Virtual Macedonia Bookstore - Buddha's Little Finger

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.

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.

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.

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.