Lisica

the long version

"With characteristic wit and narrative force, Fox takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan minefields and American road trips, and from the 1920s to the present, as it explores the power of storytelling and literary invention, notions of betrayal, and the randomness of human lives and biographies. Using the duplicitous and shape-shifting fox of Eastern folklore as a motif, Ugresic constructs a novel that reinvents itself over and over, blending nuggets of literary trivia (like how Nabokov named the Neonympha Dorothea Dorothea butterfly after the woman who drove him cross country), with the timeless story of a woman trying to escape her hometown and find love to magical effect. Propelled by literary footnotes and "minor" characters, Fox is vintage Ugresic, recovering the voices of those on the margins with a verve that's impassioned, learned, and hilarious."--