Monday Starts on Saturday is written in triptych form, three loosely connected and bizarre stories that represent the brothers' most inventive and entertaining writing. As the novel opens, our hero Alexander Privalov is on his way across Russia to visit some friends. He never gets there. After picking up some mysterious but friendly hitchhikers he finds himself staying in a town that becomes increasingly impossible to leave - a situation that feels distinctly Kafkaesque at first but quickly dives further into absurdism. This establishes the world and, such as they are, rules of the book, a world where nothing is certain and Monday could indeed start on Saturday, with Alexander repeatedly finding himself transported about in the house of the old woman who takes him in with no knowledge of his movements and being kept awake at night by the fact that the house grows legs and walks around... the woman apparently being the living embodiment of the legendary Baba Yaga figure of Russian folklore. Things only get more weird from there as he meets a talking fish who is annoyed that she seems destined to live forever - the first of many genuinely funny passages - and is plagued by a coin that always seems to return to him after he spends it.
His possession of the coin eventually gets him in trouble with the local authorities, and this leads into the second story, where the novel properly comes into its own. The local authorities, it turns out, work for NITWITT - the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy - and Privalov, a computer programmer by training, is offered a job there. There follows a relentless bombardment of satire, one-liners and dissection of myths and legends from around the world. The characters come thick and fast, each more outlandish than the last: from the government officials who attempt to control the institute with no scientific training of their own, to the researchers applying the scientific method to magical pursuits such as alchemy and the search for eternal life. England's own Merlin gets a look in, portrayed as a droning old nerd who spends his time predicting the weather - partly by magic, mostly by listening to forecasts on the radio. I'm sure there's a lot that I missed here: parodies and caricatures of Soviet state figures and the bureaucracy they were so fond of that will probably only be appreciated by those who lived in the country in the 1970s. But it matters little, because the humour does find a wider audience, in its gentle and ultimately admiring lampooning of the world of academia and the people who devote their lives to increasingly obscure studies. Or those who game the system to earn themselves fame and fortune, like Alexander's uncultured colleague Vybegallo, whose experiments, while wholly unscientific, never fail to draw media interest. As for the concept of Monday starting on Saturday here, it applies to the scientists' work ethic - Alexander is left in charge of the institute on New Year's Eve, expecting the place to be deserted, but instead it's busier than ever as his colleagues flock back from their parties to do what they truly enjoy - working and researching. The Strugatskys even do a great job capturing that kind of friendship of shared professional experience that you can only feel with close co-workers.
The third story carries on at the institute, and is more straightforward science fiction, as Alexander and some of his new friends try to solve the mystery of how their director seems to be two separate people, but still only one, and how his (their?) pet parrot seems to have come back to life. The solution again plays on the concept inspired by the book's absurd title, and proves a genuine mind-bender. This section also offers up a gently mocking critique of sci-fi literature, Privalov volunteering as a test subject and finding himself transported into a future generated literally from the predictions of the genre; he finds it by turns boringly detailed and frustratingly slow.
It all sounds quite highbrow, but Monday Starts on Saturday never gets too heavy - at the end of the day it's a book about wizards and talking animals and people who can fly and walk through walls without thinking about it. And there's room for the likes of vampires, gnomes, demons and unicorns - all reappropriated into a professional or scientific context for comedic effect. I know I've gone on about the humour, but it honestly is one of the funniest books I've read, on par with the best - Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, Infinite Jest - in its twists and turns of language. A spectacular effort that I'm sure I'll read many more times over the course of my life.
5/5
Science!
