The Blizzard

September 28, 2015
In 19th-century Russia, a district doctor named Platon Ilich Garin and his dim-witted groom, Crouper, coax their horses through a nightmarish snowstorm to deliver a crucial vaccine to the village of Dolgoye. It could almost be a classic story by Chekov or Gogol. However, this novel is by Sorokin, author of the pitch-dark Ice Trilogy and the scabrous post-Soviet send-up Day of the Oprichnik, and thus, Garin’s sled mobile happens to be en route to stop the spread of a zombie epidemic (reportedly from Bolivia) that threatens to engulf the countryside. The adventures of Garin and Crouper as the two take shelter against the merciless storm are no less bizarre. There’s a lusty miller’s wife and the tiny husband that sleeps in her bosom, an order of health-conscious Kazakhs, and even a giant, well-endowed snowman. But in the blizzard, dreams overwhelm reality, and Garin finds himself beset by a series of reveries—rendered in virtuosic bursts of prose—that tempt him with fantasies of happier times. It’s not fair to call this story “Turgenev with zombies,” since the book bears Sorokin’s usual mix of bleak social commentary and unfettered strangeness (of his other works, it most resembles the screenplay for the hallucinogenic Russian cult-classic film 4). However, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of his previous books, despite its fast pace and air of frigid danger. Sorokin’s mean streak is still intact, but The Blizzard is, paradoxically, the breeziest of satires.

September 15, 2015
A country doctor holding the cure to a zombie epidemic struggles through an impossibly stubborn blizzard. "You have to understand, I simply must keep going!" shouts the frenetic protagonist of this phantasmagoric comic novel as it opens. "There are people waiting for me! They are sick. There's an epidemic! Don't you understand?!" Somehow it's fitting that this third novel in translation by the Russian genius Sorokin (Day of the Oprichnik, 2011, etc.) begins with such urgency even as the author throws every fantastic obstacle imaginable in front of his irascible hero. The man in question is Platon Ilich Garin, a doctor who's in possession of the cure for a mysterious disease that turns its victims into zombies. The outbreak is in the village of Dolgoye, and the good doctor is desperately trying to book passage there, but a snowstorm stymies his efforts at every turn. Frustrated, he hires dimwitted driver Crouper to take him through the tempest, but the storm quickly drives them back. "Don't even dare think about it," says the doctor. "The lives of honest workers are in danger! This is an affair of state, man. You and I don't have the right to turn back. It wouldn't be Russian. And it wouldn't be Christian." Garin is a constantly amusing presence, coming off like Chekhov as channeled by Christopher Lloyd. It's through him that Sorokin gives voice to his own frustration with the persistence of Russia's authoritarian culture and its refusal to yield. But the book is stylistically interesting as well. At first it unfolds like a comic play, but as the book progresses, Sorokin crafts an increasingly psychedelic landscape that takes strange turns when Garin trips his brains out. Ultimately, the story doesn't so much resolve as end, with the arrival of Chinese invaders. It's not quite a redemption song, but Sorokin surely deserves credit for his madcap imagination. A strange, distinctly Russian diversion for readers looking for something completely different.

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November 15, 2015
Sorokin's previous novels, including his dark fantasy Ice (2002) and his widely praised Day of the Oprichnik (2011), have succeeded largely because of his gift for wittily satirizing modern-day Russian society. While his latest offbeat tale still provides a liberal helping of Sorokin's signature black humor, its approach is a little more allegorical in recounting the fate of a doctor caught in a relentless blizzard while trying to reach a rural Russian village afflicted by a zombie-generating plague. Setting out one morning with a supply of vaccines and the best of intentions, Platon Ilich Garin recruits a soft-headed sled driver named Crouper to drive through the snowstorm, but they are stymied at every turn on their way to the village. A bizarre crystalline pyramid in the road cracks the sled's runners, then Garin falls under the spell of a midget farmer's wife. As the snowstorm increases its fury, Garin becomes lost in a whirlwind of surreal events that slow his journey to a standstill. Sorokin's veiled critique of governmental paralysis is oddly mesmerizing and very funny.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)