The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

The world works in a mysterious and incomprehensible fashion. Wishing to protect frogs from children's cruelty, adults tell children not to crush them because that will make it rain - and the result is that it rains all summer because the children crush frogs one after another. And sometimes it happens that you try with all your might to explain the truth to someone else, and suddenly you understand it yourself. (pg 316)

...the American film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen...gathered together all the supermen of the nineteenth century. (There is)...nothing original about it. An economy based on brokerage gives rise to a culture that prefers to resell images and concepts created by others rather than creating new ones. (pgs 11-12)

...if someone says something memorable to us, we almost always repeat it in conversation with other people, regardless of whether what was said was stupid or clever...mind is simply a tennis racket you can use to keep bouncing the conversation from one subject to another for as long as you like. We give people back the ideas and opinions that we have borrowed from them - reflecting them from another angle, giving them a different spin, sending them into a vertical climb.

Let me remark modestly that my simulated thought almost always turns out better than the original... Who serves all these shots? One of the people?...

I'll have to wait until I have a conversation on this subject with some intelligent person. Then we'll see which way I drive the ball. That's the way I've been discovering the truth... (pgs 136-137)