Where We Are Not

"Tам, дзе нас няма" ("Where We Are Not") is Max Shchur's debut novel, which became one of the most distinctive phenomena in Belarusian literature at the beginning of the 21st century. The book transports the reader into an absurd parallel universe, where youthful quests, national idiocy, and surreal adventures intertwine in a satirical and sharp narrative. It has everything: from dystopia and detective fiction to parapsychology and ethnophilosophy. The novel was awarded the Yanka Yukhnovets Prize and was shortlisted for the Jerzy Giedroyc Prize. This is literature that evokes both laughter and anxiety.

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The action of Max Shchur's debut novel (2004, Giedroyc Prize 2016) takes place somewhere in a parallel universe, which is a radically absurd version of Belarus in the gilded nineties. In this unreality, completely real young people must survive daily — or at least for two days, during which the events unfold — whose personal search for meaning and adventure takes place against the backdrop of nationwide idiocy. Will the Improbable Book help them save the pandemonic infantologist Nick Patsukevich from prison, and Inflachchyna itself from the claims of Patriarch Pedophilia?

Critics define the genre of the novel as satirical dystopia, but the book also contains elements of detective fiction, parapsychology, and even ethnophilosophy of a non-existent ethnos. In 2004, the manuscript of the novel was awarded the Yanka Yukhnovets Prize, and in 2022, the electronic edition of the book was shortlisted for the Jerzy Giedroyc Prize.

The novel's text is supplemented with the author's reflections "Answers Without Questions" and "Palimpsest 2022," a comparative table of previous versions of the novel, and selected reader reviews. The edition is characterized by a variety of printing techniques used, in particular, a large number of fonts to convey different types of discourse.