The Clay Machine-Gun
By (Author) Victor Pelevin
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
21st August 2000
21st August 2000
Main
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
891.7344
Short-listed for IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2001
352
Width 128mm, Height 198mm, Spine 21mm
270g
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.
Born in 1962 in Moscow, Victor Pelevin has swiftly been recognised as the leading Russian novelist of the new generation. Before studying at Moscow's Gorky Institute of Literature, he worked in a number of jobs, including as an engineer on a project to protect MiG fighter planes from insect interference in tropical conditions. One of the few novelists today who writes seriously about what is happening in contemporary Russia, he has, according to the New York Times, 'the kind of mordant, astringent turn of mind that in the pre-glasnost era landed writers in psychiatric hospitals or exile'.His work has been translated into fifteen languages and his novels Omon Ra, The Life of Insects, The Clay Machine-Gun and Babylon, and two collections of short stories, The Blue Lantern (winner of the Russian 'Little Booker' Prize) and A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, have been published in English to great acclaim.Victor Pe