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Title: Buddha's Little Finger by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield ISBN: 0-14-100232-8 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 27 November, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.38 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: With books like this, who needs drugs?
Comment: For Russian speakers:
Definitely read this book (in Russian, obviously) if you liked Kafka. Read it if you ever felt curious about drugs. (This book should be classified as a "Schedule A" substance. :) Stay away from it if you like books that make sense.
For English speakers:
It's a great book, however, Pelevin _packs_ his books with cultural references - more so than any other widely translated Russian author. So, if you haven't lived in Russia, many things won't make sense. (But then, many things wouldn't make sense either way.) I suggest that you read carefully reviews by non-Russians (look for reviewers whose last names don't end in "v" :) and decide based on this.
Rating: 4
Summary: Heavy but satisfying read
Comment: Pyrotr Voyd finds himself a commissoner to Bolshevik commander Chapaev during the Russian Civil War of 1919. He has fought in battle, found himself infatuated with a female machine-gunner, and thinks and talks constantly about man's place in life. The problem? Voyd is a patient in a present-day Russian mental hospital.
Not knowing which life is real, Voyd and others in his group are subjected to a new psychotherapy treatment which includes "... patients pooling their efforts in the struggle for recovery." After being administered drugs, the collective group vividly lives the storytellers' drama in their own minds.
This book is by no means an easy read. The incessant talk about "self" and ones' own place in life and reality is quite taxing at times. Nietzsche, Aristotle, Leibniz, and a even a bit of Dostoevsky are incorporated by author Victor Pelevin to help the protagonist find his place in the universe and himself. Although it was like reading a philosophy book at times, I found the story presented in a creative and unique way. Pelevin uses an extraordinary imagination to convey a very complex and multi-layered story. This novel is Russia's modern day answer to Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment".
Rating: 3
Summary: Buddhism a la Russe
Comment: Pyotr Voyd, a man in a psychiatric hospital in modern Russia, suffers delusions of being a cavalry officer in the Russian Civil War under the leadership of the enigmatic General Chapaev. Or perhaps Voyd, a cavalry officer in the Russian Civil War, is haunted by dreams of a psychiatric hospital where his fellow patients recount bizarre and elusive fantasies. Or perhaps both the psychiatric patient and the cavalry officer are illusions, flickerings of consciousness that bring with them entire worlds that are neither more nor less real than consciousness itself.
In the novel's shifting narrative, Victor Pelevin the Russian postmodernist meets Victor Pelevin the Buddhist exegete. At the intellectual core of the novel are a series of dialogues between Voyd and Chapaev, who, for all his military prowess, prefers using his gun to make a metaphysical point than to win a battle. Chapaev wants our protagonist to recognize that there is no reality independent of consciousness, and behind consciousness there is only the void (Pyotr's surname is not coincidental). If Chapaev is right, and if a narrative voice is essentially a manifestation of consciousness, it follows that asking which narrative is "real" is a category mistake.
The confusion as to what is really going on isn't just illustrative of Buddhist metaphysics; it also reflects the chaos of both Civil War and post-Soviet Russia. These are worlds where the old rules have been scrapped and no new rules have yet firmly taken hold, and where everyday life is mutated and [changed] by the imposition of abstract, foreign ideologies. In his efforts to come to terms with this shock, Pelevin evokes the distinctively Russian genius of confronting national trauma through literature. Reminiscent of Gogol or Dostoevsky, he creates worlds where the distance between the bizarre and the mundane is closed to a point of intimate contact, and where the private realities of the protagonists are more palpable than any shared or commonsense reality. The worlds of Pyotr Voyd jump between pathos and kitsch, between discourses on Buddhist metaphysics and the giddying intake of a wide assortment of narcotics, between reflections on aesthetic judgment and ... fantasies involving Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The jaggedness of the narrative might be read as a Russian response to Buddhism and the lure of the East. One can appreciate the appeal that Eastern mysticism might have in Russia, a deeply spiritual nation that has always had an uneasy relationship with the West. At the same time, however, the Buddhist virtues of patience, detachment, and serenity would hardly leap to mind when trying to define the Russian national character. The characters of Buddha's Little Finger have no interest in the long, arduous road toward Enlightenment. Chapaev urges his metaphysics at gunpoint, and a discussion of metaphysical realism quickly descends into a brawl where a bust of Aristotle is used as a cudgel. The doctor in charge of the psychiatric ward (whose name, Timur Timurovich, alludes to the Mongol conqueror of Russia) hasn't the patience to wait for his patients' subconscious to disclose itself at its leisure. Instead, he has developed a method he describes as "turbo-Jungian": a machine dubbed "the garrote" forcibly squeezes subconscious imagery to the fore. In one of the patients' visions, Enlightenment is described as the ultimate, unending trip: all three interlocutors in this fantasy are tripping on mushrooms because that's a simpler alternative to spiritual devotion.
The effect is that, behind the zany chaos, there emerges a deep sense of sadness. Pelevin occasionally misfires, and reads like Buddhism lite for hip people on the go, but on the whole the weird juxtaposition of the manic and the profound conveys our tragic attraction to distraction. This is most prominent at the novel's conclusion, which strikes a marvelously dissonant chord of elation and dismay.
Though the storytelling is not always as tight as could be desired--a number of the stories from the psychiatric ward read as separately-written short stories that have no clear relevance to the larger plot--Pelevin does an admirable job of tying a great variety of disparate elements into a mostly unified structure. My complaint isn't that Pelevin isn't clever enough to pull off the literary sleight-of-hand his novel demands of him. My complaint is that Pelevin is perhaps too clever. "Pulling it off" seems too often to be the main priority, and telling a story often takes a back seat. At the end of the novel, I found myself engrossed and interested, but I couldn't honestly say I cared much about any of the characters in the story. The closest the novel gets to emotional content is in Voyd's romantic attachment to Anna, Chapaev's niece and machine-gunner, who is tough, exotic, and not at all interested in Voyd romantically. There is little about the relationship between the two that goes beyond the sensitive-and-obtuse-boy-falls-for-tough-and-together-girl formula. Pelevin manages to come out with a few pithy observations on the nature of love, but even these lack emotional conviction.
Because the novel's human concern falls short of its cleverness, it reads not as a way of confronting the issues Pelevin addresses, but rather as a way of avoiding such a confrontation. Pyotr Voyd is no Raskolnikov: he and his cohorts can engage us with their dialogue, but I don't feel in these characters the expression of something important and profound within my own psyche. Pelevin has given his characters permission to be interesting, but he hasn't given them permission to matter. Cleverness becomes a mask where we can't sense the human being behind it.
This was a fascinating and confusing read--the kind of book that can't be fully grasped without re-reading it--and yet the satisfaction I felt upon closing it was the shallow satisfaction of an intellectual challenge met. I don't expect I'll give this novel the re-reading it deserves.
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Title: Homo Zapiens by Victor Pelevin ISBN: 0142001813 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield, Victor Pelevin ISBN: 0811213641 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: February, 1998 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The Blue Lantern: Stories by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield ISBN: 0811214346 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Life of Insects by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield ISBN: 0140279725 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1999 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield ISBN: 0811215431 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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