Radiant Terminus

Radiant Terminus presents a world both long lost and just around the corner, where humanity has died out and its spectral remnants wander, post-nuclear holocaust, looking for death. It seems impossible that such a setting could be mined for laughs, but Antoine Volodine (one of the many pen names of an unidentified French writer) infuses the novel with a vicious streak of pitch-black humor. Nothing changes, no one is saved, but it's still fun to be along for the ride.

The plot, such as it is, begins when a former soldier named Kronauer enters the kolkhoz of Radiant Terminus, controlled by Solovyei, a creature who was once a man but now seems to exist beyond human reality. Interactions with Solovyei, his three strange daughters and the people of the kolkhoz force Kronauer to wonder if he isn't simply a plaything in Solovyei's endless games of amusement, or if he's even alive at all.

Radiant Terminus has answers to these questions, but the journey to them is a strange one, in which the dead return to life (sometimes in neutered form) and a good story will do more than food or sleep to keep existence going. The novel certainly isn't a hopeful one (and how could it be with its characters inhabiting some state of existence just beyond death?), but it does champion our greatest attribute as social animals: our ability to tell stories. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

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