Victor Pelevin
1996
Around 345 pages
If you are having trouble finding this one, don't despair. This novel goes by a few aliases, and I had better luck tracking it down as Buddha's Little Finger. If you're still having trouble, try Chapayev and Pustota. I'm advising for List purposes of course, I wasn't that impressed with this as a novel.
The novel is written as a first-person narrative of Peter Pustota and set in two different times, the October Revolution and modern Russia. Pustota is a poet who has fled from Saint Petersburg and assumes the identity of a Soviet political commissar. He meets Vasily Chapayev and spends his days drinking samogon, taking drugs, and talking about the meaning of life. Every night Pustota has nightmares about him being locked up in a psychiatric hospital.
It's strange to read a novel for the List that references Pulp Fiction and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm still stuck in the 1800s, hoping that epistolary novels make a comeback. This novel is intentionally all over the place, and it's hard to tell what's real and what's a dream. Not exactly my go to recipe for literary euphoria.
This is one of the novels where the writer seems to hate everyone and everything. More Bulgakov than Gogol, so not really my thing.
RATING: **---
Interesting Facts:
Pelevin is known for not being a part of the literary crowd, rarely appearing in public or giving interviews.
UP NEXT: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
No comments:
Post a Comment