From the book’s inner cover: “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. Slipping between the menacing dream world of the student’s fevered imagination, and the dark back alleys of the Paris underworld, The Buddha’s Return is part detective novel, part philosophical thriller and part love story.”

My take: this is a book to read for its profound philosophy, not necessarily the framework of the plot it’s hung on. There is the sense that the protagonist is out of touch with reality because he sometimes loses his grip on things, an example of which is imagining being imprisoned and interrogated for a crime against the state, and also believing he’s died before. However, I believe one of Gazdanov’s points is that he is actually more in touch with reality than the rest of us – understanding that this world around is illusory, that our individual lives are transient, and that we live in each and every thing around us, as part of a larger whole. Another is to point out the chance that is part of all of our lives, the arbitrariness of fate, and the randomness of being born into privilege in a capitalist world that is not a meritocracy. Pretty impressive stuff, particularly for 1949-50.

Quotes:
On death, and art:
“I tried to envisage everything my mind could envelop in the most comprehensive terms possible – the world as it was right now: the dark sky above Paris, its enormous expanse, thousands upon thousands of kilometers of ocean, the dawn over Melbourne, late evening in Moscow, the rushing of sea foam along the shores of Greece, the midday heat in the Bay of Bengal, the diaphanous movement of air across the earth, and time’s unstoppable march into the past. How many people had died while I had been standing there by the window, how many were now in their last agony as I had this very thought, how many bodies were writhing about in the throes of death – those for whom the inexorable final day of their lives had already dawned? I closed my eyes and before me appeared Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, and for whatever reason I immediately recalled his final epistle, in which he stated he could write no more. As I remembered these lines I felt a chill run down my spine: this hand that was now incapable of writing had carved David and Moses from marble – and yet his genius was dissolving into that very same nothingness from which it had come; each of his works an apparent victory over death and time.”

On demagogues:
“I also thought how state ethics, taken to their logical paroxysm – as the culmination of some collective delirium – would inevitably lead to an almost criminal notion of authority, and that, in such periods of history, power truly belongs to ignorant crooks and fanatics, tyrants and madmen…”

On lost love:
“How could I have thought then that I was unworthy of all this – the summer evenings, the intimacy with Catherine, her voice, her eyes and her diaphanous love? And how was it that these shadowy images, these descents into oblivion, my own shifting silhouette and the swaying instability of my life could seem so overwhelming that, fearing the inescapable illusoriness of existence, I would step into this abstract darkness, leaving that voice and these words behind, on the other side of this hateful expanse? Why did I do it?”

And this one, that sense of the moment gone:
“I had attended this concert at the Pleyel with Catherine; as she sat next to me, her misty tenderness had seemed to accentuate the sense of the melody, heightening the theme of memory in Kreisler’s playing. Attempting to translate the movement of sounds into my poverty of words, the meaning was approximately thus: that the feeling of happy plenitude is short-lived and illusory, it will leave only regret and as such it is sorrowful yet alluring warning. Because of this I knew that the moment could never be repeated, and I keenly sensed, perhaps because it too could never be repeated, the magic of the violin.”

On meaninglessness:
“I knew everyone on this street, just as I knew every odour, the look of every building, the glass of every window pane, and the lamentable imitation of life, intrinsic to each of its inhabitants, which never revealed its greatest secret: what inspired these people in the lives they led? What were their hopes, their desires, their aspirations, and to what end did each of them obediently, patiently repeat the same thing day after day? What could there be in all this – apart from some biological law that they obeyed unknowingly and unthinkingly? What had summoned them to life out of apocalyptic nothingness? The accidental and perhaps momentary union of two human bodies one evening or late one night a few dozen years ago?”

On oneness:
“…or was it that I was part of some vast human collective and the impenetrable membrane that separated me from other people and contained my individuality had suddenly lost its impermeability, allowing something foreign to rush in, like waves crashing into the crevice of a cliff?”

“Later I developed a strange and abiding desire – to vanish into thin air, like a phantom in a dream, like a patch of morning mist, like someone’s distant memory. I wanted to forget everything, everything that constituted me, beyond which it seemed impossible to imagine my own existence, this aggregate of absurd, random conventions – as though I desired to prove to myself that I had not one life, but many, and consequently that the conditions in which I found myself in no way limited my options.”

On religion:
“I once had occasion to read a most edifying encyclical by a pope – I forget which – who argued that one must know how to interpret the Church’s views on wealth and poverty correctly. Specifically, there could be no talk of donating one’s wealth, or even a tenth of it, to the poor: this was a misinterpretation. The tenth pertained to income; capital was never subject to Christian taxation. This is patently ridiculous, and if there is a hell, then I hope this pope, while he’s sat there, roasting for centuries in some gigantic frying pan, has found the time to realize his grievous error concerning the Church’s stance on property.” ( )

I liked a lot of the first novel I read by Gazdanov, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, but thought it contained some extraneous material. This was a much tighter novel, with a similar intriguing premise and similar philosophical musings about life, happiness, the meaning of chance and coincidence, and the influence of the past on the present.

The nameless student who narrates the novel is subject to dreamlike states in which he completely believes, for example, that he died in a climbing accident or was arrested by Soviet-style secret police. Over the course of the novel, he meets a variety of people including, most importantly, Pavel Alexandrovich, like him a Russian refugee in Paris. When he first meets him, Pavel Alexandrovich is down on his luck, begging for money, and the student gives him a generous amount, a gift which turns out to have reverberating unforeseen consequences. Later, Pavel Alexandrovich comes into money when his estranged brother dies, and starts living an entirely different kind of life. When he is murdered, and his gold statuette of Buddha stolen, the student is a suspect and is indeed jailed for a time. What happens next involves some of the other characters the student has met.

So much for the plot. The plot, inventive as it is, is merely the scaffolding on which Gazdanov hangs his philosophical explorations. The device of having the student have these dreamlike episodes allows Gazdanov to investigate what is real; throughout, chance plays a tremendous role. There is also a sort of love story, which slowly emerges, and art, history, and religion also play a role.

Eventually, the student finds that his episodes are diminishing, and towards the end, is thrilled when "for the first time ever I was indebted for my victory over this illusory world not to some external jolt or fortuitous awakening, but to the strength of my own will." He is on the path to directing his own life.