FICTION

THE YELLOW ARROW by Victor Pelevin, translated by Andrew Bromfield (New Directions: $17.95, 92 pp.). Parables are usually releasing rather than restricting, allowing writers to comment on culture without regard to ordinary fact. “The Yellow Arrow” comes across quite differently--it is claustrophobic, Kafkaesque, for Victor Pelevin envisions post-Communist Russia as a train that never stops, rarely even slows down.

We meet Andrei waiting in line to use the communal bathroom, and it’s many pages before the reader realizes this novella (brief even by novella standards) will take place entirely in railroad cars. Movement, naturally, is restricted; passengers are allowed to go from compartment to compartment, but interaction is minimal, food scarce, trade primitive and death an infrequent opportunity for spiritual comment--the dead, pushed out the window, are followed by their pillows.

Pelevin’s tale is grim, needless to say, mainly because the endless, predictable train journey breeds only hopelessness; no scintillating conversations here, no passionate relationships, for the great majority of passengers are emotionally paralyzed, fearing and desiring the non-train world in equal parts.

“The Yellow Arrow” is more interesting as social commentary than as fiction, for Andrei survives rather than grows, his eventual debarkation seeming a patched-on conclusion rather than deserved escape. Pelevin is obviously talented, however, and it will be interesting to watch the development of a Russian writer for whom communism is a historical artifact.