BLUE LARD, transgressive Russian SFF oddity

BLUE LARD
VLADIMIR SOROKIN (tr. Max Lawton)
NYRB Classics
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Russian master's most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination.

Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author’s books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, Blue Lard is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines.

The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese—peppered with ample neologisms—and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process” is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write.

This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers?

Blue Lard is a stylistically acrobatic book, translated by Max Lawton into an English idiom just as bizarre as the Russian original. Evoking both Pulp Fiction and the masterpieces of Marquis de Sade, Sorokin’s novel is a brutal, heady trip that annihilates all of its twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century competition in the Russian canon—and that annihilates Russia itself in a resounding act of heavy-metal dissidence.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Unquestionably the weirdest NYRB book I have yet read...and the second-weirdest alternate history book I have read this century.

It requires serious effort to engage with the first third or so of the book, as you are in medias res without even the usual linguistic snowpoles showing you where the obstacles are. You are, as is so often the case in Life, in a strange place with strange people you do not know or even understand as they have conversations around you.

After that point, there is a shift in the linguistic register that brings us closer to normal conversational tones. Not normal-normal, mind you, though closer. (There is a partial Glossary at the end for the desperately confused.) But, like Claude Simon’s nouveau roman novels, there is a difficult beginning that requires you to make an investment of concentration. We have left the normie-world of relatable plots, ordinary characters you could meet at the supermarket, sentences that start and finish in the same paragraph, and other such bourgeois fripperies. This is not a read that rewards being treated as a novel. This is writing that needs to be experienced and absorbed for itself not its meanings.

Sorokin, like so many truly inventive folk, is a natural iconoclast. At twenty-five, in 1980, he was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, at that time still under Communist-Party suspicion. The nature of iconoclasm is always to resist, so in this era of Church/state rapprochement, he opposes Putin’s war against Ukraine. It is not as though his work work was ever popular with the regime, what with Hitler raping Stalin’s daughter, Stalin and Khruschev sexing it up (ewww!), and a variety of body-horror tropes, that Little Vladdy Pu-Pu just could not ever be on board with. This, among other not-socialist-realist flourishes, will mean no invite-to-dinner from the Kremlin. Now, being good little bourgeois decoders, we too like our novels to Mean Something, like socialist realist work...but that is not on offer here.

Sorokin does not Make Sense, he makes you think about how a story is more than just the beginning-middle-end structure we are ingrained to expect. He offers not one kind of Sense, but multiple ways to experience words and ideas forming into stories. This, and the transgressive nature of the words and ideas he does present us, makes a lot...A LOT...of people really, really angry. This being a feature of the Sorokin brand. I do not get the point of their outrage and negativity being performed. Giving the man the thing he tried to get from you? The point of that is...?

A read that demands effort, does it an awful lot of the time, and allows you to decide for yourself if it means anything at all.

Like Life itself, it makes you the Author’s apprentice. You can decide if that is your jam, but I am here to say that it is a read very much worth my time and effort and could be for you as well. Remember how mad it made the Russian overlord. Buy it to be ornery, to oppose the banning/forbidding/controlling ethos that increasingly envelops the information-delivery world.

I bet lots of y’all end up liking it.