and officers. First published in Russia in 1965, Monday Starts on Saturday has become the most popular Strugatsky novel in their homeland. Like the works of Gogol and Kafka, it tackles the nature of institutions—here 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 world's greatest science-fiction writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
