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 

Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's ASSASSIN OF REALITY (Tr Julia Metov Hersey, Narr Jessica Bell)

There is a kind of deeply pessimistic magical thinking that occurs to some people when they find themselves on the verge of falling in love (or, really, already having so fallen but not ready to admit it). We say to ourselves something like, oh no now God or the universe or fate or my enemies have another hostage for my good behavior. They know they can't actually hurt me directly because I'm hopeless already, but they can hurt this person that I might love, and hurt me that way. 

Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's Vita Nostra books are all about exploring what this means when it's literally true. Last novel, the hostages were heroine Sasha Samokhina's mother and Mum's new husband and baby. If Sasha didn't study hard at the weird school she'd been coerced into attending, terrible things would happen to her family. Examples were made when she tried to test this, even as she (was told that she) gave up her humanity in order to become something entirely else; her studies were preparing her to wield incredible power, and so there had to be incredible consequences if she showed signs of misusing it.

At the first novel's end, when she took the all important third year Placement Exam at the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies, Sasha, already acknowledged as the school's finest current student and poised to become a uniquely powerful Imperative Verb in the Great Speech, manifested as something even more alarming and unexpected than that. An Imperative Verb could profoundly influence other Parts of Speech (as she learned when she understood that her then-boyfriend, a Subjunctive Verb, would never really have freedom or free will while they were together), but the Password she turned out actually to be is more powerful yet. Too powerful. There must be consequences.

This second novel, Assassin of Reality, starts off with an imposition of some of those consequences, conducted in such a way as to free her original hostages for her good behavior from their roles, and introduce a new one: an attractive airline pilot, Jaroslav, who grew up in the town of Torpa and flies a regular route in and out of its municipal airport. They are immediately and ferociously attracted to one another, but it all feels rather forced and Sasha senses the hand of her terrifying advisor, Farit Kozhennikov in it all. 

It is, of course, only one of her problems. 

As she begins her fourth year at the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies, Sasha is, oddly, warmly welcomed back by her classmates, even those who previously resented her, but regarded with outright hostility by their most important teacher: their frighteningly altered former gym teacher. This teacher, Dima, whom everyone had been led to regard as a gentle himbo, is in fact every bit as scary as Farit -- maybe even more so, as he shifts between his himbo and his steely-eyed bastard personas moment to moment and without warning. And he teaches the most difficult and dangerous class yet, in which students must examine and manipulate diagrams that can manipulate them back, for the worse. 

It is Dima who declares Sasha an "Assassin of Reality" but won't explain why, and flatly refuses to teach her. Another instructor at the school with whom she has a better relationship tries to help her make up for this severe handicap, but with limited results -- and strangely joins her advisor Farit in encouraging her to let a love affair with Jaroslav happen! She needs, they tell her, a way to recharge herself, get away from it all, and, most importantly, a source of fear to balance out the spells of omnipotence that have led Sasha to believe, in her grander moments, that she can fix everything that's wrong with the world, even the fact that people have to die.

Speaking of dying, Farit has shown up with a new way of using Jaroslav to compel Sasha's good behavior, a way that doesn't harm a hair on Jaroslav's head, and is even crueler than casually reminding her that any airplane can crash. And it's as subtle as when the Tenth Doctor asks Harriet Jones' aide-de-camp if Harriet maybe looks "a bit tired." And as devastating.

Some readers have complained that Assassin of Reality isn't as interesting as Vita Nostra, which was, after all, intended as a stand-alone, but I think it's every bit as interesting, just differently so. Vita Nostra was first and foremost a coming-of-age, structured by Sasha's progress through her first three years at Torpa; Assassin of Reality, while still taking place almost entirely at the school, has far murkier territory to explore: adulthood, with its new responsibilities, burdens, freedoms and fears. Sasha hasn't graduated yet but the Placement Exam she didn't really pass so much as obviate at the end of Vita Nostra was still very much a rite of passage (which not everybody survived), and her life after it is very, very different.

Part of this is because we finally find out what happens to Torpa students after they pass the Placement Exam; first- and second-year students are simply told that third years move on to study "elsewhere" after Placement, but it turns out it's really "elsewhen" -- they are transported as a group 15 years into the future, effectively cutting them off completely from their families and former lives in general (with the exception of poor Kostya, Sasha's first friend at the school, who has the dubious honor of being the son of their terrifying advisor, Farit)! That this kind of means that maybe Jaroslav was just a kid when Sasha endured her first three years at Torpa is never really explored but it's hard not to think about anyway.

Moreover, this book masterfully draws out a thread of ambiguity, if possibility that has been there in this story all along. Except for Sasha's winged flights over Torpa and her deeply weird experiences of profoundly altered perspective, we haven't seen much that is overtly magical or supernatural. Even the supposed time travel could really just have been accomplished by updating the decor of the Institute and adding some newer technology.* 

There is always the possibility that Farit has simply manipulated Sasha and her classmates, threatened them, confused them, spirited them away from their loved ones, shut them in with a bunch of equally vulnerable young people and made them work to exhaustion and beyond at stuff that makes no sense. They get little sleep, are forbidden most outlets for normal youthful energy, and become convinced that their teachers and Farit have godlike power over them. What does that all sound like?

It sounds kind of like a cult, to me. Sasha wouldn't be the first young woman to become convinced, through a series of events and circumstances and, yes, abuse,  engineered to be as bizarre as possible, that she's had a few supernatural experiences. Possibly with the help of psychedelics in the tea everybody is always sipping?

"It's too much to just give up, isn't it?" Sasha was dizzy, as if Farit's voice was alcohol of the highest proof, or a warm poison flooding her ears. 

And just when Jaroslav seems poised to become a source of actual strength for Sasha, when he and his father seem about to become a new family to which she might gladly belong (she even starts to consider having a child), Farit, with just the barest suggestion, turns her against her new love. And it never occurs to her that Farit might have simply lied to her. By the time he poisons her love with a few words, she is convinced of only two possibilities: that Jaroslav and his father have been lying all along, or that while they might have been real and honest and sincere before, Farit has such power over time and reality that he has reached back in the history of their lives to make his whispered slanders into the truth. But the simplest and most likely possibility is not the correct one in this mixed up world of Sasha's. 

This is, of course, the least interesting way to understand what's been going on in these books and I don't necessarily espouse it. I do, however, admire the skill and care that went into constructing the world of these novels, such that the mundane interpretation is even possible. I plan to go back and read these first two books again before I tackle the third, Migrant which, I'm told, has already been translated by Ms. Hersey, but does not yet seem to have a publication date in English. I have, however, been working very hard on my Russian vocabulary, and an ebook of the original Russian edition was very inexpensive so maybe... maybe I'll jump the gun. 

Of course, I said that about the third of Rodrigo Fresán's Tres Partes, which was published in English before I was even halfway through the Spanish edition, so pfft. I will note, though, that my Russian is way better than my Spanish. 

Either way, I'm excited for Volume Three, even though this second book had a very satisfactory ending on its own. 

*Just because they were using physical books, pencils, paper and blackboards in Vita nostra didn't necessarily mean that plasma touchscreens, smart phones and computers didn't exist, after all, just that the school didn't provide them. This could be for reasons of budget, aesthetics or the behind-the-times requirements of pedagogy.

Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's VITA NOSTRA (Tr Julia Meitov Hersey, Narr Jessica Ball)

Book review sites, jacket copy and other official and unofficial arms of what passes for book promotion these days all seem to regard the remarkable Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's Vita Nostra as "dark academia" but the inestimable Popqueenie (to whom I owe a million more thanks for recommending this book to me) and I agree that where this book and its sequels really belong is in a category we've created, Beyond Yacht Rock-style, as The Magic of Language. To wit, it has more in common with books like Pontypool Changes Everything, The Flame Alphabet and Embassytown than it does with such wizarding school classics as the TERFing Classist Lady's books and Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Most of all, it is of a kind with R.F. Kuang's Babel, which overlaps these two made-up sub-genres in much the same way.

The school in Vita Nostra, the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies -- is a lot more rigorous than most literary magic schools, and I don't just say this because they use actual Latin on matriculation day. The curriculum is much more conceptual, bizzare, nearly incomprehensible, because in the Dyachenkos' magical system, the students first must undergo a lot of weird training designed to fundamentally alter, first their neurological makeups and, later, their very nature as physical beings on this earth, before they can ever even dream of exercising any abilities that defy or alter the laws of physics and other norms we consider as constituting realilty. Indeed; Vita Nostra feels to be fundamentally concerned with what the effect of supernatural-ish abilities would be on a human's nervous system than with depicting any jolly accidents with turning each other into critters or misfiring with a magic wand.

Our point of view character is a young woman, Sasha Samokhina, who catches the notice of a Torpa recruiter while on vacation with her mother. As Sasha's long-divorced Mum meets a wonderful new man and cautiously begins a relationship at a seaside resort, Sasha is stalked by an unsettling man in dark glasses and dark clothing that might at first seem like a Man in Black type but turns out to be much stranger and scarier; without ever spelling anything out or giving any overt demonstration of his power or how it works, he asserts a sudden and uncontestable power over Sasha. Within moments of his finally addressing her, she just knows that if she doesn't obey him, he has the power to destroy everything she loves or could love. Her Mum and Mum's new boyfriend, Valentin, are suddenly hostages to Sasha's good behavior.

Through a series of bizarre commands and requirements that begin with her being trapped in a time loop reliving the same single day of her vacation endlessly until she finally agrees to a bizarre sort of exercise program, and follow Sasha through her final year of high school, this man, Farit Kozhennikov, steers her right clear of her intended future -- a philology degree from her local university, which she will attend while continuing to live at home with her Mum, and someday a job as a professor -- and into enrollment at the mysterious Torpa Institute, where the professors are strange and the curriculum even stranger; their first year at school is largely spent poring over paragraph after paragraph of complete gibberish, which they must memorize and recite without ever being told what it's all for.

Of course what it is for is to begin transforming them from mere humans into, and here's where the Magic of Language stuff comes in -- parts of what is known as The Great Speech. And while most of the transformations are internal and not readily visible, some wild talents like Sasha's manifest early and unpredictably in the form of unstable metamorphoses that in some cases -- Sasha's and one of her stranger professors -- include the development of wings. Wings that actually let them fly about above the rooftops of Torpa late at night. 

Indeed, were it not for the fact that Vita Nostra -- the title coming from the Gaudeamus sung on the students' first day at the school -- contains no references to religion or spirituality beyond this title at all, I'd almost suspect that the school exists actually to turn humans into something very like angels, and yes of course once again I thought of my patron saint Jacopo Belbo (actually Umberto Eco, of course)'s quip that "God created the world by speaking; he didn't send a telegram" as Sasha's teachers carefully allow her only little drabs here and there of useful information about why she's at this school and being put through these courses of gibberish reading and, later, strenuous application of a peculiar form of mental geometry exercises.

Meanwhile, this is still at least in part a coming of age/school days novel, which means that yes, there is a soupçon of teen romance. The first fellow student Sasha meets upon arriving in the out-of-the-way town of Torpa, Kostya, becomes a bit more than her first friend, and she has another short but fairly intense relationship with a younger student in her second year at the school. These never overwhelm the overall plot or flavor of the story, though; they are all but inevitable experiences in a young person's life but they are very much not the point, which might frustrate readers who come into this expecting more dark academia but suited me just fine.

What I've found most remarkable about this book is how little anything gets spelled out for us but how perfectly we feel we understand what's at stake and what the consequences might be for Sasha if she fails, making the closing scenes of Vita Nostra a marvel of tension and anguish for all that what is actually going on is just the handing out of exam papers for the third year Placement Exam toward which they've all been working, the midway point of a Torpa education beyond which an impenetrable wall of mystery stands between first, second and third-year students and the final two years before graduate school.

Vita Nostra doesn't quite end on a cliffhanger as such, but does end on a note of possibility and ambiguity as Sasha experiences an even weirder Placement Exam than we've been led to expect. Having been given a general idea of the kind of part of the Great Speech she is going to manifest as and then Reverberate, she and we think maybe we know what's coming next, but boy do we not. So it was a good thing that a sequel, Assassin of Reality, has already been a) translated and b) released on audio; Jessica Ball's crisply British delivery was both enjoyable enough and unobtrusive enough for me to wish to continue this series on audio -- and I had a credit waiting to use to get that one, which I'm already devouring. And, well, there is a third book out in the world and it's already been translated, per Julia Meitov Hersey, but I don't know when it's going to be available and I'm getting pretty good at reading Russian and the Russian language ebook edition was just three bucks and so...

Alla Gorbunova's IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD, MY LOVE (Tr by Elina Alter)

Alla Gorbunova's sort-of novel It's the End of the World, My Love has already earned its purchase price by the time the reader gets to a late chapter entitled "A Scary Story" but would be worth that price for this chapter alone, in which a dead woman interrogates her body parts, expresses her gratitude for how they served her in life, but then decides that her last subject, her own head, did quite the opposite of serving her and deserves banishment.

Weird, huh?

A lot of It's the End of the World, My Love feels at least semi-autobiographical. Our narrator is a young woman coming of age in the 90s, in Boris Yeltsin's and Edward Limonov's and Victor Pelevin's Russia, dodging pimps who want to recruit her, falling in love with pretty rock and roll boys with long hair, getting drunk in that special way that only 13-year-olds can get drunk (and if you've never witnessed/participated in that, well, you're more fortunate than a lot of people), ditching school... and then suddenly discovering that she actually has found one thing that she really cares about and wants to do with her life, and that is poetry. Gorbunova first came to prominence as a poet, for all that she writes here in prose; I want to track down some of her poetry now and see what it's like, because if it's anything like this, well, it's probably a hell of a thing.

After telling *a* life story, if not necessarily *her own* life story up until she decides to start taking her education seriously and become a real poet, Gorbunova treats us to a series of bizarre vignettes, too conventionally structured to be prose-poems but a little too brief and spare to be conventional short stories like the aforementioned "A Scary Story" that blend folk tale elements (a character in a story about a maker of pornographic snuff films feels a little bit like the famous Koschei the Deathless, for instance) and the brutal realism that can only be drawn from a world in which, in Mark "Exile" Ames' memorable phrase "people in the provinces were eating each other out of boredom" to create unforgettable scenes that are both funny and horrible.

The best material, though, appears in its earliest section "Against the Law" which shows our teenaged heroine drinking absurd amounts of alcohol with an impressive series of low-life men (one "forgotten beloved" seems to  have conducted their entire relationship in pissed-in pants, reeking of urine) and bitterly cynical young girls like herself in a thriving outdoor market in the country; several times she informs us that this was the happiest time of her life even though she didn't know it at the time. It's hard not to take this as a bitter indictment of our world and what our societies have done to it, and Gorbunova's narrator does not give us an out even as she acknowledges and shares our stifled laughter.

She waxes much more conventionally lyrical in the book's last third, musing over the accomplishments of her ancestors and especially her abiding love for the grandparents who raised her. These passages occasionally wander into the territory of the surreal but are nonetheless sincere and touching. Our narrator has lived a full and varied life and still has more to offer if we but let her. 

The result is a vivid, uncomfortable but utterly fascinating read. 

And I'm never touching vodka again.