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Buddha's Little Finger

Name: Buddha's Little Finger
Author: Victor Pelevin
ISBN: 9780141002323

by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield (Translator), Andrew Bromfield

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Overview

Russian novelist Victor Pelevin is rapidly establishing himself as one of the most brilliant young writers at work today. His comic inventiveness and mind-bending talent prompted Time magazine to proclaim him a "psychedelic Nabokov for the cyber-age." In his third novel, Buddha's Little Finger, Pelevin has created an intellectually dazzling tale about identity and Russian history, as well as a spectacular elaboration of Buddhist philosophy. Moving between events of the Russian Civil War of 1919 and the thoughts of a man incarcerated in a contemporary Moscow psychiatric hospital, Buddha's Little Finger is a work of demonic absurdism by a writer who continues to delight and astonish.

Synopsis

The Russian author Victor Pelevin is rapidly establishing a reputation as one of the most brilliant young writers at work today. His comic inventiveness and talent as a pure fabulist have won him comparisons to Kafka, Calvino, Bulgakov, Gogol, Phillip K. Dick, and Joseph Heller, and Time magazine has described him as a "psychedelic Nabokov for the cyberage." In Pelevin's new novel, Buddha's Little Finger, Pyotr Void, a leading St. Petersburg poet, unexpectedly finds himself in the midst of the 1919 civil war in Russia, serving as commissar to the legendary Bolshevik commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev and his formidable machine-gunner sidekick, Anna. But what is the secret of her machine gun? Why does Pyotr keep waking to find himself in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow in the 1990s? And where does Arnold Schwarzenegger fit into all this? Shifting between time and place and spinning story upon story, Buddha's Little Finger is unlike any other novel, a work of demonic absurdism that demonstrates Pelevin's genius for metaphysical comedy.

Victor Pelevin is the author of A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories, The Life of Insects, Omon Ra, The Yellow Arrow, and The Blue Lantern, a collection of short stories that won the Russian "Little Booker" Prize. He was named by The New Yorker as one of the best European writers under thirty-five and by The Observer newspaper in London as one of "twenty-one writers to watch for the 21st century."

Denver Post

...Buddha's Little Finger is a fun-and funny-read.

About the Author, Victor Pelevin

Victor Pelevin is the author of A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories, The Life of Insects, Omon Ra, The Yellow Arrow, and The Blue Lantern, a collection of short stories that won the Russian "Little Booker" Prize. His novel Buddha's Little Finger was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He was named by The New Yorker as one of the best European writers under thirty-five and by The Observer newspaper in London as one of "twenty-one writers to watch for the 21st century."

Reviews

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Editorials

Denver Post

...Buddha's Little Finger is a fun-and funny-read.

Library Journal

Seamlessly blending Russia's 20th-century history of revolution, repression, and post-Soviet depression with spoofs of the great works of literature that presaged, accompanied, or protested these events, upcoming Russian writer Pelevin shows that he is able to sustain the literary verve he first demonstrated in his short stories (The Blue Lantern) and short novels (The Life of Insects). In his intriguing new work, celebrated St. Petersburg poet Pyotr Voyd bears witness to the political and military dangers of the Russian Revolution, but he keeps waking up in contemporary Moscow, where American celebrity Arnold Schwarzenegger dominates the popular mind. By turns, Voyd is a counterrevolutionary, a mental patient, a sly poet, and a hapless lover, and he is every bit as surprised as the reader by the twists and turns of fate he must endure. The Buddha-like stance Voyd assumes also infects readers, who find themselves expertly guided through a plot that in the hands of a lesser writer would have left them frustrated by cascading impossibilities. Is Voyd mad? Is any socialized, thinking human safe from insanity? Voyd doesn't fear for his intellect, but saving his skin becomes a kind of political game. While Pelevin's setting is Russia, he shows us that what is valuable in sustaining life is universal. Highly recommenced.--Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Kirkus Reviews

A strangely discordant yet generally quite compelling political novel from the prize-winning (and remarkably productive) young Russian writer (The Life of Insects; A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, both 1998, etc.). The protagonist and antihero is (the pointedly named) Pyotr Voyd, a fair-to-middling gifted poet who's swept up into the Bolshevik Revolution of 1919, during which he's appointed `commissar` to a prominent Red Army commander (Chapaev), and becomes romantically involved (unwisely) with his superior's female machine-gunner Anna. Or so Pyotr claims—until a fantasy sequence involving the prepossessing figure of Arnold Schwarzenegger strongly suggests Voyd may be a mental patient who's only imagining those aforementioned adventures—especially when Chapaev reappears as a Buddhist-inspired fellow patient who leads the bewildered poet toward `nirvana.` Pelevin's clumsily transparent satire on corrupt Western values and the need to replace them with Wisdom from the East veers continually toward sheer rant, but his imaginative re-creation of Russia's early 20th-century literary culture (in which Pyotr Voyd shares table-talk with such historical luminaries as Aleksandr Blok and Vladimir Mayakovski) vibrates with the impish energy that distinguishes so much of his other fiction. Buddha's Little Finger is, by comparison, a messy and self-indulgent performance; still, in it's ornery bifurcated way, it's another uniquely interesting book from a spectacularly talented and brainy writer.