Perverzion (okładka  miękka)

The tale of a poet's tragicomic last days in Venice

What was the fate of Stanislav Perfetsky -- poet, provocateur, and hero of Ukrainian underground culture? Certain evidence points to suicide. But some whisper murder. Some suggest the grand Eastern European tradition of coerced suicide. It may be related to the religious cult ceremony he unluckily happened upon in Munich. . . or that job as a dancer in a strip club for older women.

Or, then again, it may not.

Perverzion reconstructs Perfetsky's final days using a mishmash of relics, from official documents to recorded interviews to scraps of paper. Perfetsky, the personification of the Ukrainian artistic superman (for example, he plays countless musical instruments so well he collaborated with Elton John during the star's secret sojourn in Ukraine), is bound for Venice to participate in a seminar to save the world from its absurdity. On the way he becomes a Ukrainian Orpheus, descending into the sophisticated decadence of the West, navigating through surrealistic adventures and no less surrealistic seminar topics as he charges head up (and pants down) toward his fate.

A work of sly, subversive humor and fantastic wordplay, Perverzion is a look into the new Ukraine's post-Soviet literary culture by one of the country's foremost contemporary writers.