"Roadside Picnic"

[fiefoe]

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's book (translated by Olena Bormashenko!) poses an interesting question - 'what if the aliens came, and just left a mess?' The 'always over the main character's shoulder' narrative style reminds me of "The Tiger's Wife" of all things.  The ending packs a punch, but the postscript by the surviving brother left an even bigger impression on me. It's funny how I've rarely been a victim of state bureaucracy and yet their oppressive power can be so viscerally felt just from the last paragraph quoted here.

• I don't like the look of that tire. There's something wrong with its shadow.
• That's about all you can manage after the Zone: hand holding. Especially when you remember the stories about the children of stalkers - how they turn out...
• When he has enough money, he buys swag from anyone, without haggling, and then he sneaks into the Zone at night and buries it there...
• He had never felt this outside of the Zone.. The air turned hard, it appeared to have surfaces, corners, edges, as if space had been filled with huge coarse spheres, polished pyramids, and gigantic prickly crystals, and he was forced to make his way through all this, as if in a dream, pushing through a dark antique shop full of ancient misshapen furniture...
• (They) had recently flocked to Harmont looking for hair-raising adventures, untold riches, international fame, or some special religion; they.. ended up as taxi drivers, waiters, construction workers, and bouncers in brothels.
• We know that things change... we've witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we're still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes.
• If it wasn't the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.
• The Visit has largely passed without a trace. For humanity everything passes without a trace.
• Intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.
• I'm absolutely convinced that in the vast majority of cases we're using sledgehammers to crack nuts.
• This self-reliance had always been measured by the amount of money he managed to wrench, wrestle, and wring out of the surrounding indifferent chaos.

------------
Now I'm sitting here, looking at these folders, and realizing that I'm hopelessly late and that no one needs me - not my irony, not my generosity, and not by burnt-out hatred. They have ceased to exist, those once-powerful organizations with almost unlimited right to allow and to hinder; they have ceased to exist and are forgotten to such an extent that it would be tedious and dull to explain to the present-day reader who is who, why it didn't make sense to complain to the Department the Culture of the CC...