A strange, distinctly Russian diversion for readers looking for something completely different.
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.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-11437-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.
The husband-and-wife team who have given us refreshing English versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov now present their lucid translation of Tolstoy's panoramic tale of adultery and society: a masterwork that may well be the greatest realistic novel ever written. It's a beautifully structured fiction, which contrasts the aristocratic world of two prominent families with the ideal utopian one dreamed by earnest Konstantin Levin (a virtual self-portrait). The characters of the enchanting Anna (a descendant of Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest, and forerunner of countless later literary heroines), the lover (Vronsky) who proves worthy of her indiscretion, her bloodless husband Karenin and ingenuous epicurean brother Stiva, among many others, are quite literally unforgettable. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this splendid translation is the skill with which it distinguishes the accents of Anna's romantic egoism from the spare narrative clarity with which a vast spectrum of Russian life is vividly portrayed.
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89478-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
