The Clay Machine-Gun

This is an amazing book.Set out in two different Worlds and times, both happening inside one man's mind (Peter Void). In one part he is a patient in a psychiatric clinic, in another a warrior and a poet. One World's dream is reality in another, so when he falls asleep in one he simply awakes in another.His task is to awaken (as for the rest of us) from both dreams into a true reality, but for him it is twice as hard as he must do it in both parts of his dream.Book is beautifully written and easy to read yet it touches (and explains) most deep Buddhist topics. Sometimes they are explained by very unexpected personages, like a member of a mafia gang, which makes them shine from completely different angle.I am not sure if this book would appeal to those with no interest in Buddhism or mysticism, unless it's a fan of some really weird "out of this world" books. Fans of Russian literature will also enjoy it as it can be put in one row with some of the best examples of Russian prose, i.e. Bulgakov.Read it, and who know, maybe it will help you to find what you were looking for (even if you do not know what it is).

A very unusual read, my attention was held throughout and I finished the book in good time - a read I didn't want to put down. Like a strange mix of Dostoevsky and modern pop culture.

It is a work of art.

`The Clay Machine Gun' starts with an epigraph from Genghis Khan (presumably from `The Secret History of the Mongols'): "I often think: where am I in this flux?". And as readers hopscotch around the narratives in this postmodern Buddhist novel they might end up thinking `where the flux am I?` as well.TCMG ingeniously scopes the lives (or incarnations) of the same `skandha' (ie what a non-Buddhist would mistakenly call a `soul'). The two dominant narratives feature Pyotr Void, who is uncertain whether he is being treated in a lunatic asylum and dreaming of being a Red cavalry officer in the Russian Revolution; or whether he is, in fact, a Red cavalry officer and dreaming of being a lunatic.If Wilde was right, and all art is quite useless, then TCMG is barely art. Firstly it's a book fused with satire, most of which is aimed at Russia's latterday drug and gangster culture. This includes a bravura passage starring Arnold Schwarzenegger that - in a parallel exercise to the book's Buddhist premise - conflates Arnie's many film roles.Secondly it's a book primed with a purpose: which means that the `plot' is more like a map than a journey. The ceramic carbine of the title, for instance, isn't mentioned until page 129 and finally appears as abruptly as any `Deus ex Machina' in an 18th C. opera.The characterisation is minimal; everyone talks with the same voice and the conversations are mostly patterned on Platonic dialogues where people who need to understand something are peevishly quizzed by the person who knows the answer. Now perhaps in a Buddhist novel (where identity is an illusion) people SHOULD all have the same voice; but it makes for flat drama.As page after didactic page of improbable debate about the impossibility of existence unfurls itself, you develop a sense of being told precisely how a clock works by someone who has no idea what time is. But for all that, TCMG is a sedulous and sincere book. To be harsh with it would be like whipping a dog for licking its genitals.

It began well. A dizzying, surreal account of a schizophrenic personality, fluidly transposing between two alien states (or two incarnations, if you prefer). It reminded me of Kafka: the rigorous, reasoned observations of the everyman protagonist in situations unraveling into absurdity. Also, Calvino's 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveller' and Ishiguro's 'The Unconsoled'.Ultimately, not as successful as those two masterpieces, in my opinion. As the novel proceeds Pelevin cannot resist bringing his tinpot Buddhist philosophizing into it, flooding the pages with repetitive, pretentious debates on the theme of existence and reality skimmed off the pages of coffee table Zen Buddhist manuals.It's funny, Buddhism often has this effect on people. They read the profound wisdom, absorb its slippery, intellectual playfulness, its linguistic contortions, its confounding elusiveness and they admire it. Admire just how clever it is, how neatly it escapes refutation, how it apparently offers all the answers, offers them, what's more, enclosed in rarefied, gnomic, dialectic questions. It just makes you sound so cool!And that's the problem. I feel Pelevin falls into this trap. The novel becomes merely a bombastic display of book learning, of Pelevin's own egotistic weakness for status, for spiritual superiority. The story and all literary responsibilities are almost completely abandoned as a result.No Buddhist, by the way, would believe for a moment that you could arrive at these existential realisations through intellectual processes, as appears to be suggested in this novel. It is not an intellectual matter. Meditation practice is the vehicle for breakthrough, for understanding. This fact is bewilderingly overlooked. Sporus, in his Amazon review succinctly sums Pelevin's efforts up, "you develop a sense of being told precisely how a clock works by someone who has no idea what time is"

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.