Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in
1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and
Gas but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the
Moscow underground of the 1980s. His work was banned in the Soviet
Union, and his first novel, The Queue, was published by the famed
emigre dissident Andrei Sinyavsky in France in 1985. In 1992,
Sorokin's Their Four Hearts was short-listed for the Russian Booker
Prize; in 1999, the publication of Blue Lard led to public
demonstrations against the book and demands that Sorokin be
prosecuted as a pornographer; in 2001, he received the Andrei Bely
Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. His work
has been translated into more than thirty languages. Sorokin is
also the author of the screenplays for Moscow, The Kopeck, and 4,
and of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov's The Children of
Rosenthal, the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi
Theater since the 1970s. His most recent novel is Inheritance. He
lives in Berlin.
Max Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. His
translations of Sorokin's stories have appeared in The New Yorker,
Harper's Magazine, and n+1. In addition to more than ten of
Sorokin's books, forthcoming from NYRB Classics and Dalkey Archive
Press, he is currently working on translations of works by Michael
Lentz, Antonio Moresco, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. He lives in Los
Angeles.
"[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
"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
“In Sorokin, Russia found its Pynchon.” —Vladislav Davidzon,
Bookforum
“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
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