The book "iPhuck 10" - Victor Pelevin

Pelevin fans have a traditional annual holiday on the street - a new book by Viktor Olegovich has been published. By the way, it was released in both forms, electronic and paper, on Tuesday, so if you are one of these fans, then hurry up to join. But it's not about that, it's never seen, Pelevin consistently releases a book a year, or even a two-volume one, but there's nothing much to say about them for the last ten years, except to squeeze their lips and shake their heads.

But "iPhuck 10" already claims at least the title of the best Pelevin creation in recent years, according to some of our critics: solid, caustic, relevant, sometimes very funny, and not at all drawn out, and in addition to all this with such a life-affirming conclusion at the end that I put it in the title of the review.

Porfiry Petrovich is an algorithm aimed at investigating crimes, but no one there, but a literary policeman: during the investigation, he writes a report on the work done in the format of a work of fiction, and then the book goes on sale.

As you know, murder detectives are best sold, but Porfiry gets only broken fences and flooded barges by someone, so this time, it seems, nothing sharp: the algorithm was hired by curator and art critic Maruha Cho to find out information about art works sold through a closed auction of the so-called plaster period. But it soon becomes clear that this is all just a pretext...

There are two central themes in the novel - artificial intelligence and modern art, and the reader has to look at both from a considerable distance, because we don't know what it will turn into even after 12 months, but for Pelevin's heroes everything has already happened: the future has not only come, but also reflected on our present.

Our modernity appears in the text more than once, but each time only in some of its vivid details: here is the artist Pavlensky and his story with the FSB, here is Tolokonnikova's correspondence with Zizek, here is Banksy, who painted the doors of a public toilet, objectification of women is one of the main problems of modern feminism, in the end, the confrontation of the iPhone, which produces its devices with only one hole between the lower extremities.

But Samsung, which works on the basis of androgynous and produces better products, is also trying to turn this into a virtue, but it always turns out to be only the second - this is a completely predictable competition between iPhone and Samsung, which a couple of years ago moved to the level of memes and jokes. All this is really very funny and surrounded by its own story, which can be told as an anecdote in isolation from the text of the novel.

Pelevin, through his work, speaks a lot not only about art as such, its origin and origins, but also about criticism. If the attack on literary critics (also, by the way, very funny, so I want to post it separately) is quite obvious, then he approaches film critics with irony, which becomes thicker and thicker as the narrative progresses: two "film reviews" are woven into the text, one is more beautiful than the other, and I think those who read "The Session" or "The Art of Cinema" will experience real pleasure from this stylization under seemingly very clever texts, after which sometimes you wonder "what is it about at all? " and whether it's all connected with the movie.

In principle, there is nothing original at the semantic level in Pelevin's theses, the fact that any reader is a co-author, and a critic is sometimes a much greater creator of meanings than the author of a work of art has been said repeatedly over the past hundred years, but the presentation itself is good: that's what you can love this author for, is that he does not hit his ideas head-on.

By simply writing them down on paper or putting them into the mouth of a reasoner, he dresses them in various artistic forms and through them brings to mind the reader, who, of course, also needs to be prepared, otherwise how to evaluate a joke about "Time and Nothing" if you don't know what "Being and Time" and "Being and Nothing" are (by the way, I didn't like that then everything is explained in the text: if you have to explain an anecdote, it's a bad joke).

As for the plot, it is very uneven in "iPhuck 10" and is obviously divided into several parts, which differ, including by genre. Its non-linearity and even such jumps are not a problem, but, frankly, I got more pleasure from the first half of the work than from the second, although it is essentially just an expanded exposition and a kind of deception that sets the reader up to certain expectations.