Вторая книга Пелевина, которую прочтал и если честно, оценивая после 7 дет, по сравнению с [b:Чапаев и Пустота|16079319|Чапаев и Пустота|Victor Pelevin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349903642s/16079319.jpg|94755] это по слабее. Но не очень - это все-ровно один из топ-книг Пелевина.

i guess there’s quite a lot of people (in former ussr countries ofc) who know exactly what he’s talking about and for them it’s the easiest read ever, maybe even until the very last chapters, but if you have difficulty understanding him, you’re likely a much happier person
i’m not a happy person. even though i didn’t live in that time, i think the feeling of the 90s was passed on to me, it’s in my dna i’m pretty sure.
i enjoyed the first part, especially the sections that had to do with the hilarious ads the mc was coming up with, it’s literally funny as sh but also made me really bitter.
i’m finally certain that i’m not a fan of pelevin’s descriptions of character going nuts and having all those dream sequences and acid trips etc, he loves them, but they bore me to death. at the same time i fully understand how effective this stylistic choice is and appreciate it. but i’ll probably take a break from his prose for some time.

Так получилось, что я читал это после более поздних романов Пелевина.

Совсем не понравилось.
Очень примитивно и не художественно мерзко.

Можно было бы списать, что в то время он открыл новый жанр.
Но еще более ранний Чапаев и Пустота мне нравится.
Как и более поздние, довольно однообразно прорабатывающие тему буддизма, но более читабельные и с интересными мыслями.

The way the plot progressed in this novel was not what I was used to; this was a large reason in why I liked it. I don't mind being a little confused as to WHERE the story is going because it is still progressing, just not in the typical spoon fed intro-problem-solution-happy ending story. Pelevin's exploration of the anal-oral-displaced patterns from the perspective of Tatarsky's own exploration in contrast to Tatarsky's experience in the advertising industry was wonderfully written. I will definitely reread this book and plan to read more novels by this author.

A lot of interesting ideas, cool hallucinations and fun jokes, but for me this book was too much about these ideas, hallucinations and jokes and not enough about people (I guess I like that better).

Clearly Victor Pelevin wrote the bulk of this book sitting on the toilet or standing in the shower. He collected all his stray thoughts and tried to make them anecdotes in the life of a cipher of a character. This book suffers from the same problems that Tom Robbins continually stumbles over, which is that he wants to convey some grand idea and then he has one character ask a couple questions to fake a dialog, while the other character expounds endlessly with the writer's voice. Whereas Robbins' books only make you sit through one or two chapters of it, the whole book is rife with exposition.

That said, some of it is really intriguing. I would even go so far as to say that you can skip the whole book and read nothing but the Homo Zapiens chapter and come out well ahead, missing virtually nothing. That chapter is truly incredible, and was clearly a stand alone essay that was the thesis from which the rest of the book loosely hangs on. BTW, this is the Che Guevara element that the cover copy talks about and this moment has no bearing or relevance at all to the rest of the plot and is there in namesake only. In fact the character later asks questions about things that were directly answered for him in that chapter.

About the rest of the book, well it gives an intriguing look into Post-soviet Russia. Most of it is fantasy, but the tone and timber are there. There were certainly some entertaining moments. Meanwhile, you have to put up with the flaccid ad copy. The reason why the Monty Python "Funniest Joke in the World" sketch worked is because you never heard the joke. Here you are shown time and again that his ad copy sucks, yet he's taken as being brilliant (and I'm pretty sure that it isn't supposed to be ironic).

As a straight read, I found it to be difficult, the book was dense, meandering and unclear. I can only assume that most of the problem was with the translation. The verbiage was awkward. There were tons of spelling errors. There were a number of sentences that use English words that would never be used that way by a native speaker. The clunky writing must come from the fact that no editor ever set eyes on this translation.