Customer Reviews

Buddha's Little Finger

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, perhaps it's a tie between this book and Pelevin's latest, "Generation P" (not yet translated from Russian).

"Buddha's Little Finger" is an amazing story, but it demands high mental agility from the reader. Can you visualize the pseudodecadent scene of St. Petersburg in the 1910s-1920s? How about "Inner Mongolia" - a place that is not at all "inner", nor a place, nor Mongolia? Or the Fugue in F Minor by Mozart that was also a staircase?

And most importantly: can you read a whole chapter of incessant Russian slang and not "obaldet v nature"?

:-)

DJA (angel-ica@mailcity.com)

Is existence an illusion in which we are ensnared until enlightenment allows us to see through the sham and escape? Can we transcend this dream of frustration, strife, and cruelty called life? And what about consciousness? Does it extend beyond the little region of time and space where we act out our roles? Buddha's Little Finger is a work that breathes drama into these esoteric musings. The main character is an apolitical, daring, poet/soldier-of-fortune nominally fighting for the Red army in revolutionary Russia. Strangely enough he is also a mental patient in the post-Soviet era who has not been able to adapt to the "new Russia". His doctor has been trying,evidently for some time, to supplant his mystical, poetic nature with one more harmonious to the materialism of society. The hero's consciousness oscillates between these two worlds,each seeming real when he is present; and the other a dream. Other more minor themes, such as the intrusion of foreign value systems into Russian culture enter into the narrative, but ultimately everything depicted in the novel more or less contributes to the main metaphysical proposition, which I would say is "Can I become the potter as well as the clay?" Images of gritty realism juxtaposed to phantasmagorical supernatural scenes propel the development of this story along toward the attainment of a peak experience by the hero, helped along by his commander/guru. I thought the novel concluded in a very satisfying manner, given the material it was built upon. A good thing in my opinion, for who wants to conclude a fantasy with a let-down? This book may even entice you to believe for a little while that there are cracks in the system of the world through which you might escape(assuming you've ever wanted to). I believe the philosophical aspects of this work earn it more serious regard than as just an interesting fantasy; but in this case serious regard does not equate with dull-no way!

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".

A contemporary Manuscript Found In Saragossa written with tongue firmly in cheek. The Buddhist allusions are a touch laboured however, all in all, it remains a thoroughly enjoyable read.

This is an awesome book....I read 3 times and sometimes reread some parts. Pelevin's style is very unique and could be misinterpreted by some people.

Not to easy to comprehends for many people, since it involves a lot of philosophical and existential concepts. Unsophisticated reader will view the book as a collection of insane stories.

I would recommend this book to those who are inquiring about "who am I", "where this world came from", "who is a real creator"... Pelevin provides existential view mainly of Buddust tradition.