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 tu ...Read More
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 tu ...Read More
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