Babylon [Paperback]

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.

In Babylon, Pelevin explores the world of the Russian advertiser, the world of the exploiter and the exploited. Babylen Tatarsky, an ex-academic and budding mystic, who stopped writing poetry at the collapse of communism, has instead turned his flair for words to the creation of advertising slogans for the corrupt New Russian businessmen eager to fleece the young generation-p (Pepsi).

RUSSIA - NO WAY TO UNDERSTAND HER NO WAY HER HIDDEN SOULD TO RENDER SMIRNOFF

MONEY DOES SMELL! "BENJAMIN" THE NEW SMELL FROM HUGO BOSS

The familiar brands are given a makeover, made deeply Russian for the unsuspecting masses. Reading this devastating and allegorical satire it is easy to understand why Pelevin is sometimes considered the Bulgakov of his generation. The journey to advertising copy-writing nirvana takes in magic mushroom trips, an encounter with Rasputin as a dealer in mind-expanding drugs, Chechen gangsters, and 'comparative positioning'. Drugs, communism, and advertising; Pelevin makes it clear these are all agents that wash the brain and distort reality. Pelevin revisits the themes he seems obsessed with - eastern mysticism, societal alienation, the ghost of the soviet - whilst crafting a novel that is more accessible than previous efforts such as The Clay Machine Gun and The Life of Insects, but not at the expense of his black humour and surrealist twist on the everyday.