Rating: 
Summary: With books like this, who needs drugs?
Review: 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:
Summary: only a shady future for the mountain of what's to come
Review: if it is a serious game upon which one shall scramble the rescued work of pelevin, then here it shall stand. yes, provided the realization of self, peter, nonetheless a maniac, an animal and a simple memorizer of foolish games of the local drunkards, has no future and no end to the past clinically welded. yes, he would say the strings of the fruitless mind have completed their own miscalculation by replacing the needs with the wants/wishes/surgical desires. but upon these mindless misconceptions of time and space and cow they or, rather, he knows what not...? yes, it is not so gleemful, but stately as the game itself. so did lennon fall in love in such terms as does viktor.
Rating:
Summary: six stars
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A rose by any other name...
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Swirling the consciousness
Review: It is impossible to say what this book is about. Shortly, it is about exploration of your inner world, "Inner Mongoly". Perhaps being one of the best Russian writers of the past century (among Nabokov and Bulgakov), Pelevin brings in a new outlook on the mordern literature, combining both exceptional literature talent and a deep knowledge of existing world phylosofy and history. Two distinct stories develop in parallel in this book. The first is about the Russian poet that is driven crazy by the bizzare reality of post-soviet Russia, that combines together things that are impossible to see anywhere else in the modern world. Experiencing severe mental shock he is trying to overcome in the mental clinic, he is attempting to solve the problem of finding himself as an integral part of the world he is living in. High on the drugs that he is treated with in the hospital, he moves into the adjacent reality - Russia of 1920 - the time of great changes and new beliefs. He finds himself there being the right hand of the Red Army General Chapayev and goes through the row of alterations that happen to him while he interacts with people and events that are now known to be a history. Like russians are currently concerned about finding the "Great Russian idea" that will bring Russian again back to prosperity and power in the modern Capitalistic world, Pustota (the name of the main hero) is looking for his own personal meaning through interaction with reality that intellegent person can barely deal with due to its complete absurdacy and senselessness. His personal fate is closely linked to that of dramatic and glorious Russian history of the past century. If you feel like you're dealing with the revolution inside yourself each and every day, this book is for you. This book is an easy reading, but only if you are ready for it. It doesn't give the answers, but it brings in the questions, which is more important. This book is worth reading lots of times. It is as beautifull as David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" and as deep and intellegent as Nabokov's "Invitation to Beheading". If only I could give it six stars!
Rating: 
Summary: Buddhism a la Russe
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Heavy but satisfying read
Review: 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:
Summary: Heavy but satisfying read
Review: 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:
Summary: Enjoyable. Forgettable.
Review: THE CONTEXT. The middlebrow and sligtly less than that reader is finally targeted at the Russian book market. The pre-Perestroika years saw thousands of Moscovites reading poetry and pholosophy in our subway. The quest for material wealth could result in a few years in prison or a brief but deadly rendez-vous with a firing squad. It was much safer to live on a salary, sip your thin borscht and soar into empirea reading Akhmatova and Berdiaev. Vodka helped to enhance the pleasure. Then the world outside opened up and the flood of Western-style entertainment took these poetic broodings from intelligentsia's hands and replaced them with J.H.Chase,Jackie Collins and other varieties of mass market idiocy. It was declared that the notion of The Culture as the realm of classic music, poetry and philosophy is outdated and has to be replaced by the bunch of different cultures, much better suited to satisfy the needs of the newly diversified society. And there is no such thing as the cultural hierarchy - just enjoy what you like! I was stunned seeing what my University pals read these days. The creative penniless misfits of yesteryears earned their first - and for many of them the last - hundreds thousands dollars and turned unashamedly to the worst schlock imaginable. Of course I was aware that we witness the cultural pendulum's downswing and the situation will become more balanced in a few years. Yes, everything is stabilized now, good reading is en vogue again, but the urge to "napriagatsya"(i.e. to make an effort) and "gruzitsya"(to immerse oneself into the complex system of images or reasoning) somehow dissolved. So the highbrow works are a losers' fare now. The former intelligentsia is satisfied with reading entertaining creampuffs generously sprinkled with the hints of Pop Buddhism and other kinds of esoterica. THE BOOK The book is good. It's making use of much-loved anecdotes about the Civil War hero Vasili Ivanovich Chapaev, his sidekick Petka and the very accessible bombshell Anka. There are great chunks of collective soul in any folklore - tackling it you will surely be appreciated. Seeing one tradition from the other tradition's viewpoint will surely result in something very readable, the sordid anecdotes made to look as the manifestations of Buddhist philosophy are shockingly original and amusing. The author throws in the current fetishes - Simply Maria from the Mexican telenovella millions of Russians love to watch, Arnold Shwartzenegger, the New Russian bandits. Evidently Pelevin does not aim for eternity. Many of the "modern day" details are already outdated. Many scenes are really cheap.The things that helped to sell as many copies of the book as possible are slipping into the past, but that does not seem to bother the author - he's already cashed on his disposable masterpiece. Chapaev and Emptiness (that's the original title) is more journalism that literature. It's not profound but it doesn't pretend to be, it's enjoyable but forgettable - a bestseller, the new phenomenon brought into life when the newborn Russian consumerism ventured into the territories of art. I can not predict the book's impact on anyone from outside the Russian cultural tradition. You have to be compatible to see that book for what it really is. Or you'll end up hailing Pelevin as the new Gogol(he is not) or doing even weirder things.
Rating:
Summary: It will make your head spin
Review: This book is an absurdist gem, ambitious from the start and, despite occasional hiccups, living up to many of its ambitions with ingenuity that at times had me applauding and laughing out loud with pure delight. The storylines are rather convoluted and the discussions between the characters on the nature of reality, consciousness, and void can make an unprepared reader's head spin, but it's all good. I read this in the original so I can't comment on the English translation but I hope that Andrew Bromfield (the translator) managed to get across at least part of the hilarious beauty of the author's dialogues. Pelevin's take on the Moscow mobsters' psylocibin-inspired philosophical exchanges on the meaning of life, for example, is a pure joy to read. Even though I doubt that non-Russians will get many of the book's cultural references, it is a work great enough to stimulate and entertain when placed in any cultural context. I have seen articles that declared Victor Pelevin the first successful Russian postmodernist and ones that claim that he sabotages postmodernism by infusing it with Buddhism. If the splitting of philosophical hairs is your cup of tea, you'll enjoy trying to categorize this book. If you could care less about all the academic stuff, you'll enjoy the novel's sparkling satire and perhaps learn something about mysticism in the process. If you don't like thinking and are looking for a simple mindless read that won't strain your grey matter, skip this book -- you're gonna hate it!
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