Chekhov's Gun

I still find myself waiting for a translation of Viktor Pelevin's latest book, SNUFF .  In the meantime I've gone back and read some of his earlier titles and recently ordered Buddha's Little Finger .  The English translation dates from 2000 and was reviewed in The New York Times.  It first appeared as   Чапаев и Пустота (Chapayev and Void) in 1996, and under the title Clay Machine Gun in the UK. Pelevin revisits that chaotic time when Gorbacev was desperately trying to hold the crumbling Soviet Union together through the eyes of a poet, Pyotr Voyd, who has run afoul of authorities over a couple poems he had published in an underground newspaper.  Once again we get a character caught between two worlds, trying to make sense of the mechanisations behind the world we see, not much unlike in Generation   π . What makes all his books interesting is the way he plays with time and space, much like Kurt Vonnegut, who I imagine is one of his literary her...

Watching the Sochi Olympic Games and viewing the unrest in Ukraine these past two weeks has inspired me to kickstart this forum once again.  I greatly appreciate that persons are still looking in and that there is actually a couple new followers.  It's a one-man show and I encourage those looking in to drop comments. A few months back I found an early English edition of Tolstoy's Sebastopol Sketches .  It is a real treat as it is a cloth-covered pocket book that dates back to 1887.  Apparently, there wasn't much call for a rare book such as this and I didn't pay too much money for it.  Tolstoy was a young man, who served in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War.  Here is a 1916 copy , courtesy of the National Library of Australia. Once again Ukraine finds itself on the battlefront, although this one seems to be more over identity, which nearly erupted into a civil war this month.  Fortunately, cooler heads have prevailed, but now there is ...