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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Victor Pelevin.

Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless

22:36 / 26.08.03

Anyone read any of his stuff? One of my favourite modern authors- in some ways reminiscent of Haruki Murakami, though not as famous. He's written three novels and a couple of short story collections. Novels being The Clay Machine Gun- which is a bit like Iain Bank's The Bridge- a severely ill mental patient flipping between post-soviet Russia and the early 1920s, where he is a commissar. It's mostly about Buddhism and rewriting Soviet history, particularly about savaging the mythic images of one revolutionary hero. It got the Russian equivalent of the Booker Prize in the teeth of stiff opposition, one critic describing it as 'a virus to destroy our cultural memory' or some such.
Omon Ra, which is a brilliant satire on the declining USSR's desperate attempts to keep up appearances through the space program. Can't say more without devastating the plot.
The latest one Babylon is about a poet who becomes a copy-writer and ends up becoming involved in a strange Ishtar-magic mushroom related media cult, connected to the Japanese and faking films of Boris Yeltsin while drunk . It is v. strange, and I think should appeal to many Barbeloi.
All his stuff is slightly cyberpunk, but don't let that put you off if that isn't your thing. His prose, even in translation, kicks seven shades of shit out of William Gibson and the like.
He writes about fairly clueless people who get enlisted unwillingly in ridiculous con-tricks, and are forced by circumstances to ride the train to the end of the line. Good black humour, particularly in Omon Ra.
The short stories are great too, particularly the one about two cavalrymen guarding a street in revolutionary Petrograd, who hold a debate about whether the actions or negligence of an individual can determine the course of history, while every so often a bald man with a goatee and a lisp tries to sneak past, dressed as an old woman.

nedrichards is confused

22:53 / 28.08.03

One of my favourite authors and it's great to see him pop up on Barbelith. Some parts of Babylon are quite simply breathtaking, the chapter where he enters the strange the strange Japanese warehouse and eventually commits seppuku (apologies Japanese spellers) is one of the best things I've ever read. I think it was excerpted in a Granta titled 'The Wild East' (can't remember the number) and it reads just as well standalone.

The Clay Machine Gun is a much more even book than Babylon and probably contains his best work. There's all sorts of post modernist reappropriation going on there as I believe the two main characters from the 1920s strand are sort of the Revolutionary Russian movie eqivilents of Laurel and Hardy (could be wrong there though).

Also interesting is 'The life Of Insects' which loses mommentum after its clever premise (everyone is, er, insects but also people at the same time). I'd thoroughly encourage you to check him out though, I paid him the ultimate geeky compliment of giving my TiBook his surname as a network name.

Disco is My Class War

15:02 / 07.03.04

How bizarre. I just wrote a rant about how much I loved Babylon on the 2004 Current Reading thread, did a Google search on Pelevin, and am now back here. Will post my rant again, as it expresses some of the same things... (By the way, if you're going to tell us Vova commits seppuku, you should put in a spoiler warning -- I'm only 3/4's of the way through!)

>>>>

My girlfriend picked up a deceptively boring-looking Russian novel in the paperback section at our local library. It's called Babylon by Vladimir Pelevin. It's bloody amazing.

The narrative is like a Buddhist-style descent (or ascent -- we can't decide) into the world of advertising, marketing and media in post-communist Russia. It has no sex in it whatsoever: the narrator points out that most people are either into sex or drugs, and he is into the latter. Hence lots of magic mushrooms and bad acid trips. And snorting coke off of lush carpets. Beyond that, there's no real plot. There are a lot of fake write-ups for advertising campaigns designed to re-format Western products for 'the Russian mentality'. There's also a brilliant section where the protagonist channels Che Guevara through a ouija board and produces a kind of revolutionary Freudiano-communist manifesto on the ideology of advertising.

Babylon covers some of the same territory as Gibson's Pattern Recognition yet pisses all over it, revealing why Gibson should hand in his cool card. Rather than slumming it around London and Toyko ripping the designer labels off her clothes, fondling Apples and trying to find some redemptive quality in 21st century media-capitalism, Pelevin's protagonist stays in Moscow, doesn't give a crap about politics, is entirely cynical and just wants to make a buck so he can impress bus-travellers with his new Mercedes. However, he manages to come up with a far more acute diagnosis of imperalism and capitalism than Gibson could. And it's not realist in any shape or form, yet still manages to feel more 'real' than the aspirational beautiful-people schtick of Pattern Recognition. (Hey, I love Gibson, which is probably why sledging him feels like such an illicit, yet delicious, pleasure.)

My gf says it reminds her of Steppenwolf and I think I agree, but it's more funny and less navel-gazing. Go read it....

08:45 / 01.04.04

I just got Babylon from the library, but also got Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, so am not sure which one to read first. Both seem to involve Russia at some point and are a yellowy colour. Babylon seems the crazier of the two.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

16:56 / 02.04.04

I picked up The Clay Machine Gun at a library sale a while back... it's gradually working its way up the list of books I intend to read. Have to admit, the blurb makes it sound fucking wicked.

16:23 / 22.04.04

parts of Babylon are quite simply breathtaking, the chapter where he enters the strange Japanese warehouse and eventually commits seppuku (apologies Japanese spellers) is one of the best things I've ever read

umm... I just finished Babylon, and seem to have missed this bit... a what point was this? did the American edition get abridged?

nedrichards is confused

16:26 / 24.04.04

er, I'll check when I get home but I think I got it confused with The Clay Machine Gun.

01:13 / 27.04.04

You guys convinced me to check Pelevin out. (Literally.) He reminds me of another author I recently started reading, Steve Erickson.

09:56 / 27.04.04

Really? What similarities do you see between them?

11:14 / 29.04.04

Just finished a British edition of Babylon, and no seppuku in that one either. Good book though. Reminded me a little bit of Mark Leyner's "Et Tu, Babe".

17:48 / 30.04.04

Most of the similarity to me is that Tours of the black clock and Omon Ra are both oddly speculative works set in authoritarian regimes of the 20th century. They're almost SF, yet not really.

18:01 / 30.04.04

I read all the reviews on amazon, and I think I'm gonna buy one of his short story collections. He sounds cool so I'll give him a shot.

19:28 / 30.04.04

Nobody has mentioned The yellow arrow, which at a slim 90-some pages I read yesterday morning. I don't think I can say anything about it ruining the surprise of the premise, however.

nedrichards is confused

09:16 / 01.05.04

Further analysis and a swift use of Amazon's 'search inside the book' reminds me that the Seppuku bit is from 'The Clay Machine Gun' (confirmation in the Salon review), also excerpted in Granta 64. I belive it's a much better book than Babylon technicaly and structurally, with the fractured timeframe and multiple POV on the same theme.

14:25 / 24.05.04

I Read Omon Ra as part of my degree.C'est Bon!!. It's the most savage satire i've ever read, the language and the ideas are quite playful, but it just completely shits on everything Marxist-Leninism stands for while laughing heartily all within the structure of a Soviet production novel.That Pelevin's kinda like morrison in his context shifting random idea vomit (stimulating vomit)

unheimlich manoeuvre

11:19 / 17.10.04

*bump*

i read the Clay Machine Gun a few months ago, on the rave reviews in this thread, and it did not disappoint. it is one of the best books i've read in years! beautiful, profound and absurd.

11:01 / 18.10.04

I read "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories" a few months back. Some of the stories were great, most notably the title story as well as the last one in the book which detailed life in a bizarre Soviet Ministry around 1983 where everyone plays the newest video games...