Buddha's Little Finger
Historical fiction, Philosophy
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
The Russian author Victor Pelevin is rapidly establishing a reputation as one of the most brilliant young writers at work today. His comic inventiveness and talent as a pure fabulist have won him comparisons to Kafka, Calvino, Bulgakov, Gogol, Phillip… K. Dick, and Joseph Heller, and Time magazine has described him as a "psychedelic Nabokov for the cyberage. " In Pelevin's new novel, Buddha's Little Finger, Pyotr Void, a leading St. Petersburg poet, unexpectedly finds himself in the midst of the 1919 civil war in Russia, serving as commissar to the legendary Bolshevik commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev and his formidable machine-gunner sidekick, Anna. But what is the secret of her machine gun? Why does Pyotr keep waking to find himself in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow in the 1990s? And where does Arnold Schwarzenegger fit into all this? Shifting between time and place and spinning story upon story, Buddha's Little Finger is unlike any other novel, a work of demonic absurdism that demonstrates Pelevin's genius for metaphysical comedy.