Product Description

A manic satire of psychiatry, crime and corruption in Russia. Peter Null is undergoing treatment in Moscow's Psychiatric Clinic number 17, where his consultant believes the way to treat his condition is to humour his delusive personality until it achieves reintegration with the rest of his psyche.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #383870 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-21
• Original language: Russian
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
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)

Customer Reviews

Is this book real?
One of the strangest books you're ever likely to read, this manages to combine a thriller about mistaken identity with meditations on metaphysics. Pelevin achieves the near-impossible by generating extremely philosophical dialogue in a way that doesn't sound at all unnatural or forced. And there is a tension and mystery about the characters and situation that keeps you reading.

The story? Well, it begins in 1920s Russia with a murder and a chain of events that the central character is unable to stop. The plot then switches to present-day Russia and an asylum, and between the two you start to wonder what exactly is real and what imagined.

Not as good as the amazing Life Of Insects, but better than the disappointing Babylon.

Just amazing
I'm finding it unusually difficult to find what it is that I want to say about this book. It really is the best thing that I've read in a very long time. In fact I can't remember the last time I had to set down a book half way through a chapter, just to think about what I'd just read.
The closest experience I've had to reading this was when I read Philip K. Dick's VALIS for the first time. It's not particularly easy to read, but the flow of the narrative is close to perfect.

I think that there are a lot of levels this can be read on. I think that I probably missed a lot of them too. It's intensely deep and dripping with all sorts of symbolism and imagery.
The more I read fiction from eastern europe and russia, the more impressed I become. It's just so completely different from the style of authors further west. Once again I find myself impressed almost beyond words.

Even though I finished this a few days ago, I'm already looking forward to when I pick it up to read it again. And that hasn't happened to me in a long time too. I'm off now to order up the rest of Mr. Pelevin's books.

A Journey into the realms of sanity that is madness
The meaning of the universe, the concept of reality, the truth of one's existence - these are the thoughts overflowing the mind of the characters in Pelevin's The Clay Machine-Gun. Read it again and again and you will uncover new layers of meanings that every word oozes from every page of this amazing book. You are inside Petr's head, you experience both his contemporary reality in which he finds himself surrounded by the inhabitants of a mental institution and his other reality, in which he is the comrade of the legendary "Chapaev", fighting the battles, drinking too much vodka and sniffing coke. Yet, this is not a book that lectures you on the impossibility of ever finding the truth, it just gives you a fascinating story of life in any society, in any century and in any country.