The Tool and the Butterflies

Taking a page from Gogol's satirical story The Nose," wherein the protagonist loses his aforementioned facial feature, Lipskerov's novel transposes such a loss onto a more delicate organ. The protagonist awakens one morning bereft of his tool; and the tool, which re-appears, sentient and in a small village far away, without his man. Thus begins a novel both funny and absurd, in which characters come together across disparate social strata and with differing goals to weave the fate of a universe familiar yet fantastical, a perfect satire of the madness of Russian society today. Not just a darkly comedic exploration of post-Soviet attitudes towards gender and sexuality, this novel is also a historically and socially grounded narrative rich in naturalistic dialogue and everyday detail, and an engaging story of family and what matters most in life, in the grandest tradition of Russian literature"--