Title: Rivers of Babylon (Rivers of Babylon #1)
Author: Peter Pišťanek
Translator: Peter Petro
Publisher: Garnett
Year: 2007
Country: Slovakia
259 pages
Pišťanek takes a romp through an almost-post-Communist state in which Communism and capitalism are equally and cynically skewered. The anti-hero protagonist mulishly pursues his own ends and tragicomically winds up a slightly anxious bourgeois with soft hands, a big house, and a cultured wife. I'd give it four stars but for the tremendous reduction of women's roles to virgin (one) or whore (all the rest), including gleeful exploitation of and violence toward virtually all. Not that men aren't exploited and hit, but they are portrayed as agents as well as objects.
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