I have suffered a reading slump recently which I can only blame on Volodine's Terminus Radieux, not because it is a bad novel, but because it is the most depressing novel that I have read in a long time. So here are some bullet points as to why I found it such a struggle to get through:

It is a dystopian novel, where even staying alive seems to be a pointless exercise.

It takes place in Russia - a post nuclear Russia.

Characters seem to be neither dead nor alive, but something in between.

The prose is circular with very few events and when something does happen it is liable to be described again.

It is a novel of over 600 pages (I read the french original and so I might have lost something in the translation) where the situation seemingly, gets worse and worse.

Kronauer; a soldier and two colleagues have escaped from the Orbise a collective that was functioning as a capital of the region. It had been attacked by barbarians. Everybody is suffering from radiation sickness. The three have been on the run for about a month, have run out of water and collapsed within sight of some railway tracks. The woman Vassilissa Marachvili has been carried on Kronauer's back for some time and she is nearly dead, slipping in and out of consciousness. A train consisting of four wagons containing soldiers comes down the track and stops nearby. It is manned by soldiers half of whom are very dead, some are almost alive and all are sick. The three comrades remain hidden, but Kronauer decides to make for some nearby woods in a search for water. He eventually makes it to a Kolkhoze (an agricultural collective) and becomes a semi prisoner of the President.

The President Solovièï practises some kind of mind control and has become immune and possibly immortal due to radiation poisoning. His partner Mémé Oudgoul has become notorious as one of the few people who also survives the radiation. They are encamped on a nuclear rector/outlet and have three daughters with whom Solvieï has incestuous relationships. He exercises control over the few inhabitants by nightmarish dreamscapes and is jealous of any unwelcome approaches to his daughters. Everybody is sick. Time passes, no one is really sure if they are alive or dead, the sun is almost blotted out, everything is grey and cold, daylight is decreasing and the creatures that seem to be benefiting are the carrion crows.

If ever a book celebrates the idea that darkness is coming then it is Terminus Radieux. Reading dystopian novels at a time when we are on the doorstep of a climate catastrophe is not everybody's idea of fun reading, but added to that the distinct possibility of nuclear war in Europe and one can easily for-see the future of our planet in the world that is described by Volodine. The novel is effective because it creates a powerful atmospheric force that destroys all hope of a return to lighter times. Is our future on this planet as bleak as Volodine claims, well if so I suggest you read his novel on a bright sunny day when the birds are singing. It should be banned as winter reading in Scandinavia or anywhere north of Alaska.

A difficult novel to rate, as an exercise in dystopian fiction then possibly a five star read. It is however a struggle and my enjoyment limits it to 3.5. ( )

Conflicted. Can't decide what I think about it. I'll come back to reviewing it when the dust has settled a bit. ( )

When I finished this novel I began to cry.

But: I have no idea what this novel is supposed to mean. I could read up about it, I suppose. But even with more knowledge, I'm not sure there would be a way for me to have loved it more, or to have been touched by it more, or to have been made to think more, than the choice I made, which was to read this very complicated and mysterious novel as a dialogue, a 1-1 relationship between me and the words on the page.

So how to describe this complicated knot of feeling, now that I've reached the end?

What I'm feeling has to do with a sense that this novel stands for the permanence of human relationships--that our thoughts and feelings and actions as thinking creatures can create a reality that endures every kind of assault.

Described here is a horrific world. And yet the characters trapped in this horrific world never fully despair. And the story itself, however violent and seemingly hopeless, always holds out in the end a thread of fragile hope that humanity (not just people, but their best selves) will endure. ( )

I read the first two pages as an ebook sample and thought what terrible writing and even worse translating. Luckily I had to read this for a book group, because I started again with a print copy and thought what amazing writing and translating. Once I got used to the rhythm of the writing and the weirdness of this particular bardo, I found so much 'post-exotic' humor and creativity. Definitely a book that works best as a group read. ( )

Prepare to enter parallel universes where time collapses on itself--it's circular--the future and the past are always the present, where a 2,000 year old Gramma feeds and talks to a nuclear reactor core, where you never know if a character is living, dead, or somewhere in between, and where the characters exist mostly in a dreamlike state. The setting is a nuclear wasteland after the fall of the second Soviet Union. The antagonist Solvyei is much too powerful and it's not difficult to figure out what he is supposed to represent in Volodine's politically charged novel.

While dealing with time in a circular fashion so that those previously dead are alive again, and attempting to manipulate people's dreams so that the character never knows if they are in their own dream, someone else's dream, or awake is certainly difficult subject matter, several parts of the book were tedious and redundant. Each time a character entered a different state, the author described it all over again. There were simply too many details. Do the readers really want to know exactly what is being fed to the nuclear reactor core each time Gramma feeds it?

Volodine went to great lengths to ensure the reader doesn't confuse his writing with sci-fi or any other genre. He wants it to be called post-exotic fiction as one of his characters, a writer, makes clear at the end, and as he mentions throughout the novel. Apparently, this is an emerging genre and it seems you must be one of the cogno senti to fully appreciate it.

It would be easy to write this novel off as the rantings of a madman, but Volodine is far too clever to be called a madman. For those with the patience to enter this dreamworld, it's a fascinating place. ( )