[Blue Lard]'s most ingenious passages are parodies of such stalwarts as Tolstoy and Nabokov. A number of loosely related sketches, including a play that lampoons the age-old obsession with Jewish ritual murder and a scene of the Bolshoi Theatre drowning in fecal matter, allow Sorokin to take down Russian culture high and low. Although there's enough sodomy in Sorokin's work to fill a world-class bathhouse [...] perhaps what angers many is that in [his] vast and sordid imagination it is Khrushchev who mounts Stalin and not the other way around.
—Gary Shteyngart, The New Yorker
Forbiddingly postmodern, Sorokin’s texts are a jolting literary and rhetorical head-trip. They test the limits of linguistic boundaries, political satire and scatological humour. Perhaps none of Sorokin’s works embodies this more than Blue Lard, the genre-bending 1999 novel that became his literary calling card and is finally available in English for the first time...From a translation perspective, Blue Lard presents a task almost as fiendish as its subject matter. In the novel’s epistolary opening section, a Russian scientist communicates with his lover in a futuristic dialect that veers between different languages. In some parts, Sorokin uses a mixture of Russian, a made-up Chinese dialect, French and near-incomprehensible science-speak. In other sections, he mimics canonical Russian authors....Lawton does a mighty job...with a work that still leaves the reader with the same assault on the senses as Sorokin’s original...
— Courtney Weaver, Financial Times
Sorokin, global literature’s postmodern provocateur, is both a savage satirist and a consummate showman....[he] resembles his countryman Gogol, a comic enigma whose wonderfully bizarre fictions — like the best and worst of dreams — beg for interpretation while flouting meaning...Blue Lard features a world largely bereft of meaning, love, moral concern or many of the other familiar signposts of fiction. In its place is a new vocabulary, a free-floating grammar of debasement and ecstasy. But one need not stumble into the trap of nihilism. Even Sorokin’s most debauched episodes can be understood as camouflaged bids for transcendence. Each is a challenge, an incitement to change. He reminds us of our scandalous freedom.”
—Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times Book Review
This frenetic 1999 novel by Sorokin, translated for the first time into English by Lawton, led to widespread protests in Russia due to the irreverent political satire contained within its science fiction frame....Sorokin’s patchwork fever dream takes on a weird and wonderful life. Readers will revel in the pandemonium.
—Publishers Weekly
Armed with fearless wit, giga-brain wordplay, and epicurean style to spare, iconoclastic supernova Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard hits like a pipe bomb in the despot’s wet dream of how we are. Already an archetypal subversive masterpiece that has literally incited right-wing riots in the streets—and now brought to new life in a bravura high-wire translation by Max Lawton—Gravity’s Rainbow, Naked Lunch, The 120 Days of Sodom, and Dr. Strangelove could be good kin . . . but really nothing should prepare you for the parade of unsparingly hysterical gallows terror in these pages, which demand we reckon with that fact it’s no longer merely satire to portend the systemized demise of literature itself, much less our souls’. Like fresh air in a gashouse, a waterfall in an inferno, what a blessing there’s Sorokin. Read, read, you jackals, while you still have eyes!
—Blake Butler
The year is 2068; the sensibility is savage and gay. . . . The clone manuscripts are brilliant tour-de-force sources of entertainment on their own, and Max Lawton’s translations are pitch-perfect. The reader starts with a pleasant sense of recognition; then a twisted humor invades the story, a couple of weird glitches, until everything collapses into a comic-strip nightmare.
—Michael Scott Moore, Los Angeles Review of Books
Baffled or not, attentive readers will likely emerge altered by the novel’s sheer extravagance, physicality and erudition.... Perhaps a clinching proof of Blue Lard’s achievement and prescience is in how closely it now hews to the absurdities of contemporary Russian life.... This is pure Vladimir Sorokin — just as, in Russia’s present reality, one can imagine Putin, his courtiers and his propagandists fueling their madness from the blue lard they secrete as they compose their daily scripts of lies.
—Julian Evans, TLS
