Where Reality Ends and Fiction Starts in Pelevin’s Novel Generation “P”

Reading Pelevin’s Generation “P” is like watching letsplay on the new game on youtube without a sound. You can just observe what the character does with some small understanding of what is going on. Nobody explains you anything and all you can do is to try to make educated guesses.
The main hero of the game - Vavilen Tatarsky is the collective image of people of 70s. Of those mystical times when criminals were romanticized, and people disappear faster than warm buns from a bakery in the morning. By the way, the advertisement for the bakery is the debut of Vavilen in the world of advertisement, to where he got after working on the criminal in a stand (kiosk). Owing to his literary education in university, Vavilen successfully goes up in his career path, changing three bosses on his way. From times to times, to stay inspired, he takes into mushrooms, some drugs and LSD, which help him to generate new creative ideas as well as to see some strange things as a goddess, speaking dog and even speak to the spirit of Che Guevara. By those drug trips, Vavilen travels into himself and the world, trying to understand all its mysteries.

The novel is structured in the way of the computer game. Our character starts from zero level, having only his university education as a tool. He also knows little about this world and what is happening around. Readers together with the character see things, read his thoughts and learn what protagonist learns with small portions, hoping to make sense from it later. As Vavilen promoted, we go to the next level with new problems and questions to answer. The novel leads a reader softly and slows through the reality of the world of the 90s with its cruelty, showing what is hidden around each corner: danger, deaths of unfortunate businessmen, criminals ruling the business and talking with police as equal, economic and social instability. However, it is not that tragic tour, or better to say it tries not to show it by the derision of character’s actions, silly advertisement lines, insults to those fans of cola. That all can hamper readers from the realization of how scary those times were, causing the older generation to nostalgy while making younger laughing but for both be confused. But, at the same time, such a “lovely” setting did not appear from nowhere. The setting consists from the real people who were killed in the attempt to make money and to become “New Russian”- rich and successful businessmen. From people who lost everything they believed in after the dance of the tanks. Therefore, it is important for us as well as for Vavilen Tatarsky to know where reality is and where there is only substitution of the reality known also as Simulacra.

The representative of people from generation “P” lives in four layers of realities. The first one is the internal of the character, external of the world outside, mythical of goddess Ishtar and god Enkidu, and the realm of advertisements. The reality of both internal and external worlds intervenes with the fiction of mythical one. The thing is that after some time the borders between them disappear, and to know where reality is, becomes impossible. By working in an advertisement company, Vavilen creates another layer of reality for all lost people who want to find some truth in advertised products. He starts from creating some fictional condition that emerges when you buy Sprite, Harley motorcycle, brand GAP and even donating to Christ. Tatarsky assures that consuming those things will make a person feel better about his current condition, thereby creating another reality consumers believe in. However, he does not stop there. From creating additional reality through promo videos, Tatarsky goes to work on Media Channel. There he first checks the advertisement scripts of others and then controls what other politicians will say by writing script to their 3-d models. By the way, it turns out that there are no politicians at all but only their 3-d models that are controlled by some higher authorities. Substitution of reality to the fictional one in the novel Generation “P” is similar to the Precession of Simulacra. Jean Baudrillard described this process in his philosophical treatise “Simulacra and Simulation” in 1981. According to Jean Baudrillard, the last couple of years people with the help of signs and symbols via media substituted the real things with the constructed perceptions of those things. In other words, we do not experience the things itself but the imitation of these things. The same is true with the politicians in the Generation “P”. Not knowing that politicians do not exist (but not for sure), people listen to their copies, words for those are created by people like Tatarsky, who can only assume what they could say or better: what other say they might say. The world of the Generation “P” is the brightest example of Simulacra.

Now, when you started to doubt the world you live in, or to be concrete, only one of its layers. I suggest you get even more confused and start playing the book-game Generation “P”.

П :D

Five stars for a book that I resent? Certainly why not?

From the second that I started to read the book I couldn't quite decide if I liked it or hated it. The book comes off a bit like an elitist ass hole. One of those guys who knows he is smarter than you and decides that instead of acting like a civilized person he is going to prove it to you by, well telling you things that don't make any sense and then acting like they do. and if that is not enough he will include diatribes against things that as far as you were aware of didn't exist in the book. A weird obsession with pens and a preponderance of references to buddhism that don't actually explain that they are references to buddhism.

and why will you then give this book five stars? because somehow it all fits together. The long diatribe against tv actually changes your perception of the book thus far and colors your reading of further passages. Comments about che guevera's buddhism change your understanding of what might be buddhism, but comments about he buddhist method of television watching then change your perception of whether pelevin even understands buddhism, or if he wants to?

The mundane seems repetitive but the deep seems substantial and ever changing.

somehow the book seems complete without being reasonable and active while forcing a slowdown.

Everything feels deliberate. The first 10 chapters feel convoluted and hard to read but slip into a long stretch of easy flowing chapters which again devolve into convoluted muck. materialism becomes buddhism becomes "Ideal"ism. There is something about the evolution of the novel as form that evolves the novel as content. In short something feels right, perhaps because something feels just a little wrong.

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I don't actually know if I like this book. I mean I resent it but I don't know. I shall extrapolate and possibly decide and review later...

I love Victor Pelevin, but I somehow managed to miss this one when it came out. I only learned of its existence because a film adaptation premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival under the title Generation P. The film blew me away and was my favorite from that year's festival; Victor Ginzberg's film adaptation was magnificently faithful to a novel that, I find, was begging to be a weirdass film from the first page.

Homo Zapiens -- the title refers to a theorized new, devolved form of human being whose thoughts and reactions are largely governed by the television, even if, maybe especially if, what he's mostly doing is zapping to avoid commercials -- is Pelevin at his most gleefully nihilistic as he surveys the chaos that was Russia in the 90s. Not since The Exile: Sex Drugs and Libel in the New Russia have I seen this milieu so vividly depicted: blatant corruption at all levels of public and private life, gross materialism and drug abuse, vodka and cranky mysticism, all wrapped up in the Russian version of How to Get Ahead in Advertising; had hero Babylen Tartosky sprouted another head I would not have been surprised. But Pelevin has other, crazier ideas to play with, here.

Like the idea that at some point the mass media stopped reporting the news and started making it up -- even to inventing the politicians, who only exist as artfully computer-generated animations and carefully seeded urban legends (a cadre of ordinary-seeming ex-soldier types has the job of planting stories of seeing, e.g. Yeltsin or Berezhovsky in a grocery store or walking down the street). It's unclear whether or not we readers are expected to take this idea as true for this fictional world, or as just another whopper his co-workers and employers have laid on for Babylen's confusion or edification, and it's one of the amazing things about this novel that it ultimately doesn't matter if the reader believes it or not, if Babylen's superiors believe it or not, or if Babylen believes it or not.

Which is to say that Homo Zapiens, novel and film, messed with my head in all of the ways I most like having my head messed with. But if you're not familiar with the real world that inspired this phantasmagorical fake (or is it? Hmm?) one, do yourself a favor and have a look at The Exile, either the book I linked to above, or look at some of the archived "classic" issues from its original run as one of the bitchiest and most profane alternative newspapers the world has ever seen. Doing so will not only enrich your experience of reading or watching Homo Zapiens/Generation P, but will also give you a unique and completely compelling look at the world through the eyes of "two hairy-assed jerks" who had front row seats to watch the chaos, cannibalism and cockery of the collapse of the world's last great empire.

This is actually at least a 2.5, maybe a 3. I enjoyed it. I couldn't even begin to tell you what happens in this book but honestly I think I'm just too American for it.