Joined at the Heart
By Natasha Randall
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Itar-Tass
Vladimir Sorokin is known in the West but, until now, little of his work has been made available in English.
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The controversial postmodernist Vladimir Sorokin has struck through the language barrier again in a crystalline English translation by Jamey Gambrell of his unnerving novel “Ice.” Sorokin himself may already be known outside of Russia for his clashes with conservative groups over the last several years — but until now, very little of his particular brand of gritty satire has been available to English-language readers. “Ice,” one of 11 novels he has written, and the first installment in a projected trilogy to be published by New York Review Books, is a marvelous introduction to his work. Sorokin first published “Ice” in 2002, the same year that the pro-Kremlin youth group Moving Together attempted to sue him for “distributing pornography” in the form of his novel “Blue Lard,” which depicts clones of Nikita Khrushchev and Josef Stalin engaged in a sex-act. The case was dropped, but there’s no question that Sorokin’s work inspires strong reactions. Some of it is physically hard to stomach, his stories tend to be painfully damning of everything they touch and his phantasmagorical style is often startling. “Ice” is a thriller, and though it is far less violent on the whole than Sorokin’s previous work, it is explicitly not for the faint of heart. Indeed, the novel begins with a kidnapping scene in which two hostages are tied to trees and beaten on their bare, bloody chests with ice-tipped hammers. The first hostage expires after a few hefty blows, but the second one, a young man, has just what the kidnappers are seeking. When the youth’s chest is struck, his heart issues a haunting sound — a signal that he is one of them, one of the chosen people whose hearts speak. The murderous kidnappers are members of a secret Gnostic sect whose mission it is to find and awaken their fellow heart-speaking brethren. They have blond hair and blue eyes, and they mercilessly sift through people of that description, discovering new brethren or murdering those whom they call “empties,” whose hearts don’t speak. “Ice” unfolds in a series of bloody re-awakening scenes, very gradually shedding rays of light on the mysterious purpose of these Ubermenschen. What keeps you reading this peculiar page-turner are the questions, “Who are these people?” and “What do they want?” New brethren are discovered in prostitutes, businessmen and drug-addicted adolescents, each of whom struggles to understand his or her strange heart-speaking after enduring the painful process of being kidnapped and beaten. One of the newly awakened, Borenboim, tries to explain to an old friend what happened: “And then — picture this — the broad starts slamming my chest with this hammer. She keeps saying, ‘Talk to me with your heart, tell me with your heart.’ … I’m mooing, she’s bashing me. … Then I just lost consciousness. … But the most interesting part was after. I wake up and I’m sitting in a Jacuzzi. … And these women start patting me gently and telling me some nonsense about a brotherhood, that we’re all brothers and sisters — talking about sincerity, frankness, and so on.” In the second part of “Ice,” Sorokin takes us into the inner sanctum of the “awakened” group, following the life of a young Russian village girl who is rounded up by the Nazis during World War II for deportation to a concentration camp. The brethren discover her among the captives and sequester her in their safe house in the Alps. There, the girl, whose heart name (the name her heart speaks) is Khram, is bathed and anointed, and introduced to the others. Through her, we learn about the rites and objectives of the heart-speakers. “Khram, you are our sister, share our repast with us,” Bro, the eldest heart-speaker, says. “The rules of our family are to eat nothing living, neither boil nor fry food, neither cut nor pierce it. For all these things violate its Cosmos.”
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For The St. Petersburg Times
Ice
By Vladimir Sorokin
Translated by Jamey Gambrell
New York Review Books
328 pages. $23.95
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True to Gnostic form, it is some abstract higher galactic energy that the brethren hold sacred. They believe that the Earth was created by cosmological error, and that it is their task to find every brother and sister so that they may initiate a transformation back to “Eternity” and return to the “Primordial Light.” This journey back to Eternity was begun several decades earlier, when a meteorite made of interstellar ice landed in Siberia and was discovered by Bro — indeed, it is with this ice that the heart-speakers batter their captives in their “awakenings.” And so Sorokin has conjured up a vicious species of Superman (with both the Nietzschean and the DC Comics associations), whose aims, from within, seem strangely beautiful, but whose ruthlessness brings several 20th-century atrocities to mind. That he isn’t directly commenting on any one episode of ideological fanaticism becomes clear as Khram migrates from Nazi Europe to Soviet Russia, witnessing purges and falling prey to a long bout of torture at the hands of Soviet authorities. The second part of “Ice” presents a litany of competing evils in the midst of what continues to be truly gripping writing. And then, in Part Three, something strange — even stranger? — happens. Sorokin returns to his talent for summoning pitch-perfect voice in “Instructions for Using the ICE Health Improvement System,” a do-it-yourself awakening kit. With the help of little hammers made of interstellar ice and a virtual-reality helmet, the heart-speaking experience has now become a commodity. Sorokin provides 16 testimonials from customers who have enjoyed the kit: “I can honestly say: It is amazing! At first there were tears and extraordinarily intense childhood memories; then emptiness, peace, and flight! And what a flight it was! It was something like a collective orgasm. …” As these characters relate their childhood memories, many remember some cruelty wrought on an animal or person and begin to cry uncontrollably. They see themselves holding hands in a large circle of people while some sort of great light emerges. And then they take off the video helmet. Is this a mockery of “empty” human hearts, or a counterweight to the horrific dogma of the ice-hearted brethren? Whose hearts are true? Or, as the epigraph from the Book of Job relates, “Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?” Natasha Randall is a writer whose new translation of “We,” by Yevgeny Zamyatin, was published last year by The Modern Library.
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