Laszlo Krasznahorkai's BARON WENCKHEIM'S HOMECOMING (Tr Ottilie Muzet)

One of the funniest, saddest and most stupid character deaths since the middle interlude in Stephen King's The Stand, and -- for a different character! -- an equally ridiculous funeral scenes in a caliber with a Juzo Itami film are only two of the absolute delights on offer to a certain kind of reader in Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming. 

I, needless to say, am that kind of reader. 

But first, Krasznahorkai makes his reader earn those delights, for this novel also contains some of the longest and most complicated compounds sentences that do not contain "the fact that" that I've yet seen. I read the ebook edition, so I couldn't actually count physical pages, but let's just say that the novel's very first sentence fills a number of them that's well into the double digits. Ottilie Muzet earned some delight, too, rendering such constructions into readable English prose.

Everybody has to work when Laszlo has something to say. But we already knew that. 

Nobody has to work as hard, though, as Krasznahorkai's characters, though maybe it's not a question of "work" so much as "endurance;" the title character, whom we quickly come to understand is not only elderly and aristocratic in that genteely poverty-stricken post-WWII way, but is also intensely neurodivergent. So of course, Krasznahorkai had to go and design the best (by which I mean worst) possible way to torment the old Baron that any literary sadist could devise. And he makes us share that torment, too, by making us understand precisely what the Baron's issues and tics are, making sure we always have them very much in mind, foreshadowing the torture in store for our poor protagonist, and then slowly unfolding his exquisite Rube Goldberg plot against the Baron's sensitivities over fully half the novel. 

The effect is not unlike watching the tied-up maiden squirm on the railroad tracks, intercut with scenes of the incoming train coming, starting from hundreds of miles away. -- but instead of a train it's more like a Katamari.

But I'm focusing too much on the title character, and there are so many other unfortunates whose fates are affected by decisions made by - and even more by decisions made about - this old aristocrat who is returning to the hometown he hasn't seen since his family high-tailed it out of Hungary sometime during or after the War. Chief among these is a famous professor whose own bad and weird chickens come home to roost and leave him hiding,as the novel begins, in a shack he built himself out of trash in an unsightly and overgrown vacant lot on the outskirts of the Baron's hometown* not long before The Homecoming. His cantakerousness, runaway philosophizing, inscrutable motives and surprising proficiency with firearms quickly bring him into conflict with a local Biker Gang as well as with local authorities, which, get ready for those. Each authority figure gets time in the spotlight, mostly to display the qualities that lead an anonymous commentator to pen a screed for publication in a local paper, the better to call out every excreble facet of the supposed Hungarian national character and leave them all pondering their commitment to Free Speech something something Epstein Files something something. 

Krasznahorkai even takes the time to poke a little fun at his very own writing style late in the novel, as the editorial staff of the local opposition newspaper contemplates the above-mentioned screed:

"- the gratuitous use of all these innumerable "wherases" and "wherebys," - I think we should just wipe these or like fleas in a pigsty"**

And we cannot forget the poor old lady who gets dragged unwilling into the spotlight when the gossip traveling ahead of the Baron's train reveals her as the Baron's long-lost first love, the whole reason he's made the journey from the land of his exile (and later disgrace), exotic Argentina, to this provincial Hungarian city. Marika, aka Marietta, barely remembers the Baron as an abnormally tall and thin youth who crushed on her from afar and once accidentally scared her into thinking he'd committed suicide. She doesn't even seem to have thought of him much when her relationships with a series of handsome but abusive jocks has left her alone and sad with a dead-end job and only one true friend in her old age. But now, suddenly, the whole city wants to know everything about her and has planned a whole romantic new chapter for her life as Mrs. Wenckheim, munificently helping the Baron to lavish his imagined millions on worthy civic projects and business ventures and deserving individuals, ever after. And if a few of them have already decided to start lobbying her for future gain, what's the harm?

But so, if The Melancholy of Resistance was a tr agedy, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is somewhere between a black comedy and a farce, but with real feeling for the people and places in which it is acting out. I was already a Krasznahorkai devotee, but now more than ever. 

 *Which, Easter eggs in the text suggest, is the same town depicted in The Melancholy of Resistance, and, for extra fun, it's impossible, if one has also read Chasing Homer as I so recently did, not to wonder as Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming unfolds, if maybe the Professor isn't going to end up being the fugitive in that novella!

**It is so hard to pull quotes from prose like this. One either gets a very short and pithy little clause pulled out of a sentence or a giant block of text full of ellipses lest one overwhelm the screen with a sentence longer than other books' entire chapters!

Vladimir Sorokin's BLUE LARD (Tr by Max Lawton

About midway through Vladimir Sorokin's infamous, absurd and obscene Blue Lard, a very au courant couple in an alternate (very alternate) mid 20th century Moscow go out on a very chic date that winds up forming a tableau of the most perfect encapsulation of the state of world culture in the 1990s I've encountered in a long time, maybe ever. It might seem ordinary at first: they attend a performance of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Ballet. But this ain't the stately, ornate palace of the arts you're no-doubt imagining right now. I mean, well, it is, but it's also so much more:

The hall of the Bolshoi Theater constitutes the primary sump of 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.

To attend a performance at this Bolshoi requires donning a kind of diving suit, and the lobby of the famous theater now functions as an airlock, from which the contents of the auditorium are pumped in and out to facilitate entry to the performances. The rest is pretty much a typical theater-going experience, just murkier. Oh, and you have to attach a special apparatus to your diving helmet to make it compatible with the drinks service in order to enjoy your champagne uncontaminated by #1 and #2 and whatnot. As is ever the concern when ordering comestibles in public, no?

By the way, sorry if any of the above grossed you out too much. But if it did, you might as well stop reading this post, and cross Blue Lard off your TBR, because the vast variety of offensive material packed into this novel, of which the Bolshoi sewer lagoon is by no means the most offensive, means it probably isn't for you. 

Except, well, you'd be missing out on a lot. Even a pretty decent and straightforward plot (well, except for some wibbly wobbly timey wimey bits) mixed in with outrageous scenes, nearly impenetrable slangs (including a lot in a sort of Russian/Chinese pidgin that only dorks like translator Max Lawton and Your Humble Blogger* likely really enjoy; there's a glossary in the back of the NYRB edition**) and off-kilter parodies of the works of most of Russian literature's greatest heroes that, to a 21st century reader, are gonna feel like the output of a Large Language Model force fed on Pushkin and Akhmatova, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Platonov and Chekhov, but are somehow both worse and better than that for reasons I'll get into later. 

Later in the book, after a hilariously explicit yet oddly tender sex scene that you've probably already heard about if you've heard anything about this book, the lovers have a bit of a literary discussion for their exhausted and happy pillow talk:

"I've forgotten what a book even is."

"That's forgivable for the leader."

"Are there interesting writers?"

"There are.  But not interesting books."

"In what sense?"

"You see... something is happening with Russian literature. But I still haven't quite understood what."

"Is it rotting?"

"Probably."

"Well, we're all rotting. As soon as a man stops growing, he starts rotting."

"A book isn't a man."

"Do you mean to say that books don't rot?"

Blue Lard is the first book that I've encountered that i truly feel could only have been written in the 1990s, a decade in which public intellectuals were making nonsense declarations about "The end of history" and predicting stagnation and stasis as all we had to look forward to now that the great Cold War had been "won" by the West. At the time I thought this attitude only prevailed in the West -- the former Soviet Union was still living through some mighty interesting times*** -- but here in this book that first saw print in 1999 we have the above arresting image of the flower of Russian arts and culture reduced to its very dregs, passed through a million digestive systems and still being circulated and presented as all there was on offer. And that's just for a start.

Egads, I love this weirdo, Sorokin.

But so,  what does all this have to do with lard, of any color? 

I'm not going to go too deep into the color stuff. Sean over at SFUltra handled all that just fine and I'd just be rehashing him. Suffice it to say that this particular term for the color blue in Russia has come to take on connotations not unlike our old use of "lavender." But what's the Lard?

Buckle up. 

So, for about the first third or so of the book, told by the way, in epistolary form by a technician to his absent lover in the kind of prose that might remind the reader of James Joyce's love letters to his wife, Nora, if James Joyce had been a Russian science fiction writer, concerns a bizarre project. For the good of Mother Russia, hilariously mis-grown  clones of great Russian literary figures of the past are set to work producing new texts, not for the sake of generating those texts (which are shared in full in these letters), but in order to collect the weird and unspecifically powerful residue that these clones produce as a byproduct of their literary efforts, a blue substance very like bacon fat that the clones secrete when writing.

So basically, Blue Lard is misbegotten creativity (the only kind Sorokin foresaw his culture producing as the millennium ended****) made tangible and collected to use as fuel for grander projects. Our correspondent and his coworkers all believe that it will serve as fuel to power a nuclear reactor on the Moon. Russian greatness of the future must consume Russian greatness from the past in order to achieve Russian greatness in the present. Or something. How all of that is supposed to work is beside the point -- very much so, as at no point do we even come close to seeing this reactor, or the Moon at all. What does become of the Blue Lard is so much weirder than that. So much. As Lawton says in his "extraduction" at the end of the book, Blue Lard isn't meant to be understood so much as borne witness to.

Except, and I know this is the very height of hubris to even pretend to say, I feel like I did, in fact, understand that to which I bore witness, here. Just not on a conscious level. Or a rational one. But Vladimir Sorokin and Max Lawton put something in my brain by means of black excrescences on white paper, and that something will live in there forever, inflating the view my inner eye has of my brain, like Tetsuo's body in the last act of Akira, eternally. If you've already read this book, you know exactly what I'm referring to here. Heh.

But so anyway, this whatever that Sorokin and Lawton put into my brain, can I even explain it? In a blog post? You see here that I have tried. But I feel like I've failed, even as most people feel like they have failed to understand Blue Lard. But maybe it's not a matter of understanding, or of bearing witness, but of making the mighty effort to invent a new art form, a new kind of expression, with which we can convey our individual and idiosyncratic experiences of reading Blue Lard. I'm game. How about you?

Rips, ni ma de.

*Recall that Mandarin and Russian are the two languages that I've made the most effort to sort-of learn except my squirrel brain is even worse about hopping from language to language than it is from book to book.

**But you don't really need it. Context clues are usually enough to get the gyst, and I think constantly flipping to the glossary page would just slow you down/annoy you into DNFing long before the real fun of Blue Lard even begins.

***My perspective on this is still, I freely admit, colored by my old Beaudacious Bard College classmate's big ugly book about his experiences in Russia in the 90s.

****I think he's been proven wrong on this score, I'm happy to say. Not only has Sorokin himself continued to publish some fascinating work almost as fucked up as Blue Lard, but so have the Dyachenkos, Tatyana Tolstaya, Eugene Vodolazkin, Victor Pelevin, Dmitry Glukhovsky and Lyudmila Ulitskaya, to name a few whose work I myself have read. Perhaps not all of this will be regarded as immortal work for the ages, but some of it likely will, and none of it is rotted or boring or terribly conventional. I've certainly enjoyed it quite a lot, anyway, some of it, like Vodolazkin's Laurus, I've read more than once and even decided to try reading in the original because I've liked it so much. To say nothing of Belorussian, Ukrainian and other Former Soviet states whose native writers are getting the kind of international attention that used only to be possible for either very orthodox or wildly transgressive Russian nationals