Product Description

Translated from the Russian, this razor-sharp satire on consumer culture, Russian style, follows the irresistible rise of a Moscow advertising copywriter, who specialises in adjusting Western adverts to the Eastern mentality and selling Pepsi, Seven-up, Gucci, Mercedes and Reebok to the rising middle class.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34918 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-19
• Original language: Russian
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"Gucci for Men--be a European, smell better". The irresistible rise of Babylen Tartasky from poet to advertising copywriter followed by the short step to ultimate political power is founded on his smart diagnosis of his country's malaise and his ability to encapsulate his compatriots yearnings in a sharp slogan. This is the new Russia of gangsters, fast-flowing cocaine and the untrammelled free market and it is a very disturbing place indeed, not least because in its rawness is laid bare the anatomy of our own degenerative Western culture. Add a splash of Gucci aftershave and there really is little to tell us apart.

As a literary sensation in Russia, with six novels already to his name, Pelevin has clearly touched a nerve with his acute insights into the national psyche. Written with cruel wit concealing an austere compassion, it is Pelevin's peculiar talent to capture the sheer absurdity of the experience of a nation which, in the space of a century, has undergone two convulsive revolutions, won and lost a global empire, conquered space and yet been defeated by its own habits of dependency. Omon Ra, Pelevin's most controlled work to date, is a novel woven around the fundamental Soviet fantasy of the cosmonaut hero, while The Clay Machine Gun concerns a contemporary madman's vivid imaginings of his experiences as an unintentional hero of the Revolution. In Babylon, though, we are tricked by a double fantasy: the narrative segues in and out of virtuosic hallucinatory prose alongside Tartasky's own drug trips while the story itself veers towards ludicrous revelations about where the power in society truly lies.

At times the strategy can be exasperating and the ultimate rewards are slightly squandered but along the way there are wonderful jokes and acute analysis. ­-Alex Butterworth

Customer Reviews

Babylon is Kafka, Bulgakov and Philip K Dick rolled into 1
Russian writer Victor Pelevin is the wunderkind of young Russian literature; when everybody despairs about the condition of modern literature in the country of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and the only new Russian novels available are exploitative trash in the tradition of Tom Clancy and Jackie Collins, Pelevin is the one that brings hope back to weary and cynical literary critics. 39-year-old Pelevin has been writing his own peculiar kind of science fiction absurdism for the better part of a decade now, and he is widely popular among critics, young readers, and Internet users. Babylon is the fourth of his novels to be translated into English so far; The Clay Machine-Gun, Omon Ra, and The Life of Insects have all previously been released to critical acclaim in the West.

Babylon follows the strange adventures of Tatarsky, a disillusioned young man in the drab days of post-Communist Moscow. As Tatarsky unexpectedly falls into the world of advertising, he finds himself enjoying the process of transforming Western ad campaigns into Russian formats. Slowly but surely, reality as he knows it begins to disintegrate in front of his eyes, and he is not certain whether this is a result of the powerful hallucinogenic drugs he consumes on occasion, or whether Russia has simply become a world with no apparent logic or sanity. Meanwhile, he is getting some helpful hints from the ghost of Che Guevara, who is now a Buddhist ghost (albeit with Freudian ideas about historical materialism), communicating via ouija boards.

It is rather easy to spot the influences in Pelevin's novels: Kafka, Bulgakov, and Philip K Dick just to name the most obvious predecessors. The absurdity of the situations that Tatarsky finds himself involved in are indeed reminiscent of Bulgakov's comic masterpiece The Master and Margarita. Furthermore, the black humour and seemingly endless series of trivial yet frightening obstacles on the path toward completion of a process bring back notions of Kafkaesque comedy (particulary The Castle). Philip K Dick is frequently evoked in the anti-capitalist satire and in the literary approach to sci-fi existentialism.

However, Pelevin's style is his own, and Babylon oscillates wildly between satiric depiction of the shallow world of advertising (often the strongest parts of the novel), and theoretical expositions on the nature of greed and human stupidity in a capitalist society. Not that Pelevin should be seen as a nostalgic socialist: he ridicules the rigidity and lack of free thought under party rule as viciously as he lashes out against the current regime. The conclusion of the novel features an idea as brilliant as it is absurd; for fear of ruining the pleasure of reading Pelevin, it shall not be revealed here. Suffice to say, you will look very carefully at the next photo you see of Boris Yeltsin.

Reviewed by Lars Andersson.

Identalism as the highest stage of dualism!?
Babylon contains within it one the funniest and perceptive critiques of our media-advertising age that I have ever read. Tatarasky somehow contacts Che Guevara via ouija board, and accesses a report on a growing organism called ORANUS which has developed a primative nervous system called the media, this in turn transmits 3 types of impulse, oral, anal and displacing wow-impulses. The oral wow-impulse causes cells (humans transformed to homozapiens through television)to ingest money in order to relieve self suffering brought about by the conflict of the self image and the ideal super self generated by advertising. The anal impulse induces elimination of money. I'll leave you to discover the rest for yourself, but Pelevin develops this premise in this short section and somehow manages to satirise EVERYTHING in only ten pages. This is only one aspect of this very well written and inventive novel. It stands alongside 'money', 'crash', 'fight club', 'dice man', 'atomised' and 'american psycho' as a modern classic.

Contributes superbly to a rich literary legacy!
This man has inherited the Crown of the Grotesque from Bulgakov, married it to Gogol's absurdist might and coagulated a literary legacy which spans Dostoevsky's Underground Man, Kafka's 'Castle', Kundera and Calvino.

He combines considerable humour and interpretative nous to expose the significant shortcomings and explore the ultimate direction of post-Soviet capitalism and, by extension, the modern world, soaked in materialism and oblivious to the philosophical-spiritual sphere which underlies Pelevin's fiction. (The corruption engendered by Yeltsin's rule and depicted in 'Babylon' may prove far more damaging than the halving of GNP which he presided over...)

Lamentable only is the exaggerrated use of such time-worn tricks as ouija boards and narcotics abuse, to which Pelevin is forced to resort to achieve the necessary inspiration and motivation in his characters, thereby displaying, in comparison to Dostoevsky (to whom he makes duly reverent reference) a distinct psychological ineptitude.

Throughout this novel and the suspension of disbelief it induces, the insistent thought recurs, as with Franceschini's 'La donna della Piazza Rossa': could it really be true? Did Pelevin really know about the Nike suicide ad - subsequently barred? (Answers via a subconscious brand-positioning broadcast, please.)

Despite overt references to and rich imagery borrowed from it, this work pales into insignificance, however, when placed alongside the source of all Truth, the Bible itself.