Blue Lard

My first encounter with Sorokin will certainly not be my last. After reading a little about it, I was expecting off-the-walls insanity, but that doesn't even scratch the surface! The plot itself feels like a fever dream, but the prose (tr. Max Lawton) is somewhere between a lushly verbose word-dessert and a complete deconstruction of language itself. It's like Pynchon, Gogol, Nabokov, Burroughs, Tolstoy, and Platonov were thrown into a blender of ultra-violence and anachronism. If black humor, lengthy digressions, and hallucinogens are your thing, it's hard to beat this. If not ... well, it's definitely not for everyone. Don't attempt to make sense of it, just enjoy the ride.