the aborted preparation of a series of attacks on the moon

the dystopian oeuvre of Antoine Volodine – the primary pseudonym of a multifariously named French-Russian writer – forecasts the cumulative effect of successive waves of political and ecological catastrophe in futures where “the worst of barbarous human or subhuman history had been reached and even surpassed”, as Volodine writes in Mevlido’s Dreams. First published in French in 2007, and nimbly translated by Gina M. Stamm, this novel begins with a scene that at first seems to be from the Soviet era: after a speech on “proletarian morality”, Mevlido, a middle-aged policeman, bashes his superior on the head with a brick during the latter’s “self-criticism”. But the crimes to which his superior confesses are trivial or absurd – “theft of toilet paper”; “the aborted preparation of a series of attacks on the moon”

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