Victor Pelevin Books In Order

The Yellow Arrow

Set during the advent of perestroika, a surreal, satirical novella by a critically acclaimed young Russian writer traces the fate of the passengers on The Yellow Arrow, a long distance Russian train headed for a ruined bridge, a train without an end or a beginning and it makes no stops. Andrei, the mystic passenger, less and less lulled by the never ending sound of the wheels, has begun to look for a way to get off. But life in the carriages goes on as always. This important young Russian author’s first American translation garnered rave reviews. The main character, Andrei, is a passenger aboard The Yellow Arrow, who begins to despair over the trains ultimate destination and looks for a way out as the chapters count down. Indifferent to their fate, the other passengers carry on as usual trading in nickel melted down fro the carriage doors, attending the Upper Bunk avant garde theatre, and leafing through Pasternak’s Early Trains. Pelevin’s art lies in the ease with which he shifts from precisely imagined science fiction to lyrical meditations on past and future. And, because he is a natural storyteller with a wonderfully absurd imagination. The Yellow Arrow is full of the ridiculous and the sublime. It is a reflective story, chilling and gripping.

The Life of Insects

In a sophisticated display of allegory, fantasy, and philosophical inquiry, Victor Pelevin creates an Ovidian, shape shifting world that never fails to resonate on various strata with our own. The Life of Insects opens with a trio of investors two Russians and one American discussing business prospects in the Crimea, when, suddenly, they reveal themselves to be mosquitoes in search of hemoglobin and glucose. Other figures morph from human to insect and back again in this thoroughly disorienting yet strangely familiar Kafkaesque novel. Both a parody of traditional Russian prose and a savage commentary of post Soviet culture, The Life of Insects is a triumphant act of storytelling that succeeds in making ‘insect aspirations and anxiety feel so fragile and so soberingly universal’ The New York Times Book Review.

Omon Ra

‘An inventive comedy as black as outer space itself. Makes The Right Stuff looks like a NASA handout.’ Tibor Fischer. Victor Pelevin’s novel Omon Ra has been widely praised for its poetry and its wickedness, a novel in line with the great works of Gogol and Bulgakov: ‘full of the ridiculous and the sublime,’ says The Observer London . Omon is chosen to be trained in the Soviet space program the fulfillment of his lifelong dream. However, he enrolls only to encounter the terrifying absurdity of Soviet protocol and its backward technology: a bicycle powered moonwalker; the outrageous Colonel Urgachin ‘a kind of Sovier Dr. Strangelove’ The New York Times; and a one way assignment to the moon. The New Yorker proclaimed: ‘Omon’s adventure is like a rocket firing off its various stages each incident is more jolting and propulsively absurd than the one before.’

The Clay Machine Gun

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.

Babylon

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.

Buddha’s Little Finger

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.

Ho*mo Zapiens

Chronicling the garish excesses of post Soviet Russia, Victor Pelevin’s novels have won him cult status at home and critical acclaim in the international press. In his new novel, Ho*mo Zapiens, Pelevin weaves together a deliciously comic vision of vanity, greed, and advertising Moscow style. The collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up a vast market ripe for exploitation. Everybody wants a piece of the action. But how do you sell things to a generation that grew up with just one brand of cola? Enter Tartarsky, the hero of Ho*mo Zapiens, a lowly shop assistant who is hired as a copywriter and discovers a hidden talent for devising home grown alternatives to Western ads. Tartarsky is propelled into a world of gangsters, spin doctors, and drug dealers, fueled by cocaine and hallucinogenic mushrooms. But as his fortunes soar, reality loosens its grip and old certainties crumble. Who is the boss man or his television set? When advertisers talk about ‘twisting reality,’ do they mean it quite literally? And exactly what does go on at the Institute of Apiculture? This is a stunning and ingenious work of imagination, humor, and poignance, a satire that cuts both ways, East and West. It confirms Pelevin as the true heir of Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov, a powerful voice of Russian absurdism.

The Sacred Book of Werewolf

Paranormal meets transcendental in this provocative and hilarious novel. Victor Pelevin has established a reputation as one of the most brilliant writers at work today; his comic inventiveness has won him comparisons to Kafka, Calvino, and Gogol, and Time has described him as a psychedelic Nabokov for the cyberage. Pelevin’s new novel, his first in six years, is both a supernatural love story and a satirical portrait of modern Russia. It concerns the adventures of a hardworking fifteen year old Moscow prostitute named A. Huli, who in reality is a two thousand year old were fox who seduces men in order to absorb their life force; she does this by means of her tail, a hypnotic organ that puts men into a trance in which they dream they are having sex with her. A. Huli eventually comes to the attention of and falls in love with a high ranking Russian intelligence officer named Alexander, who is also a werewolf unbeknownst to our hero*ine. And that is only the beginning of the fun. A huge success in Russia, this is a stunning and ingenious work of the imagination, arguably Pelevin s sharpest and most engrossing novel to date.

The Blue Lantern

Pelevin, The Blue Lantern. Addictive, hysterical, and uncategorizable stories

A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia

The absurd becomes the truth in these magnificent eight short stories by the contemporary post Soviet Union author. Victor Pelevin is ‘the only young Russian novelist to have made an impression in the West’ Village Voice. A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, the second of Pelevin’s Russian Booker Prize winning short story collections, continues his Sputnik like rise. The writers to whom he is frequently compared Kafka, Bulgakov, Philip K. Dick, and Joseph Heller are all deft fabulists, who find fuel for their fires in society’s deadening protocol.

‘At the very start of the third semester, in one of the lectures on Marxism Leninism, Nikita Dozakin made a remarkable discovery,’ begins the story ‘Sleep.’ Nikita’s discovery is that everyone around him, from parents to television talk show hosts, is actually asleep. In ‘Vera Pavlova’s Ninth Dream,’ the attendant in a public toilet finds that her researches into solipsism have dire and diabolical consequences. In the title story, a young Muscovite, Sasha, stumbles upon a group of people in the forest who can transform themselves into wolves. As Publishers Weekly noted, ‘Pelevin’s allegories are reminiscent of children’s fairy tales in their fantastic depictions of worlds within worlds, solitary souls tossed helplessly among them.’ Pelevin whom Spin called ‘a master absurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of things human’ carries us in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia to a land of great sublimity and black comic brilliance.