Buddha's Little Finger

Rating:
Summary: Russian Magic Realism with a Buddhist slant
Review: This is a book of, and about, confusion. Mental ward patients, imagining themselves as famous civil war characters, rugged Bolshevik generals as Zen philosophers. Artsy high-society conversations, dialogues of drunken mobster, and fantasies involving the corniest Hollywood flicks with Arnold Schwarzenegger scrambled together in a weird tasting salad of a fiction book.

The author most probably is no stranger to confusion himself. Pelevin grew up in the northern Moscow suburb of Dolgoprudny - on the surface just as drab and faceless as many others. It is unique, however, in one respect: it is a home of PhysTech, the best college in natural science and technology, Russian equivalent of MIT (and my alma mater). It has also certain parallels to Yale or Columbia, where pleasant campuses are situated right in the middle of gritty inner city poverty, and where Ivy League preppies walk the leafy alleys between hallowed auditoria to write term projects and papers on, among other things, diversity and multiculturalism; after dark a SafeRide shuttle drives them around town, shielding privileged students from a little bit too real multicultural world outside, warts and all.

Dolgoprudny during late Soviet era was also a rough neighborhood. Not just working-class, it also had a large percentage of "limita" - poor migrants from faraway provinces working unattractive jobs for Moscow residence permit. Street roughs didn't mesh easily with whiz kids - future rocket scientists. They were quite right to hate PhysTech geeks: their prettiest girls liked to hang out at campus discotheques and had a habit of losing virginity in our bedbug-ridden dorm rooms. Occasionally students were attacked on poorly lit streets around campus or on pathway to commuter rail station to Moscow. We didn't have campus police and a SafeRide. The best way to protect ourselves was to quickly, at a notice of an attack, to gather available manpower at the nearest dorm and run to the streets to chase these hoodlums. Pelevin mentioned in one interview that he participated in these skirmishes - on the side of street roughs. He wasn't one of the "limita" kids though. Instead, he was of relatively comfortable soviet middle class background and was later a student in another Moscow college, albeit not as prestigious as PhysTech. More confusion.

PhysTech campus, with rows of grim rectangular buildings, wasn't a pretty place. Yet it was one of the freest spots one could find in Soviet Union. Authorities kept us at much longer leash than the state censorship would normally allow. As long as these geeks had shown promise to design better missiles and lasers, they could be spared crude forms of Soviet indoctrination. Inside these nondescript buildings there was an astonishing variety of creative life. Rock concerts, zany student theatrical performances, brilliantly made wall-sized newspapers (sometimes three-dimensional constructs), and funniest April Fools pranks surpassed everything I've seen later at the best American campuses. Interestingly, creativity extended to the other side of the Dolgoprudny social divide. Aside from best-selling Pelevin, the town also produced one of the best rock bands of the late 80's-early 90's - "Duna", composed of those street roughs we always tried to avoid on the way to train station.

Confusion of this book certainly doesn't end with readers, in particular of the English translation. Many mistook it for a scathing parody of the early Soviet propaganda hero - Red Army commander Chapaev. It is not, although appears natural for western readers who assume that Soviet pop culture was mostly propaganda (which was itself a Cold War-era propaganda idiocy of the western side). In Russia mocking Soviet-era heroes and indoctrination was already passé in 1991; by 1995 it was simply irrelevant. This Soviet classic (a book and a movie) was long before superceded by a hilarious serious of jokes about Chapaev and his sidekicks Pet'ka and Anka. I hardly remember the movie (I've probably seen it once at age of 10 or so) but I still remember dozens of jokes. Huge popularity of these jokes can be illustrated by a one of their own kind: somebody dies and enters the Great Beyond (since he was a well-known person, its a kind of VIP section). A guide who explains how things are working there shows him around. "Basically, everybody is relatively OK, having a quiet comfortable life. There is one catch though - every time somebody tells a joke about you back on Earth, you roll over. See, for example, over there, there is Khrushchev, just flipped again, over there - Nixon..." "Gee, why it is so chilly here?" - shivers the new arrival - "those two fans are spinning like mad!" "Oh, those aren't fans", explains the guide, "they are Chapaev and Pet'ka!"

The constant theme of these jokes was the folksy oafishness of the whole pack - drunken debauchers and bunglers Chapaev and Pet'ka and their vaguely sluttish companion Anka "the machine-gunner". Pelevin's quirky high-society image of Chapaev and Anka in "Buddha's little finger" is a parody on these innumerable jokes, not the "official propaganda" of the Soviet times.

Is the book itself worth it? It's hard to write a long story around a few jokes, albeit good ones, even more so around parodies on these jokes. This is probably as good as it could get, but still not quite satisfying. It is quintessential Pelevin, but somehow not his best. One can find some funny dialogues, scathing satire and delightful absurdities. Don't look for depth, or exquisite subtlety, however - it's not there. Some readers would find it sincerely enjoyable; others would feel the presence of that all-destroying Buddha's little finger - pointed at the hours spent in reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: This is Pelevin's best work to date.
Review: 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 ([e-mail])