The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Homo Zapiens by Victor Pelevin. Trans. Andrew BromfieldMichael Pinker
Victor Pelevin. Homo Zapiens. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. Viking, 2002. 256 pp. $24.95.
Life is a television program, commercials the key to meaning and worth, yet as you watch with eager excitement your character is overwritten by their message. Pelevin’s ambitious fatalist “Babe” Tatarsky’s burgeoning consciousness of this brave new weltschmerz leads him into a heady wonderland of arch conmen, whose compelling creations stupefy by destroying any resistance to the mediocrity of contemporary culture, urging everyone, since all significance lies in money, to admire and desire only what can be bought and sold. Disseminating the beautiful lies we live in, these calculating purveyors of cant rule by plying humankind with the illusion of freedom while we rush headlong toward mindless conformity. Pelevin’s global take on the tenor of our time summons genies from mythologies old and new to excoriate shibboleths afflicting not only Russian society but all those subject to Westernizing “development”—God bless us, every one. Feckless avatar of Generation P (which favored Pepsi over Coke when the American cash cow invaded the Soviet Union), Tatarsky discovers in Yeltsin’s Russia that he, that everyone, has become Homo Zapien, a channel-surfer subject to the rhythms of oral, anal, and displacing impulses. As every intention is shaped by television, people become little more than media-bound automatons obedient to the whims of distant, cynical manipulators, whose “Russian idea” owes everything to vodka, hallucinogens, and unsavory company. Still, once “Babe” learns the drill, talent and good fortune swiftly boost him toward the corporate pinnacle, a star “creative” of the mass illusion. Pricking the bubble of contemporary society’s prevailing myth of individual freedom in an age of corporate corruption, Pelevin’s madcap parable reveals the meaning of our overcharged existence in Che Guevara’s disquisitions over a ouija board. A merciless send-up of “black advertising,” Homo Zapiens merrily skewers the fatuity of our fervid, if ephemeral, joys and fathomless despair. [Michael Pinker]