A cyber-age retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur from one of Russia's most exciting young writers. Labyrinth (noun): An intricate structure of intercommunicating passages, through which it is difficult to find one's way without a clue; a maze. They have never met; they have been assigned strange pseudonyms; they inhabit identical rooms which open out onto very different landscapes; and they have entered into a dialogue which they cannot escape - a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its ...
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A cyber-age retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur from one of Russia's most exciting young writers. Labyrinth (noun): An intricate structure of intercommunicating passages, through which it is difficult to find one's way without a clue; a maze. They have never met; they have been assigned strange pseudonyms; they inhabit identical rooms which open out onto very different landscapes; and they have entered into a dialogue which they cannot escape - a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown. Victor Pelevin has created a mesmerising world where the surreal and the hyperreal collide. The Helmet of Horror is structured according to the internet exchanges of the twenty-first century, yet instilled with the figures and narratives of classical mythology. It is a labyrinthine examination of epistemological uncertainty that radically reinvents the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur for an age where information is abundant but knowledge seems ultimately unattainable.
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I have been following the Canongate Myth Series a best as I can. I have found most of the books in the series to be short, provocative, but limited in scope. Pelevin's retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur nearly breaks the mold. If the mind is computer, Pelevin asks in his introduction, is mythology its shell program? Does this shell program determine everything we do before we do it? Pelevin's characters are trapped in a chatroom thread. They can see into their own labyrinths, but they can't see their way out and they can't see their way to each other. One labyrinth is a bedroom, another is a dead end, another is a medieval church. If you're looking for easy answers and an easier read, this isn't the book for you. This book is a difficult and disturbing with each turn of the page.
