Buddha's Little Finger Hardcover – May 1, 2000

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

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)
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