Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin

 


Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin. According to Max Lawton, a moshujia of translation, this novel isn't here to be read so much as borne witness to.

How should one bear witness? Max advises us to keep in mind and heart the novel's epigraph from Fritz - "There are more idols than realities in the world: that is my "evil eye" upon this world: that is also my "evil ear."

Blue Lard is not easy to review. I can't claim that I completely understood everything that was going on. Hardly. Indeed, as Max tells us, Vladimir Sorokin himself "seemed to venerate even his own incomprehension of Blue Lard and expressed that the writer must not be exempt from an aesthetic of nontransparency."

An aesthetic of nontransparency. It appears that Sorokin takes the words of esteemed Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) to heart: "Art makes the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived. To do this, it presents its material in unexpected, even outlandish ways: the shock of the new." Comrades, rest assured that with Blue Lard, the reader is in for a series of shocks across the novel's 345 pages. It's as if the author intends to jolt us out of what Shklovsky termed "automatic and habitual perception." In simpler terms, with a fanfare of Russian trumpets, it's time to awaken from our routinized stupor and savor the scent of the Blue Lard roses.

There's no introduction in this New York Review Books edition; instead, Vladimir Sorokin plunges the reader straight into his tale. And what a plunge it is! We find ourselves in 2068, where a number of characters speak in NovoRuss, a language mixing codes, pop phrases, Russian, and Chinese. Take a gander at this snatch:  

Without references to L-harmony, Kir is a simple shgua who stuck his skinny zuan kong tchi into fashionable HERO-KUNST. Daisy is a laobaixing who went straight from Pskov to the ART-mei chun in Petersburg. She's not even able to support an elementary tanhua and, like Rebecca from your favorite show, is only truly comfortable when repeating the last words of her collocutor's sentences, disguising her idiocy with a hebephrenic “ha!”

Got that? Two pieces of good news: 1) A glossary containing Chinese words, phrases, along with other futurist terms and expressions, is provided at the back of the book; 2) NovoRuss is spoken only in the first section of the novel; beyond page 116, Blue Lard shifts gears and clicks into a rip-roaring Sorokin-style adventure yarn.  You'll eagerly keep turning those pages that seem to fly by.

The story is initially set in an Eastern Siberian lab, where geneticists create clones of great Russian authors capable of replicating the literary works of their human counterparts. The BL-3 project yields seven clones: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov, Pasternak, Dostoevsky, Akhmatova, and Platonov.

How does this work? We're given a hefty sample from all seven authors, which turns out to be a series of side-splitters. For example, let's consider Platonov. As one of the scientists writes in a letter to a friend, “The most exotic individuals produced the most M-predictable texts. I proved to be correct at 67%. Outwardly, Platonov-3 hasn't changed in any way; as he was a coffee table, so has he remained.”

Platonov-3's text runs twelve pages entitled The Injunction, which will especially resonate with readers familiar with Chevengur. Instead of locomotives, there are lumpomotives that run on lumps of human body parts. There's mention of Rosa Luxemburg, an object of veneration for a wandering knight in Platonov's classic. There are hordes of men and women at the ready to give everything to the cause of the proletarian. For example:

In Ostahkov, four legless donors and a pregnant broad holding a piece of rail asked to ride with them until Konepad.
“You're gonna have to jump off yourselves! We don't have enough steam for idling! Bubnov warned them.
“We will jump, Comrade, of course!” the donors rejoiced in the warmth and motion. “We've nothing left to break!”

The Injunction picks up serious absurdist/black humor steam with every page right up until the rousing preposterous conclusion. What a hootnik.

The clones provide an additional vital function – as they write, they accumulate blue lard on their back and the inside of their thighs. The blue lard is scrapped off and contains qualities far beyond the normal laws of physics and chemistry. The leaders of this laboratory plan to use the blue lard for their moon project but there are those who have other plans.

Suddenly, there's an attack on the Eastern Siberian lab and a series of scenes so crazy and weird that they qualify as hypercrazy and hyperweird. When all the dust, ice, and blue lard settles, we're back in  Moscow in 1954. Not long thereafter, it's Stalin time.

I suspect most readers know Blue Lard prompted a criminal investigation back in Russia, and protesters threw Sorokin's books into a huge sculpture of a toilet placed in front of the Bolshoi Theater. The reason: alternative history with a vengeance. There's a graphic scene where Khrushchev sticks his cock in Stalin's anus. Investigators and protesters no doubt also objected to those pages describing cannibalism, sadism, torture, murder, and the rape of a young girl (Hitler rapes Stalin's daughter). All this to say, much of Blue Lard can be tough going for readers who only want the world of Jane Austen.

Speaking of the Bolshoi Theater, one of my favorite bits has the famous performance space filled with the Moscow sewage system. “Those who are superficially familiar with fecal culture suppose the contents of a sewer system to be a thick, impenetrable mass of excrement. This is not even remotely the case. Excrement makes up only twenty percent of its contents. The rest is liquid. Though this liquid is murky, it is still possible to survey the entire hall with strong enough lighting – from the floor spread with carpets to the ceiling with its famous chandelier.” But no worries as each audience member is adequately fitted out with the proper scuba gear. And, by the way, in this vast watery theater-turned-sewer, wind instruments sound much more extravagant than the strings.

I concur with Max Lawton when he cites the ideal mode of reading Blue Lard is one of wonder, contemplation, and amusement. But, above all, read it...soon.


Vladimir Sorokin, born 1955. Photo taken around 1999, the year Blue Lard was originally published in Russian.