“The Clarity of Secrets”

“He upsets a harmony without our knowing how he succeeds in doing it: perhaps because, used to the horror of Earth, we only see the alien horror he attempts to impose on Earth” (Jorian Murgrave, 95). Thus ponders Dojna, one of the two female soldiers sent to seek out Jorian Murgrave, the being (is he human?) who wants to destroy Earth. Thus perhaps thinks the reader, confronting the universe of Volodinian fictions, who shudders as he reads, and then, closing the book, looks peacefully on his daily horror—at least more comfortable than the desolate steppes or the ravaged cities where the characters wander. Also more reassuring than these paradoxical spaces where one advances without advancing, where the monastery promising refuge constantly eludes the advance of the two deserters, where the underground passages ineluctably lead to the same shop of the lute-player of the shadows. More reassuring than these no man’s lands where dead people wander among several uncertain endings. Than these mental Moebius strips, where the linkage between dream and reality is imperceptibly made, where one can die in a dream, even if one awakens immediately in order to dodge the fire from flame-throwers, and where one investigates one’s own death, at the risk of seeing oneself condemned to ashes: “Go away…you are dead…”