This flamboyantly imaginative story is set in Russia in the periods
that mark the beginning and end of communism - 1914 and the early
1990s. Both are times of political emptiness and uncertaintly, when
the old order is crumbling and the new is yet to be established.
The protagonist, aptly named Peter Voyd, inhabits both periods - as
a patient in a psychiatric hospital in the 1990s, and in his dream
state, as Petka , a captain in the Red Army in 1914. The story
begins with Peter Voyd in his Petka role arriving in Moscow to
avoid the Cheka (secret police). He meets up with a friend by
chance and goes back to his flat with him only to discover that the
meeting is a trick and the Cheka are on their way. To his own
surprise and even revulsion, he murders his 'friend', takes his
cocaine and then quietly begins to play his favourite fugue in F by
Mozart. Pelevin is a contradictory as his turbulent novel. Although
he has a cult-like following in Russia, and is seen in the west as
one of Russia's most important contemporary literary writers, the
Russian literary establishment is divided and many think him a
fraud. He is a recluse who has spent time in meditation in a
Buddhist monastery, yet he enjoys the benefits of wealth and does
not turn his back on western interviewers. This is his third book
to be translated into English, and is a complex novel rich in
ideas, comedy and literary tricks - a sort of nightmarish shuffling
of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Joseph Heller's Catch 22. It is not to
be missed. (Kirkus UK)
An intellectually dazzling and hilarious fantasy about identity and
Russian history, and a spectacular elaboration of Buddhist
philosphy, The Clay Machine-Gun confirms Victor Pelevin as 'one of
the brightest stars in the Russian literary firmament' Observer.
'Victor Pelevin is the future of the Russian novel. His satires
take the temperature of post-Soviet Russia, in all its amoral,
dystopian chaos.With his fusion of oriental and sci-fi, there's no
mistaking Pelevin's place in the absurdist pantheon alongside Gogol
and Bulgakov.' Independent.
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