/lit/ - Literature

This was the /sffg/ book for July.
4 people in the group finished it this month. A 5th has it marked as currently reading.

The Snail on the Slope - Arkady & Boris Strugatsky (1966), 2018 translation edition, Russian.

I've tried reading other books by these authors and wasn't interested. Their novel Roadside Picnic is well regarded by those who have read it on /sffg/. I don't tend to enjoy allegory and this very much was one. Of the two viewpoint characters, I liked Peretz better, because Candide was even sillier. Both are stuck in nightmarish limbo, Peretz in a bureaucratic one, and Candide in a surreal one. Nothing interested me. Not the characters, setting, plot, themes, or whatever else. The prose is fine and does well in establishing its thematic content. There were so many random antics that intended to disorient both the reader and viewpoint characters. Basically, stuff happens, or it doesn't, and it'll matter or it won't.

>If you see something without understanding it, you may as well have thought it all up. I'm living it, seeing it, and not understanding it; I'm living in a world that someone else has thought up without bothering to explain it to me, or maybe even to themselves...
>And everything will be full of deep meaning, in the same way that the behavior of any complicated system is full of deep meaning, and it will all be strange, and it will therefore be meaningless to us, at least to those of us who still haven't gotten use to the meaninglessness and accepted it as the norm.

The Afterword was far more interesting to me than the novel itself. It's a nice summation of their attitude, outlook, and much else.
>How should he behave, when he realizes that the direction of progress, and he finds it abhorrent?
>The novel stopped being science fiction (assuming it ever had been) and became simply fantastic, grotesque, symbolic
>on the whole remained entirely inaccessible to the general reader. I can count on one hand the number of people who fully grasped the entirety of the authorial intent.
Intentional obscurantism isn't something I tend to enjoy.

Rating: 2/5, not my sort of novel.
TL;DR An atmospheric novel where the reader is meant to be as confused as the characters.