The Blizzard
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A darkly comic dystopian odyssey, from one of Russia's leading contemporary novelists
Garin, a country doctor, is desperately trying to reach the village of Dolgoye, where a mysterious epidemic is transforming the villagers into zombies. He has with him a vaccine which will prevent the spread of this epidemic, but a terrible blizzard turns his journey into the stuff of nightmare. A trip that should take hours turns into a metaphysical odyssey, in which he encounters strange beasts, apparitions, hallucinations and dangerous fellow men. Trapped in this existential storm, Sorokin's characters fight their way through a landscape that owes as much to Chekhov's 19th-century Russia as it does to near-future, post-apocalyptic literature. Fantastical, comic and richly drawn, The Blizzard at once answers to the canon of Russian writers and makes a fierce statement about life in contemporary Russia.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
