Buddha's Little Finger [Hardcover]

Victor Pelevin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

At one point in the hallucinatory trip that is Buddha's Little Finger, the protagonist regains consciousness in a cold-water bath, with a large, naked man prodding him awake and cheerfully acknowledging that the situation "might seem quite unbearably loathsome. Inexpressibly, inhumanly monstrous and absurd. Entirely incompatible with life." That would be an understatement. Yet Victor Pelevin, who's already produced such post-perestroika gems as Omon Ra and The Life of Insects, gets plenty of comic mileage out of Pyotr Voyd's dilemma. He also puts identity, reality, and existence up for grabs, and toys with time and continuity much as Italo Calvino did in his exhilarating If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

A poet from St. Petersburg, Pelevin's hero finds himself caught in a temporal tug of war: on one hand, he's walking a tightrope between Reds and Whites during the Russian Revolution, and on the other, he's floating in and out of the bizarre world of a psychiatric hospital in 1990s Moscow. The revolutionary era does offer Pyotr the occasional boost. His commander, the sly and intellectually provocative comrade Chapaev, tells him that he is a "man of decisive character and at the same time you have a subtle appreciation of the essential nature of events. People like you are in great demand."

That's not the sense he gets in the hospital, however, where he passes the time kneading lumps of Plasticene and sketching busts of Aristotle. Sharing a room and "turbo-Jungian" therapy sessions with three other nutters, Pyotr is all too easily submerged in their intricate fantasies. Sound complicated? Well, Pelevin offers up these parallel lives in such a kaleidoscopic jumble that it's sometimes easy to get lost. Yet those readers willing to follow the hero in his travails--to make, as it were, a leap into the Voyd--will encounter a hilarious, disturbing, and wildly inventive exploration of reality. --S. Ketchum

From Publishers Weekly

The ambitious, time-traveling scenario of Russian writer Pelevin's third novel finds the aptly named poet Pyotr Void tumbling between two distinct nightmares. In the first he is serving as commissar to the legendary Bolshevik commander, Chapaev, during the 1919 Russian Civil War. Pyotr pines for Chapaev's machine gunner, Anna, entertains officers who come to pinch cocaine (acquired by an accident of fate) on the pretext of discussing the nature of the intelligentsia, and feels horribly disjointed all the while. Then, Pyotr wakes up in a present-day mental hospital in Moscow distinctly labeled "schizophrenic." He observes his doctors and roommates (including an effeminate man who has assumed the identity of "Maria") until he almost feels comfortable, only to be pumped full of sedatives and returned to the year 1919. The two settings provide Pelevin, who won Russia's "Little Booker" prize for his collection The Blue Lantern, with plenty of room to obsess about political changes and social realities in Russia (at one point, Maria announces, "That's always the way with Russia... when you see it from afar, it's so beautiful it's enough to make you cry, but when you take a closer look, you just want to puke"). Just when the plot seems to fragment into an irretrievable mess, Pelevin stitches things up rather nicely with some loosely applied Buddhist principles. Bromfield's translation is smooth, the prose crisp, lively and humorous as well as richly philosophical. This work will surely cement the reputation of Pelevin (whose satiric novels include Omon Ra and The Life of Insects) as one of contemporary Russia's leading writers. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (April 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670891681
• ISBN-13: 978-0670891689
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,052,921 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars six stars, June 4, 2000

By 

Orlando Zepeda - See all my reviews

This review is from: Buddha's Little Finger (Hardcover)

If there is any justice in the literary world, this book will earn Pelevin recognition as the literary supernova that he is, as one of a handful of writers who will define 21st century literature five, ten, a hundred, five hundred years from now. It's not an easy book - it's a book that dares to be ambitious, that dares to refuse to conform to any expectations or limitations, a rare book that is intelligent and intellectually ambitious but still deeply relevant and engaged with the world around it. Pelevin has been similarly brilliant before, particularly in Omon Ra, but Buddha's Little Finger is a mind-blowing masterpiece, a Russian novel in the tradition of Gogol and Bulgakov, yes, but also a book deliriously, wonderfully, thrillingly eager to be in that tradition and to go well beyond it. Pelevin attempts things that a writer bound by any sense of just upholding a nationalist literary tradition would never ever dare. To begin to write about Russian cossacks and revolutionaries and end up with Japanese businessmen and Buddhism and so much else - it's that kind of ambition and range that is absent from so much so-called contemporary literature, and is exactly what is necessary to make a book a 'great 21st century novel.' And that's exactly what Pelevin has written here.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rose by any other name..., May 18, 2000

By 

Stuart Whatling (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Buddha's Little Finger (Hardcover)

Indeed - naff title for the re-issue. In England it's still published as "The Clay Machine Gun".

But whatever you call it it's a masterpiece. Daniil Kharms and Mikhail Bulgakov brought up to the post-soviet age. The episodic nature of the narrative almost makes it a loosely woven thread of short stories but the themes of existence vs illusion tie everything together beautifully. Respect to Andrew Bromfield who has done another marvelous job - I only hope he never tires of translating Pelevin's work.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Russian Magic Realism with a Buddhist slant, April 24, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Buddha's Little Finger (Hardcover)

For the first fifty pages, I wondered whether this would be more than a voyage into second-rate Kafka. Then the story began to take hold. By the time I was into the second madman's story, I was hooked. If you like metaphysical voyages, like Banks' The Bridge or some of Borges' more accessible works, you will like this. If you like your Buddhism warmed over slightly, again, you'll enjoy this.

I did, but I like dream-like voyages. I especially liked the spiritual guide of Chapaev.

I was surprised Amazon didn't notice that the forward is part of the joke - there is no Urgan Jambon Tulku VII.