"Genocide" is certainly good. There is in him the sophistication of tough intellectual pessimism. Unlike countless novels in which humanity casually deals with impudent aliens who break into our living space without knocking, “Genocide” paints the exact opposite picture: impudent people who have broken into our living space (and have reached in their impudence to the point that they don’t even considered it necessary to appear before the readers), casually deal with humanity. The author has to gather all his humanism in order to protect a small herd of homo sapiens, who become the protagonists of the novel, from immediate death. The situation described in the novel clearly echoes “On the Shore” by Neville Shute. The difference is that Dish allows his characters to stubbornly not believe in imminent death. This same illusion dominates the reader throughout the entire book (despite the fact that the size of the homo sapiens herd is inevitably decreasing). For the reviewer, who did not have the opportunity to read the original, it remained a mystery: was this illusion deliberately built into the novel by the author or did it appear as a result of the kindness of the translators? Based on the general mood of “Genocide,” it can be assumed that Disch tried to construct as “dark” a novel as possible. He could afford to hang Chinese lanterns in the darkness, but he did everything to ensure that the heroes saw them only from afar. And it seems to me (and I am basing this on the published translation) that this is exactly what he did. The lanterns remained in translation. The impossibility of leaving the darkness has disappeared. It disappeared precisely because the author achieved this impossibility only and exclusively by the style of the text, which the translators were unable to preserve. Sergei Berezhnoy (address: mailto:[email protected]) html