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
