Rocketship coffee full#

Rocketship coffee full#

That last big sentence full of big ideas arrives on page six in Omon Ra.

In my heart, of course, I loathed a state whose silent menace obliged every group of people who came together, even if only for a few seconds, to imitate zealously the vilest and bawdiest among them but since I realized that peace and freedom were unattainable on earth, my spirit aspired aloft, and everything that my chosen path required ceased to conflict with my conscience, because my conscience was calling me out into space and was not much interested in what was happening on earth. Which, incidentally, is why all my life I’ve only been bored by all those Western radio voices and those books by various Solzhenitsyns. When visiting the Industry Achievements Expo, Omon gazes upon an artistic rendering of an astronaut whose “arms were stretched out confidently towards the stars, and his legs were so obviously not in need of any support that I realized once and for ever that only weightlessness could give man genuine freedom.”īecause the point of view at this juncture is that of a boundlessly enthusiastic boy, and because Pelevin can write his absolute ass off, the sentence does not end at freedom. On his aunt’s TV set, he pauses on any channel broadcasting an airborne object. Victor Pelevin’s Omon Raopens with the titular Omon recalling his youth, when he was obsessed with space. The best encapsulation of my emotional relationship to technology during the pandemic comes from a Russian novel published in 1991.