The Buddha's Return
-
- USD 11.99
-
- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
A millionaire is killed. A golden statuette of a Buddha goes missing. A penniless student, who is afflicted by dream-like fits, is arrested and accused of murder.
In typically crisp, unfussy prose, Gazdanov's delicately balanced novel is an irresistibly hypnotic masterpiece from one of Russia's most talented émigré writers. Slipping between the menacing dream world of the student's fevered imagination, and the dark back alleys of the Paris underworld, The Buddha Returns is part detective novel, part philosophical thriller, and part love story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gadzanov's previous novel to be translated into English, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, a masterly Dostoevskian and noir-ish narrative of doubled identities, turns out to have only been a taste of the dizzying strangeness to which this novel ascends. A troubled student experiences a crisis and "dies,"only to be arrested by a mysterious and dysfunctional bureaucracy working for the "Central State." Released into the nightlife of Paris, the unnamed student becomes acquainted, and eventually obsessed, with one Pavel Alexandrovich Scherbakov, a former beggar who has become a glamorous arriviste. Together, they spend nights discussing philosophy, religion, and literature but Pavel Alexandrovich retains connections from the Paris criminal underworld and is drawn into the schemes of Zina and Lida, a vicious mother-daughter team, even as the student begins to be visited by an enigmatic lieutenant calling himself the Gentleman, who insinuates that there may be more than lucky accident behind Pavel Alexandrovich's change in fortune. When Pavel Alexandrovich is murdered and his prize golden Buddha stolen the Central State takes the student into custody as the perpetrator; but at this juncture, it's not even clear who is dead, who is living, and where the cycle of betrayal and mistaken identity will end. This is an excellent novel by any standard, and especially remarkable for joining the philosophical underpinnings of the Russians with the intrigue of a French thriller.
