Fiction 2018 [antikvár]

Perfumed Panthers - synopsis - The narrator and his lover, both Romanian, travel across Putin's Russia from Moscow down the Volga to the Caspian Sea and then through Dagestan, Chechnya and Georgia to the Black Sea, following in the footsteps of Alexandre Dumas. The narrator is trying to make a documentary film that will reconstruct Dumas's little-known journey through Russia and the Caucasus; his travelling companion Eva, a conceptual artist from Bucharest, brings along her uninhib-ited sexuality and avidity for every conceivable erotic experiment. Perfumed Panthers is a baroque road novel set against the geopolitical backdrop of Russia and the Caucasus, reeking of sex and death, and brimming with cultural, his-torical and ethnographic details. The novel takes us through Kalmykia of the Buddhist Mongols, it makes us smell the oily spells of the Caspian Sea, and it starkly depicts the atrocities committed by the pro-Moscow Grozny govern-ment against the Islamists of the Chechen mountains. In the end, the delicate fabric of the couple does not survive the ordeal of the journey, nor the rivers of alcohol that the narrator and his lover have to guzzle with their protectors from the Chechen mafia.